3. The depressor inventory

Now that relevant phonological features with explicit phonetic correlates have been introduced, it becomes possible to determine the phonological contrasts in the phonemic inventory of Zulu. Since stops exhibit the richest contrasts, I will limit my discussion to this set. I assume that the relevant distinctions in fricatives, affricates and clicks are equivalent.

I propose the following featural distinctions:

If one assumes that only distinctive features are underlyingly marked (following e.g. Steriade 1995), the feature matrix in (13) is reducible to the one in (14):

This would imply the following default rules: