Tumachee
 | This article is a construction site. This project is currently undergoing significant construction and/or revamp. By all means, take a look around, thank you. |
| Tumachee | |
|---|---|
| yûkka tûmaḩ | |
| Pronunciation | [ʝúkʲɑ dúmɑɧ] |
| Created by | Jukethatbox |
| Date | 2024 |
| Native speakers | 600 (2024) |
Tumachic
| |
Early form | Proto-Tumachic
|
Dialects |
|
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 Ḩôskebânki) and the coast of the He-who-irrigates Lake(Kumâziḩâ Gzînkebânki) 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.
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
Consonants
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Palatal-velar | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | pulmonic | b | t d | (c)[1] | k g | ||
| palatalised | tʲ dʲ | kʲ gʲ | |||||
| Nasal | m | n | (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.
Syntax
Constituent order
Tumachee uses a VOS(verb-object-subject) constituent word order.