Differences
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The letters of the Assamese alphabet which
are not necessary for writing Karbi and hence are not included
in the Karbi alphabet are :
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The retroflex series of sounds do not occur in Karbi. |
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The letters for the voiced aspirated stops
 (bh),
 (dh) and
 (gh) occur only in a limited number of borrowed words.
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The non-syllabic vowels
 and
 which have been treated as the allophones of y and v
respectively can be written in Karbi with the letters for the corresponding
syllabic vowels
 (i)
and
 (u) respectively because of a similar convention in
Assamese.
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The letters for the diphthongs
 (ai) and
 (au) which are
pronounced as  i and
u respectively in Assamese can be used
in Karbi also in similar words.
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The total distinction in vowels, viz., high, level and low is
not represented in the Karbi alphabet because (i) their representation in
writing will make the writing system a
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little complicated, (ii)
not all but only a small percentage of the vocabulary in Karbi
involve this distinction and (iii) the native speakers can
predict the total difference in words from the contexts in which
they are utilized.
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The glottal stop
occurring between morphemes need not be marked by a distinct
symbol because in writing such words, the second morpheme will
always begin with a vowel letter whereas in other words, the
preceding pure consonant will be combined with the following
vowel and written with the secondary (mantra) symbol for the
concerned vowel.
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In the existing modified
Assamese alphabet which is used for writing Karbi, the phoneme
/o/ is distinctly represented using three letters
 and
 .
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The present phonemic
analysis indicates that this phoneme has only two allophones and
totally, a three-way distinction is made. As said earlier, the
tones are unmarked in the Karbi alphabet which is proposed here.
Since the native speakers make a three-way distinction in
writing and sound
 (o) is phonetically distinct from
(
), a two-way
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