Ill Bethisad

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Version of the logo created in 2006 for use by members of the project. This or variants of it has been used on various websites over the years Logo of the Ill bethisad project.png
Version of the logo created in 2006 for use by members of the project. This or variants of it has been used on various websites over the years

Ill Bethisad is a collaborative alternate history project which had 58 active participants as of March 2021. [1] Originally created by Andrew Smith from New Zealand, [2] it was initiated in 1997 as the Brithenig Project. It can be characterized as an instance of the subgenre of steampunk. Ill Bethisad has a largely encyclopedic character, consisting of constructed languages, written histories, timelines, news items, maps, flags and other images, short movies, descriptions of cultures, religions and technologies, as well as short stories.

Contents

Constructed languages

Constructed languages play an important role in Ill Bethisad, and it can be said that Ill Bethisad is the central meeting point, if not the cradle, of an entire subgenre of conlangs, namely alternative languages. To date there are over thirty languages at varying levels of construction that play part. [3] Among the languages spoken in Ill Bethisad are Brithenig (a Romance language with strong Celtic substrate influences, based on Welsh), [4] [5] [6] Wenedyk (Polish as a Romance language), [7] [8] [9] Bohemian (Pémišna: Germanized Czech), [10] Dalmatian (a Romance language similar to Romanian, based on the actual extinct language of the same name), Xliponian (another Romance language with a superficial resemblance to Albanian, spoken in our world's Epirus) and several Finnish-like "North Slavic" languages, including Nassian (spoken in our world's Karelia). [11] [12]

The name Ill Bethisad itself is Brithenig for the universe, a calque from Welsh bydysawd or Latin baptizatum. [13]

In addition, many other languages from our world have been changed in some way, although some, like German, Italian, or Russian, appear to be exactly the same. In many cases, as with Spanish, English, or Japanese, the changes are relatively slight and mainly affect orthography or Romanizations. One example is the language of Galicia, which is called Ruthenian (rather than Ukrainian) and is written with Polish orthography (rather than Cyrillic; see Ukrainian Latin Alphabet for real-world examples). [14] Others are more drastic; Ill Bethisad Croatian, for example, is an invented Slavic language that in many respects is closer to Czech than our world's Croatian, [15] and the Dalmatian of Ill Bethisad seems to be influenced by Slavic languages more than its real world counterpart.[ original research? ]

Points of divergence

The central point of divergence of Ill Bethisad is a stronger Roman Empire. Nevertheless, history runs mostly parallel to the history of the real world, so that many countries and regions have their own separate points of divergence: [16]

In general, there are more independent countries than there are in the real world, and constitutional monarchies, federations, colonies, and condominia are far more numerous. [10] The history of Ill Bethisad, on the whole, often sees extinct or minority languages such as Catalan, Low Saxon, Crimean Gothic as well as others remaining more widely spoken in their respective regions than they have become in real-world history. Also, technologies that have either fallen out of favor or failed to develop in our world are explored and broadly used. [12] For example, zeppelins and ekranoplans or ground-effect vehicles are still in use for both military and civil purposes. Computers are not highly developed, and there is no 'Silicon Valley' of North America, but information technology centres are instead found in Ireland.[ citation needed ]

Related Research Articles

Fictional languages are the subset of constructed languages (conlangs) that have been created as part of a fictional setting. Typically they are the creation of one individual, while natural languages evolve out of a particular culture or people group, and other conlangs may have group involvement. Fictional languages are also distinct from natural languages in that they have no native speakers. By contrast, the constructed language of Esperanto now has native speakers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ukrainian language</span> East Slavic language

Ukrainian is an East Slavic language of the Indo-European language family spoken primarily in Ukraine. It is the native language of a majority of Ukrainians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dalmatia</span> Historical region of Croatia

Dalmatia is one of the four historical regions of Croatia, alongside Central Croatia, Slavonia, and Istria, located on the east shore of the Adriatic Sea in Croatia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dalmatian language</span> Extinct Romance varieties of Dalmatia

Dalmatian or Dalmatic was a group of Romance varieties that developed along the coast of Dalmatia. Over the centuries they were increasingly influenced, and then supplanted, by Croatian and Venetian.

The Istriot language is a Romance language of the Italo-Dalmatian branch spoken by about 400 people in the southwestern part of the Istrian peninsula in Croatia, particularly in Rovinj and Vodnjan. It should not be confused with the Istrian dialect of the Venetian language or the more distantly related Istro-Romanian, a variety of Eastern Romance.

Venedic is a naturalistic constructed language, created by the Dutch translator Jan van Steenbergen. It is used in the fictional Republic of the Two Crowns, based on the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, in the alternate timeline of Ill Bethisad. Officially, Venedic is a descendant of Vulgar Latin with a strong Slavic admixture, based on the premise that the Roman Empire incorporated the ancestors of the Poles in their territory. Less officially, it tries to show what Polish would have looked like if it had been a Romance instead of a Slavic language. On the Internet, it is well-recognized as an example of the altlang genre, much like Brithenig and Breathanach.

A constructed writing system or a neography is a writing system specifically created by an individual or group, rather than having evolved as part of a language or culture like a natural script. Some are designed for use with constructed languages, although several of them are used in linguistic experimentation or for other more practical ends in existing languages. Prominent examples of constructed scripts include Korean Hangul and Tengwar.

Brithenig, or also known as Comroig, 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. Officially according to the Ill Bethisad Wiki, Brithenig is classified as a Britanno-Romance language, along with other Romance languages that displaced Celtic.

