Brithenig

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Brithenig is an invented language, or constructed language ("conlang"). It was created as a hobby in 1996 by Andrew Smith from New Zealand, who also invented the alternate history of Ill Bethisad to "explain" it.

Brithenig was not developed to be used in the real world, like Esperanto or Interlingua, nor to provide detail to a work of fiction, like J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish tongues or Klingon from the Star Trek scenarios. Rather, Brithenig started as a thought experiment to create a Romance language that might have evolved if Latin had displaced the native Celtic language as the spoken language of the people in Great Britain.

The result is a sister language to French, Spanish and Italian, albeit a test-tube child, which differs from them by having sound-changes similar to those that affected the Welsh language, and words that are borrowed from Brythonic and from English throughout its pseudo-history. One important distinction between Brithenig and Welsh is that while Welsh is P-Celtic, Latin was a Q-Italic language (as opposed to P-Italic, like Oscan), and this trait was passed onto Brithenig.

Similar efforts to extrapolate Romance languages are: Breathanach (influenced by the other branch of Celtic), Judajca (influenced by Hebrew), Þrjótrunn (influenced by Icelandic) and Wenedyk (influenced by Polish). It has also inspired Wessisc, a hypothetical Germanic language influenced by contact with Old Celtic.

Brithenig was granted the code BZT as part of ISO 639-3.

Andrew Smith was one of the conlangers features in the exhibit "Esperanto, Elvish, and Beyond: The World of Constructed Languages" displayed at the Cleveland Public Library from May through August 2008.^[1] Smith's creation of Brithenig was cited as the reason for his inclusion in the exhibit (which also included the Babel Text^[2] in Smith's language).

Vocabulary

Most of Brithenig's vocabulary is distinctively Romance, even though it is disguised as Welsh. The following list of 30 words gives an impression of what Brithenig looks like in comparison to nine other Romance languages including Wenedyk, and to Welsh. The similarity of about one-quarter of the Welsh words to Brithenig words (indicated by not being bracketed) is due to their common Indo-European background, although a few others, such as ysgol, were borrowings from Latin into Welsh.

Example

The Lord's Prayer:

Nustr Padr, ke sia i llo gel:

sia senghid tew nôn:

gwein tew rheon:

sia ffaeth tew wolont,

syrs lla der sig i llo gel.

Dun nustr pan diwrnal a nu h-eidd;

e pharddun llo nustr phechad a nu,

si nu pharddunan llo nustr phechadur.

E ngheidd rhen di nu in ill temp di drial,

mai llifr nu di'll mal.

Per ill rheon, ill cofaeth e lla leir es ill tew,

per segl e segl. Amen.

References

• Higley, Sarah L., M/C Journal Vol 3 Issue 1. Cited as example of an a posteriori constructed language.
• International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, William J. Frawley, Oxford University Press (C) 2003, p. 154

External links

• The page of Brithenig
• The cultures of Ill Bethisad
• Romance glossary (a list of common words in several Romance languages, including Brithenig and Wenedyk)