Mestian

Vowels
Mestian features distinctive stress and a pitch accent system: short vowels can either be stressed, marked with an acute accent such as in <ú>, or unstressed (unmarked), while long vowels can have either a peaking or dipping intonation when stressed. Dipping is marked with a tilde diacritic, such as <ũ>, and peaking is marked with a circumflex, such as <û>. The dipping and peaking diacritics replace the macron of long vowels.

Nouns
Mestian has a moderately complex fusional noun system that distinguishes ten cases and three numbers. Mestian nouns are grouped on their declension patterns -- the suffixes they take -- and their accentual paradigms -- how their accent shifts when they inflect.

(I) A-Stems
Mestian a-stems make up the first declension class in the language. By definition they are nouns with an <-a> in the nominative, optionally followed by a single consonant. A-stems can be in any of the five genders. The declension class has two subtypes: The two subtypes differ minimally in the suffixes they take.
 * Hard a-stems -- ending in a hard consonant followed by <-a>
 * Soft a-stems -- ending in any one of {š ž tš dž j} followed by <-a>

pírka (fish, ani)

rhýka (pebble, ina)