Tumachee

Tumachee
yûkka tûmaḩ
Pronunciation	[ʝúkʲɑ dúmɑɧ]
Created by	Jukethatbox
Date	2024
Native speakers	600 (2024)
Language family	Tumachic Tumachee
Early form	Proto-Tumachic
Dialects	He-who-uses-the-loom He-who-irrigates
Writing system	Latin

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	b	t d	(c)		k g
	palatalised		tʲ dʲ			kʲ gʲ
Nasal		m	n̪			(ŋ)
Fricative			s z	ʝ	ɧ		ɦ
Affricate			t͡ɕ
Approximant	normal	w		(j)
	lateral		l	(ʎ)		(ɫ)

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.

Syntax

Constituent order

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

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