Phoneme inventory

The vowel and consonant inventory of Mursi is similar to those of other Southeast Surmic languages, except for the lack of ejectives, the labial fricative /f/ and the voiceless stop /p/.^[7]

• Except for the hesitant inclusion of the glottal stop /ʔ/ by Firew, both Mütze and Firew agree on the consonant inventory. The layout mostly follows Mütze. The characters in angled brackets are the ones used by Firew, where they differ from Mütze.
• Mütze rejects the phonemic status of the glottal stop [ʔ], claiming that it is phonetically inserted to break up vowel sequences.^[10] Firew discusses this and leaves the question undecided, but includes the sound in the phoneme chart.^[11]
• Firew classifies the alveolar implosive /ɗ/ as postalveolar, without giving reasons.^[12]

• Both Mütze and Firew agree on the vowel inventory and on the chosen transcription, as shown above.^[14]
• Even though vowel length appears phonetically in Mursi, it can be explained by the elision of weak consonants between identical vowels.^[15]

Tone

Both Mütze^[16] and Firew^[17] agree that there are only two underlying tone levels in Mursi, as opposed to larger inventories proposed by Turton and Bender^[18] and Moges.^[19]

Nouns

Nouns can be inflected for number and case.^[30] The number marking system is very complex, using suffixation, suppletion or tone to either mark plurals from singular bases, or singulatives from plural bases.^[31] Mursi preverbal subjects and all objects are unmarked,^[32] whereas postverbal subjects are marked by a nominative case. Further cases are the oblique case and the genitive case.^[32] Modified nouns receive a special morphological marking called construct form by Mütze.^[33]