Hard

General information
Hard is a very hard language

Consonants
The floor tap only occurs intervocalically

All consonants except h may be aspirated, this may be marked by an h.

All consonants except palatal consonants, dental consonants, non-nasal sonorant consonants and retroflex consonants may be palatalized, this is marked by a y

All consonants except labials may be labialized

All consonants may be prenasalized)

All consonants may occur in a cluster with a glottal stop. When a glottal stop comes into contact with a stop the resulting combination is an ejective stop of the same row as the original stop, with the glottal stop disappearing.

The maximum syllable structure is (fricative)-(prenasalization)(any consonant)-(sonorant {unless preceding consonant is sonorant})(secondary articulation)(vowel {never diphthong})(Fricative or sonorant)(stop)

Vowels
All vowels may be either short or long.

There are no diphthongs.

A vowel may carry one of four tones

low tone: a, aa

high tone: á, áá

rising tone: aá (long vowels only)

falling tone: áa (long vowels only)

Class 3-r verbs
3-r verbs are all intransitive or semi-transitive and form their plural stems by nasalising the first consonant of the verb stem and prefixing a copy of the radical vowel and a click consonant from the same row as the root of the verb. This verb class is most commonly used to form the nominalizations of tools, for example, ksud "paint" to nksuud: I paint.