Tallfellow

Tallfellow (Mambéhoblind) is a naturalistic (mostly), a priori artlang by Enrique Gamez. The language is intended to sound and feel familiar to speakers of American English, while still being significantly different from English in terms of grammar and vocabulary. It is spoken by tallfellow halflings inhabiting the Patchwork (Elmbúmbi) and surrounding areas in the conworld of Dombellus, a homebrew Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting. So far, only the Babandelglib dialect as spoken in the Age of Twilight is documented.

Phonology

Tallfellow uses no sounds not found in English, except for prenasalized consonants /ᵐb/, /ⁿd/, /ᵑg/. However, while historically these could occur at the beginning of a word (and still can in related languages such as Overhill and Rootbarrel), this is no longer allowed in Tallfellow, so from the point of view of a speaker there is little difference between these and sequences /mb/, /nd/, /ŋg/. Tallfellow does not use a voiced-unvoiced contrast as English does, instead employing a three-way contrast between voiced, prenasalized, and voiceless aspirate stops.

Tallfellow's phonemes are listed below. (Parentheses indicate the typical romanization.)

	Labial	Alveolar	Retroflex	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m (m)	n (n)
Plosive	b (b) ᵐb (mb) pʰ (p)	d (d) ⁿd (nd) tʰ (t)		g (g) ᵑg (ng)
Fricative	f (f)	s (s)			h (h)
Approximant		ɫ (l)	ɻ (r)	w (w)

	Front	Back
Close	i/ɪ (i)
Close-mid		oʊ (o)
Open-mid	ɛ (e)	ʌ (u)
Open		ɑ (a)

The phonotactics of Tallfellow are still being studied. In general, however, consonant clusters are restricted to those that include at most one stop or fricative (or occasionally two fricatives, when not beginning or ending a word). The remainder of the cluster is required to be liquids, nasals, and/or semivowels, generally no more than one (on the inner side) at the beginning or end of a word, or two (one on either side) in the middle of one. Also, a cluster cannot contain both a voiceless fricative (which includes all of Tallfellow's fricatives) and a stop. These restrictions are not always obeyed in loanwords or in the names of foreign places, e.g. /ɫiɻ'ɑsgoʊⁿd/ "please", from Darkfoot /li'jaʃkud/.

It should be reiterated that prenasalized consonants count as a single consonant for this purpose, so that constructions such as /boʊɫᵑgɫɛm/ "of/by means of the book" are permitted. Also, some consonants have more stringent restrictions. Nasals /m/ and /n/ may not be followed by /ɫ/, and neither may aspirated stops /tʰ/ and /pʰ/; however, semivowels /ɻ/, /w/ may follow any of these. /h/ and the aspirates may not end syllables, and /h/ also may not be followed by /ɫ/ or by semivowels.

A stop or nasal followed by /h/ is typically pronounced as an aspirate at the same place of articulation, when possible, and is rewritten that way in the script for compounds; e.g. /ɻoʊm/ "good", /hɑɻ/ "adverbial suffix", /'ɻoʊpʰɑɻ/ "well". Nasals may not follow stops, and may not precede /h/ or aspirated stops. The sequence /ʌɻ/ is typically realized as /ɚ/ (similar to American English), but the sequence /ɛɻ/ never is.

Vowel sequences of any type are forbidden in Tallfellow (with /oʊ/ being treated as a single vowel rather than a diphthong). Common repair strategies involve inserting /ɻ/ between two vowels that would otherwise follow each other directly, converting initial /oʊ/ to /w/, replacing a sequence /ɑi/ with /ɛ/ or just /ɑ/, etc.

Despite its strong resemblance to English, in addition to lacking many sounds that English possesses, Tallfellow allows several combinations not found in English. For instance, clusters such as /dɫ/, /mɻ/, /nɻ/ may begin words, and prenasalized consonants /ᵐb/ and /ᵑg/ may (and frequently do) end them.

Stress is phonemic in Tallfellow, having fossilized from a stress rule involving double vowels that it has now lost. Most notably, the allative and ablative cases are distinguished only by stress: /'bɫʌnoʊ/ "from the river", /bɫʌ'noʊ/ "to the river".

Grammar

Tallfellow is a nominative-accusative, head-initial, dependent-marking language, using SVO word order. Adjectives (nearly indistinguishable from nouns, grammatically speaking) follow the noun they modify, while adverbs fall at the very end of the sentence or, in the case of complex constructions, at the end of the scope of a particular verb (e.g. Emb wan nopa pin wur ingung pin mondel rari, "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry").

Verbs in Tallfellow are uninflected, with tense, aspect, mood, and the like indicated either by particles that precede the verb (such as /wɑn/ "future tense particle" or /dɛ/ "progressive particle") or by adverbs (such as /bɛɫsɑɻ/ "perhaps, hopefully"). Nouns, however, inflect for case and number, and demonstratives are realized as a suffix or infix to a noun rather than a separate word.

Tallfellow uses verbal particles to mark past tense, future tense, progressive aspect, passive voice, and jussive mood. Combining past tense with the adverb /gʌm/ "now" often indicates the perfective aspect. The particle /ɪm/ may be used to produce an infinitive form, as in Sal roblis im bope, "she wants to read".

Nouns have a fairly elaborate inflectional system. They have five cases: nominative/accusative, genitive/instrumental, locative, allative, and ablative. The nominative/accusative case is unmarked; the locative, allative and ablative are all marked by suffices (which come with stress changes in the allative and ablative), and the genitive/instrumental is marked either by a suffix or by an infix, the details of which depend on the structure of the word. In addition, Tallfellow incorporates demonstratives into its nouns as suffixes or infixes, which may be combined with any of the five cases above. Nouns possess a very regular plural form, marked by a prefix that does not fuse with any of the other inflections and may be combined with all of them. Tallfellow thus makes use of prefixes, suffixes and infixes in its inflections, and its noun forms are somewhat agglutinating.

These inflections are quite regular, with the form of nearly all Tallfellow nouns being completely predictable. The exceptions include many common positional nouns (which often have irregular locative, ablative, and/or allative forms) and pronouns (which have irregular plural and genitive/instrumental forms).

(More information to follow!)

Lexicon

The current Tallfellow lexicon can be found in File:Tallfellow Lexicon.pdf (created with PolyGlot).

Swadesh list for Tallfellow

Texts

Tower of Babel translation (Audio version)