(usually, a means the crest that a Kannada character like has), and the same convention was adopted by Upadhyaya in his 1988 Tulu Lexicon. The long counterpart of this vowel occurs in some words. In all dialects, the pair /e/ and /ɛ/ contrasts. Additionally, like Kodava Takk and Toda, and like Malayalam and Tamil , Tulu has an -like vowel (or schwa ) as a phoneme, which is romanized as ŭ (ISO), ɯ, or u̥. Both J. Brigel and A. Männer say that it is pronounced like e in the French je. Bhat describes this phoneme as /ɯ/. However, if it is like Malayalam "half-u", or may be a better description. /ɛ/ formed from previous ai and previous /u/ split into modern /u, ɯ/; long versions of /ɛ, ɯ/ are extremely restricted. In the Kannada script, Brigel and Männer used a virama (halant), , to denote this vowel. Bhat says a is used for this purpose, but apparently he too means a virama. Consonants The following are consonant phonemes in Tulu: The contrast between and is preserved in the South Common dialect and in the Brahmin dialect, but is lost in several dialects. Additionally, the Brahmin dialect has and . Aspirated consonants are sometimes used in the Brahmin dialect, but are not phonemic. In the Koraga and Holeya dialects, s and ś merge with c (the Koraga dialect of the Tulu language is different from the Koraga language). Word-initial consonant clusters are rare and occur mainly in Sanskrit loanwords. Grammar Morphology Tulu has five parts of speech: nouns (substantives and adjectives), pronouns, numerals, verbs, and particles. Substantives have three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), two numbers (singular and plural), and eight cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, ablative or instrumental, communicative, and vocative). According to Bhat, Tulu has two distinct locative cases. The communicative case is used with verbs like tell, speak, ask, beseech, inquire, and denotes at whom a message, an inquiry, or a request is aimed, as in "I told him." or "I speak to them." It is also used to denote the relationship with whom it is about, in a context like "I am on good terms with him." or "I have nothing against him." Bhat calls it the sociative case. It is somewhat similar to the comitative case, but different in that it denotes communication or relationship, not physical companionship. The plural suffix is -rŭ,