Check out this sentence! To us it sounds like just one, maybe two, words but to speakers of the language it actually has means: “Yesterday, I crushed a log in the latrine with a rock.”
Each “ko ko” had a different tone and thus this, in the mind of a Bakoum speaker, is not just one word repeated over and over but instead is 5 different words. Whew! I suppose that this can serve as a reminder to pray for you missionary friends learning tonal languages.
