 When three consonants (or one geminated consonant and one simple consonant) come together within a word, the cluster is broken up with the introduction of an epenthetic vowel "ə", and when two consonants (or one geminated consonant) would otherwise end a word, the vowel "i" appears after them, or (when this happens because of the presence of a suffix) "ə" is introduced before the suffix.For example,

Stress is neither contrastive nor particularly salient in Tigrinya.It seems to depend on gemination, but it has apparently not been systematically investigated.