What if English evolved from Brythonic instead of Germanic?

[TCCollins]

I've been thinking about this a few days now, Welsh words but English word order or grammar rules. Could this work as a conlang or would it just look like badly translated Welsh? Thoughts?

[Jonlang]

I'd imagine that it would look like badly translated Welsh. I'd imagine that if English had evolved from Brythonic then it may well still contain sounds like /z/ and lose mutations. It's hard to imagine really.

[linguoboy]

I've been thinking about this a few days now, Welsh words but English word order or grammar rules. Could this work as a conlang or would it just look like badly translated Welsh? Thoughts?

You'd have to play around with the form and meanings of the words somewhat in order for it not to look like Scymraeg.

I'm having trouble understanding exactly what you're imagining, though. Do you have some kind of origin scenario in mind? Like the Anglo-Saxon invasion takes place but on a smaller scale and at least part of the area is re-Brittonicised?

[hwhatting]

I'm having trouble understanding exactly what you're imagining, though. Do you have some kind of origin scenario in mind? Like the Anglo-Saxon invasion takes place but on a smaller scale and at least part of the area is re-Brittonicised?

Or you could have the French (or Normannic) scenario - the Anglo-Saxons become the elite, but take over the language from their Brythonic subjects.

[Vijay]

Or you could have the French (or Normannic) scenario - the Anglo-Saxons become the elite, but take over the language from their Brythonic subjects.

But I'm having trouble thinking of an example where something like that happened and caused the entire grammar of the language to change. I thought the structural changes before the Norman invasion were more dramatic than changes due to Norman/French influence...

[hwhatting]

Or you could have the French (or Normannic) scenario - the Anglo-Saxons become the elite, but take over the language from their Brythonic subjects.

But I'm having trouble thinking of an example where something like that happened and caused the entire grammar of the language to change. I thought the structural changes before the Norman invasion were more dramatic than changes due to Norman/French influence...

I wasn't talking about a radical chnage of the structure, only about whatever woild be spoken in England in that scenario to be based on Brythonic with some Anglo-Saxon influence.

[Vijay]

I wasn't talking about a radical chnage of the structure, only about whatever woild be spoken in England in that scenario to be based on Brythonic with some Anglo-Saxon influence.

Oh, OK. I thought the OP was talking about a radical change of the structure, though. Maybe I misunderstood?

[hwhatting]

I wasn't talking about a radical chnage of the structure, only about whatever woild be spoken in England in that scenario to be based on Brythonic with some Anglo-Saxon influence.

Oh, OK. I thought the OP was talking about a radical change of the structure, though. Maybe I misunderstood?

He was, but I wasn't.

[Vijay]

Lol, okay.

[Richard W]

There's enough SVO and Adj-N lurking around in Insular Celtic that they're not impossible. 'Badly translated Welsh' might not be a bad description of what might be spoken if an English aristocracy had adopted Welsh without any regard for Welsh sensibilities.

[TCCollins]

I'd imagine that it would look like badly translated Welsh. I'd imagine that if English had evolved from Brythonic then it may well still contain sounds like /z/ and lose mutations. It's hard to imagine really.

That's what I thought. I love the fluidity of welsh, the mutations, the Y's, so many Y's... haha

I've been thinking about this a few days now, Welsh words but English word order or grammar rules. Could this work as a conlang or would it just look like badly translated Welsh? Thoughts?

You'd have to play around with the form and meanings of the words somewhat in order for it not to look like Scymraeg.

I'm having trouble understanding exactly what you're imagining, though. Do you have some kind of origin scenario in mind? Like the Anglo-Saxon invasion takes place but on a smaller scale and at least part of the area is re-Brittonicised?

I'm having trouble understanding exactly what you're imagining, though. Do you have some kind of origin scenario in mind? Like the Anglo-Saxon invasion takes place but on a smaller scale and at least part of the area is re-Brittonicised?

Or you could have the French (or Normannic) scenario - the Anglo-Saxons become the elite, but take over the language from their Brythonic subjects.

Well, Kind of. That's why I'm asking you guys for input!

With fairies being rife in Welsh mythology, I wanted to create a language for them that decended from Brythonic, but with the order of grammar that English has, so "Corgi" - dwarfdog would be "Cigor" instead, or "moron oren" would be "oren foron". Possibly using some vowel shifting too.

Also, I'm playing on the idea of removing entire articulations, mutating consonants to the next point. either labial, dental, velar, uvular or glottal. I'm gonna play around with it for a bit, for for the most part, I want it to feel Welsh.

