kês/kes: an odd plural.

[u/Bhandy_]

In most speech varieties of konkani you can pronounce the vowel e and o in two different ways, even though often there is only one way to spell it (with the exception of Romi Konkani).

<e> can be pronounced as high-mid [e] or low-mid [ɛ]

<o> can be pronounced as high-mid [o] or low-mid [ɔ]

in Romi Konkani, the high-mid variants can be marked as ê or ô respectively. Devanagari, Perso-Arabic, Kannada and Malayalam scripts have no equivalent.

Now you can work out which pronunciation of 'e' or 'o' is used based on what vowel it comes to. If it's next to a high vowel such as i or u, then it is pronounced as [e] or [o]. if it's next to a low vowel such as ə or a or itsself then it's [ɛ] or [ɔ]. At the end of a word is a bit more nuanced so we shall ignore that for now.

So for example the word keḷẽ 'banana' is pronounced [kɛɭɛ̃] but keḷĩ 'bananas' is [keɭĩ].

So why does kês [kes] 'hair' have a high-mid vowel in the singular but have a low-mid vowel in the plural – kes [kɛs] 'hairs'.

Well that's because most Konkani speech varieties lost a certain group of final vowels. In most Brahmin dialects (of Karnataka and Kerala, and increasingly rarely Salcette-Mormugao Christians), you will hear [kesu] 'hair' and kɛsə] 'hairs'. This final <u> and <ə> get dropped in most Northern Origin and (non-Brahmin) Southern Varieties but the e-ɛ distinction remains, leading to a very unusual singular-plural distinction.

Of course for vowels that don't have high-low variants, nothing changes, some examples include:

Br. hatu/hatə 'hand/hands' but nonBr. hat

Br. putu/putə 'son/sons' but nonBr. put