An artistic language, or artlang, is a constructed language designed for aesthetic and phonetic pleasure. Constructed languages can be artistic to the extent that artists use it as a source of creativity in art, poetry, calligraphy or as a metaphor to address themes such as cultural diversity and the vulnerability of the individual in a globalizing world. They can also be used to test linguistical theories, such as Linguistic relativity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mutual intelligibility</span> Closeness of linguistic varieties

In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelligibility is sometimes used to distinguish languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eastern Romance languages</span> Romance subfamily of Southeast Europe

The Eastern Romance languages are a group of Romance languages. The group, also called the Balkan Romance or Daco-Romance languages, comprises the Romanian language (Daco-Romanian), the Aromanian language and two other related minor languages, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Italian language in Croatia</span>

The Italian language is an official minority language in Croatia, with many schools and public announcements published in both languages. Croatia's proximity and cultural connections to Italy have led to a relatively large presence of Italians in Croatia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Constructed language</span> Consciously devised language

A constructed language is a language whose phonology, grammar, orthography, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction. A constructed language may also be referred to as an artificial, planned or invented language, or a fictional language. Planned languages are languages that have been purposefully designed; they are the result of deliberate, controlling intervention and are thus of a form of language planning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pan-Slavic language</span> Type of constructed language

A pan-Slavic language is a zonal auxiliary language for communication among the Slavic peoples.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Italians of Croatia</span> Historical national minority in Croatia

Italians of Croatia are an autochthonous historical national minority recognized by the Constitution of Croatia. As such, they elect a special representative to the Croatian Parliament. There is the Italian Union of Croatia and Slovenia, which is a Croatian-Slovenian joint organization with its main site in Rijeka, Croatia and its secondary site in Koper, Slovenia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dalmatian city-states</span> Dalmatian localities where the local Romance population survived the Barbarian invasions

Dalmatian city-states were the Dalmatian localities where the local Romance population survived the Barbarian invasions after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 400s CE. Eight little cities were created by indigenous inhabitants who maintained political links with the Eastern Roman Empire which defended these cities, enabling their commercial trade.

<i>In the Land of Invented Languages</i> 2009 book by Arika Okrent

In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers who Tried to Build a Perfect Language is a 2009 non-fiction book by linguist Arika Okrent about the history and culture of constructed languages, or conlangs, languages created by individuals. Okrent explores the motivations for creating a language, the challenges faced by such projects, and the outcomes of a number of high-profile conlangs. The book revolves around six conlangs: John Wilkins' unnamed 'philosophical language', Esperanto, Blissymbols, Loglan and its descendant Lojban, and the Klingon language designed for the Star Trek universe. Okrent describes her personal experiences learning and interacting with these languages and their speakers, and provides historical and linguistic analyses of their structures and features.

References

  1. "The List". IBWiki. Retrieved 18 April 2022.
  2. Rogers, Stephen D. (15 October 2011). The Dictionary of Made-Up Languages: From Elvish to Klingon, The Anwa, Reella, Ealray, Yeht (Real) Origins of Invented Lexicons. ISBN   9781440530395.
  3. "IB Languages". IBWiki. Ib.frath.net. 12 April 2012. Retrieved 21 December 2013.
  4. Sarah L. Higley. Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG: Inventing Languages on the Internet. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000).
  5. Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language, 2009, str. 321.
  6. Mikael Parkvall, Limits of Language. Almost Everything You Didn't Know You Didn't Know about Language and Languages, 2008, p. 131.
  7. Dorota Gut, : Now@ Mow@ ("New Language"), in: Wiedza i Życie, February 2004.
  8. 1 2 Ziemowit Szczerek, Świat, gdzie Polska nie jest Polską Archived 19 October 2008 at the Wayback Machine , on: Interia.pl , 26 September 2008.
  9. Anna-Maria Meyer, Wiederbelebung einer Utopie: Probleme und Perspektiven slavischer Plansprachen im Zeitalter des Internets, p. 266, 2014, ISBN   9783863092337
  10. 1 2 3 Jan Oliva, Virtuální vlasnictví (diplomová práce), Hradec Králové 2006, p. 6.
  11. Tilman Berger, Vom Erfinden Slavischer Sprachen Archived 31 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine , in: M. Okuka & U. Schweier, eds., Germano-Slavistische Beiträge. Festschrift für P. Rehder zum 65. Geburtstag, München 2004, pp. 24-25.
  12. 1 2 Jan Havliš, "Výlet do Conlangey", in: Interkom, 2008/3 (243), pp. 17-21.
  13. "Ill Bethisad". IBWiki. 26 August 2009. Retrieved 21 December 2013.
  14. "Hołowna Storinka". IBWiki. Retrieved 21 December 2013.
  15. "Croatian". IBWiki. Retrieved 21 December 2013.
  16. "Ytterbion's Rules of Creation". Archived from the original on 20 May 2010. Retrieved 16 October 2010.
  17. "Republic of the Two Crowns". Steen.free.fr. Retrieved 21 December 2013.
  18. "RUSSIA in Ill Bethisad". Steen.free.fr. Retrieved 21 December 2013.
  19. "History of Castile and Leon". IBWiki. Retrieved 21 December 2013.
  20. Jakub Kowalski, Wymyślone języki Archived 7 October 2011 at the Wayback Machine , on: Relaz.pl, 2 March 2007.