There are sounds in the Hamar language are noteworthy because they represent uncommon phonetic features not found in many languages:[citation needed] ɓ: A bilabial implosive (geɓí ‘many’) ɠ: The velar implosive is found in just one word (ɠiá ‘hit’) and is regarded as rare.
It appears in several light verb constructions, such as waakí ɠiá meaning "herd the cattle" (literally "hit cow"), and ɲuurí ɠiá meaning "churn the butter" (literally "hit the butter container"), among others.
ɗ: n dental alveolar implosive (ɗánga ‘throat’) t’: alveolar ejective (déetʼa ‘heavy’) ɲ: A palato-alveolar nasal (háɲa ‘fat-tailed sheep’) c’: A palato-alveolar ejective (pacʼ ‘many’) Sixteen phonemes, including /p/, /b/, /t/, /j/, /k/, /q/, /ɓ/, /cʼ/, /s/, /z/, /sh/, /x/, /m/, /n/, /l/, and /r/, are found in word-final positions.
Some minimal pairs are provided to illustrate the difference between geminated and non-geminated consonants:[citation needed] kótte: shirt kóte: here ʔóito: female name ʔóitto: the fourth Thus, consonant gemination not only affects the length of sounds but can also distinguish word meanings.
[citation needed] Vowel Harmony exists in that every root word and every suffix belongs to either category I or II.
[citation needed] When the category of a root and its suffix do not agree, a kind of umlauting takes place.
[citation needed] There is a sixth non-phonemic vowel, /ə/, which appears in speech epenthetically to "break up" otherwise invalid consonant clusters.
[citation needed] In such cases, the quality of the vowel changes due to the suffixes, and this can alter the meaning of the word.
There are a large number of (mostly very simple) rules governing metathesis and epenthesis when consonant clusters appear.
There is no official writing system for Hamer, though several romanization schemes have been proposed, along with a Gə'əz orthography.
[citation needed] It is perhaps the de facto standard, simply by being the one in which the majority of the existing corpus is presented.
The inflection markers are: The forms beginning with "t" may only be attached directly to the root, and are usually used with animate nouns.
Aspect is not indicated in negative forms or in questions asking for specific information, which instead differentiate only between past and non-past.
Below are examples of locational, temporal, and manner adverbs using different words in the context of the Hamer-Banna language.
For example, the postposition íinte ʻinsideʼ contains the body part noun ii ʻstomachʼ followed by the locative case -te, and it can be analysed as follows: íi (stomach) - n (F.OBL) - te (LOC): in the stomach > inside[10] The Hamar language employs a base-ten numeral system for numbers from one to nineteen and a base-twenty system for numbers greater than nineteen.
Interestingly, there is no native word in Hamar for 'number,' so younger speakers often adopt the Amharic term qutʼər.
[11] In the Hamar language, based on the example you provided, the typical word order is Subject - Object - Verb (SOV).
This shows that word order in Hamar is flexible depending on the type of question being asked.
Hamar language makes use of serial verb constructions to express actions that happen in a sequence or are related to each other in a single event.