Tumachee

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Tumachee
yûkka tûmaḩ
Pronunciation[ʝúkʲɑ dúmɑɧ]
Created byJukethatbox
Date2024
SettingSleeping Bull
Native toSleeping Bull Confederacy
Native speakers600 (2024)
Tumachic
  • Tumachee
Early form
Proto-Tumachic
Official status
Official language in
Sleeping Bull Confederacy
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Tumachee(yûkka tûmaḩ; Tumachee: [ʝúkʲɑ dúmɑɧ]) is a Tumachic language spoken by the Tumachee people in the fictional He-who-uses-the-loom River Basin(Tumachee: Kumâḩâ Keḩôskibân) and the coast of the He-who-irrigates Lake(Kumâziḩâ Kegzînkibân) of the North-western United States. It is the sole member of the Tumachic language family alongside Gzuwê.

It is a highly agglutinative language with a very rare verb-object-subject basic word order and a (not so rare)noun-adjective order. The language is also very context-reliant, where sentences can change meaning based on the context of the conversation.

Etymology

Endonym

The Tumachee endonym, tûmaḩ, is probably derived from the Proto-Tumachic word *dúmas, which means "wide prairie, lowland". As the ancient(and modern) Tumachee lived in relatively low-lying areas like river basins, this may explain the reason for it becoming an endonym. The Tumachee and Gzuwê words for "lowland" are also derived from *dúmas: Tumachee tumîḩi and Gzuwê ttumiz.

Exonym

The English exonym Tumachee has an origin in the language of the now extinct Jikiha(Tumachee: Gzîkka) tribe, who were the first members of the Sleeping Bull Confederacy to interact with British colonisers. The Jikiha exchanged information on the other tribes and peoples in Sleeping Bull, and probably referred to the Tumachee people as *tú(ð)máki, which is a plural form of *tú(ð)mág, which was then loaned into English as initially Toumacke or Tumacki and then finally into Tumachee.

Phonology

Orthography

Tumachee uses the Latin alphabet, with some unique letters, notably circumflex vowels(âêîôû) and the cedilla h(ḩ), with the new letters phonetically representing high tone and vowels and the voiceless palato-velar fricative respectively.

Consonants

Labial Alveolar/
Dental
Palatal Palatal-velar Velar Glottal
Plosive pulmonic p b t d (c)[1] k g
palatalised tʲ dʲ kʲ gʲ
Nasal m (ŋ)
Fricative s z ʝ ɧ ɦ
Affricate t͡ɕ
Approximant normal w (j)[2]
lateral l (ʎ)[3] (ɫ)[3]

Vowels

Front Back
Close i u
Open-mid e ɔ
Open ɑ

Prosody

Tone

Tumachee has one tone that only appears on vowels, the high tone([˦]). Orthographically, it is marked by a circumflex(e.g. â).

Phonotactics

Tumachee mostly follows the syllable structure of (C)V(C), where C is any consonant and V is any vowel.

Morphology

Nouns

Adjectives

All nouns in Tumachee have their own adjective form, which is usually manifested in an agglutinate suffix form like -miḩ. Each noun has their own unique adjective/suffix form, meaning you could make basically any word by agglutinating a noun and a noun-derived suffix. For example, the word and name "Ox-like-the-water" would be Kîkwisyigûn(lit. ox.NOM-water.ADJ), with -yigûn being the suffix form of yîlgos, water.

Numbers

Tumachee natively uses a base 7 counting system, though most modern Tumachee use the mostly universal base 10 counting system.

Tumachee English
Name Digit Name Digit
kûnsu/
sêlo[4]
0 zero 0
kkêo 1 one 1
minnâ 2 two 2
ḩûḩ 3 three 3
ḩêrdaz 4 four 4
sômzo 5 five 5
entiḩ 6 six 6
ûrzun 7 seven 7
îmmiko 10 eight 8

Pronouns

Personal pronouns

Singular Plural
First person ud kûḩod
Second person mikkê mîkked
Third person Masculine bân bâniu
Feminine ḩes ḩesû
Neuter/
Object
ôn lôu

Syntax

Constituent order

Tumachee uses a VOS(verb-object-subject) constituent word order.

Agglutination

Like in German, Tumachee has the ability of creating new words by adding existing words together. For example, the word "pill" is sikkumiḩ, which is a combination of sikku, "medicine" and -miḩ, the suffix form of "small".

Stem & suffixes

Words in Tumachee have two forms: a stem and a suffix form. The stem form are the standalone words themselves, sometimes called the nominative declension. The suffix forms are used for agglutinate words like the -miḩ in sikkumiḩ. -miḩ is a suffix form of the adjective wêlmiḩ, meaning "small".

Noun case

Tumachee has five noun cases: the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and instrumentative. Each case has at the very least its own suffix, though the instrumentative case has its own prefix to go with the suffix.

Case
Nominative Accusative Genitive Dative Instrumentative
Prefix ke-
Suffix -sô -ḩâ -su -ki

Phrases

Nouns

Verbs

Sentences

Dependent clauses

Example texts

Other resources

  1. ^ Dialectic variation of /tʲ/.
  2. ^ Dialectic variation of /ʝ/.
  3. ^ a b Dialectic variation of /l/.
  4. ^ kûnsu literally means "nothing", and is more commonly used colloquially and in basic arithmetic. sêlo is from English zero, and is more commonly used in relation to mathematics.