These include fish names for the sea eel, yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), left-eye flounder (Bothus mancus), triggerfish, sailfish, barracuda (Sphyraena barracuda), damsel fish (Abudefduf sp.

The extent to which it is accurate to characterize each of these vowel sequences as diphthongs has been a matter of debate, as in Wilson 1972, Flora 1974, Josephs 1975 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFJosephs1975 (help), and Zuraw 2003.

Nevertheless, a number of the sequences above, such as /ui/, clearly behave as diphthongs given their interaction with other aspects of Palauan phonology like stress shift and vowel reduction.

In the early 1970s, the Palau Orthography Committee worked with linguists from the University of Hawaii to devise an alphabet based on the Latin script.

Three notable exceptions are worth mentioning: There is no phonemic /n/ in Palauan: this gap is due to a historical sound shift from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *n to /l/[10] ‒ a change that is also found elsewhere in the region (e.g. in Gorontalo).

The following set of pronouns are the pronouns found in the Palauan language:[11][12] Palauan nouns inflect based on humanness and number via the plural prefix re-, which attaches to plural human nouns (see Josephs 1975:43 harvcolnb error: no target: CITEREFJosephs1975 (help)).

The possessor agreement suffixes have many different irregular forms that only attach to particular nouns, and they must be memorized on a noun-by-noun basis (Josephs 1997:96).

menga(ng) 'eat', for example, may be analyzed as verb prefix me- + imperfective -ng- + kal, in which -kal is an archimorpheme that is only apparent from comparing various forms, e.g. kall 'food' and taking into consideration morphophonemic patterns: Ng milenga a ngikel a bilis 'the dog was eating fish' (lit.

In the preceding example, SVO-advocates assume that there is no pro and that the morpheme ak is simply an overt subject pronoun meaning 'I'.

Proponents of the SVO analysis must assume a shifting of the subject a Satsuko 'Satsuko' from clause-initial to clause-final position, a movement operation that has not received acceptance cross-linguistically, but see Josephs 1975 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFJosephs1975 (help) for discussion.

For example, to count people, it is: tang, terung, tedei, teuang, teim, telolem, teuid, teai, tetiu, and teruich.