"U(r)" assimilates similarly after laterals, retaining its rounding, e.g. ꆭ "hlu" "to stir-fry", and is after a labial nasal, e.g. ꂥ "hmu" "mushroom"; moreover it induces a labially trilled release of preceding labial or alveolar stops, e.g. ꅥ "ndup" "to hit". The tight-throat phone occurs as the realization of in the high tone. That it is phonemically loose-throat is shown by its behaviour in tightness harmony in compound words. The high-mid tone is only marginally contrastive. Its two main sources are from tone sandhi rules, as the outcome of a mid tone before another mid tone, and the outcome of a low-falling tone after a mid tone. However, these changes do not occur in all compounds where they might: for instance ꊈ "wo" "bear" + ꃀ "mop" "mother" regularly forms ꊈꂾ "wo mox" "female bear", but ꃤ "vi" "jackal" + ꃀ "mop" "mother" forms ꃤꃀ "vi mop" "female jackal" without sandhi. The syntax creates other contrasts: tone sandhi applies across the boundary between object and verb, so is present in SOV clauses like ꃅꏸꇐꄜꎷ "mu jy lu ti shex" "Mujy looks for Luti", but is absent in OSV clauses like ꃅꏸꇐꄜꎹ "mu jy lu ti shep" "Luti looks for Mujy". A few words, like ꑞ "xix" "what?", have underlying high-mid tone. Nuosu is an analytic language, the basic word order is Subject–object–verb. Vocabularies of Nuosu can be divided into content words and function words. Among content words, nouns in Nuosu do not perform inflections for grammatical gender, number, and cases, classifiers are required when the noun is being counted; verbs do not perform conjugations for its persons and tenses; adjectives are usually placed after the word being fixed with a structural particle and do not perform inflections for comparison.