‘underneath’
source: three to five consultants 2015 note: there is significant phonetic overlap between o and a in Sula. Many words are produced with one or the other depending on the speaker (regional variation), but all dialects do seem to maintain both o and a as distinct phonemes. Compounding the difficulty in explaining their overlap, some speakers seem to alternate within the same word with no clear contextual trigger. For example a Capuli speaker provided bo heha ‘underneath’ and ba neu ‘underneath’. She did not have a reason for the alternation, but said that they had to be that way (other speakers I worked with did not all agree with her). I suspect an elusive phonological condition exists that causes phonetic vowels to overlap or be substituted, but much regional and speaker variation renders the condition unclear. It will take a long-term, onsite study of the language to sufficiently explain the phenomenon.