1. The description of phoneme disribution is variously handled in recent studies, some using the word, others the contour, still others the syllable as their unit.' The growing importance of distribution as a part of linguistic description makes it of interest to examine this problem more closely. Without extensive first-hand research in these languages it would be impossible to be sure whether the difference is determined by the languages themselves or by the linguist's predilections. The present paper is intended to show for one language which has a large number of consonant clusters that it is possible to bring out the structural principles of distribution best if one adopts the syllable as one's descriptive unit. As the writer has pointed out elsewhere, the attempt to find phonetic criteria for syllable division appears to be futile.2 Morphological boundaries are often marked by juncture, which at the same time marks syllable boundaries; but these will here be disregarded. We are only con-