[TCCollins]

He was, but I wasn't.

He? Awkward...

[TCCollins]

There's enough SVO and Adj-N lurking around in Insular Celtic that they're not impossible. 'Badly translated Welsh' might not be a bad description of what might be spoken if an English aristocracy had adopted Welsh without any regard for Welsh sensibilities.

I feel like I'm offending my ancestors if I do this lol

[linguoboy]

With fairies being rife in Welsh mythology, I wanted to create a language for them that decended from Brythonic, but with the order of grammar that English has, so "Corgi" - dwarfdog would be "Cigor" instead

Okay, this confuses me. The order of Welsh "proper compounds" is already the same as English and other Germanic languages, i.e. modifier-head. Reversing this makes the language seem less like English and more like...Vietnamese?

Incidentally, one of the great mysteries of Welsh historical grammar is that Middle Welsh was overwhelmingly S-V-O despite the fact that both Old Welsh and Modern Welsh default to V-S-O. Making S-V-O the default for a modern Brythonic conlang would be a trivial development. (Hell, it happened in Breton.)

[Yng]

jesus christ lord preserve us why on earth would you want to do that

hasn't welsh suffered enough??!

[Jonlang]

With fairies being rife in Welsh mythology, I wanted to create a language for them that decended from Brythonic, but with the order of grammar that English has, so "Corgi" - dwarfdog would be "Cigor" instead

Okay, this confuses me. The order of Welsh "proper compounds" is already the same as English and other Germanic languages, i.e. modifier-head. Reversing this makes the language seem less like English and more like...Vietnamese?

Incidentally, one of the great mysteries of Welsh historical grammar is that Middle Welsh was overwhelmingly S-V-O despite the fact that both Old Welsh and Modern Welsh default to V-S-O. Making S-V-O the default for a modern Brythonic conlang would be a trivial development. (Hell, it happened in Breton.)

Out of curiosity, how did Welsh manage to go from VSO to SVO and then back to VSO?

[Vijay]

Maybe word order just isn't that stable a feature. I seem to recall hearing that there are a bunch of Iranian languages where word order has historically been really unstable.

[hwhatting]

He was, but I wasn't.

He? Awkward...

Oh, sorry, I hope I didn't offend you. We have so few non-males on this board that I went for the default assumption. Sorry again.

[linguoboy]

Incidentally, one of the great mysteries of Welsh historical grammar is that Middle Welsh was overwhelmingly S-V-O despite the fact that both Old Welsh and Modern Welsh default to V-S-O. Making S-V-O the default for a modern Brythonic conlang would be a trivial development. (Hell, it happened in Breton.)

Out of curiosity, how did Welsh manage to go from VSO to SVO and then back to VSO?

Mae'n ddrwg 'da fi, but you'd need to reach the rank of at least clerwr before I could be allowed to reveal such secrets to you.

[Jonlang]

Incidentally, one of the great mysteries of Welsh historical grammar is that Middle Welsh was overwhelmingly S-V-O despite the fact that both Old Welsh and Modern Welsh default to V-S-O. Making S-V-O the default for a modern Brythonic conlang would be a trivial development. (Hell, it happened in Breton.)

Out of curiosity, how did Welsh manage to go from VSO to SVO and then back to VSO?

Mae'n ddrwg 'da fi, but you'd need to reach the rank of at least clerwr before I could be allowed to reveal such secrets to you.

Say what now?

[mèþru]

I actually thought about this before when thinking about a situation in which Brithenig (a Britanno-Romance that looks like French with mutations and without liaison and nasals) could emerge. With a smaller Anglo-Saxon invasion, the Anglo-Saxons might effectively be wiped out of Britain or restricted to Kent or North East England. If you use the latter option, Scots may still develop (however it will probably be a mutually intelligible dialect of English). The area around the Fens and London would speak a Romance-language, while Wales, northern England (the places not inhabited by Anglo-Saxons), and Cornwall would speak separate Celtic languages. In the area between the Romance and Celtic speaking area, both language families would be spoken. Romance is associated with towns and rural nobility, while Celtic is associated with rural peasants. As the Vikings invade, they will probably capture areas in the Romance area, and the Romance speakers would flee to the West. Their language would be replaced by Celtic, which also becomes the language of the Britannicised Vikings.
The Norman-style option does not seem realistic to me. The dominant language of the earliest Anglo-Saxon areas was the British dialect of Vulgar Latin. The people who spoke this language were driven into the largely Celtic speaking countryside, which lead to the extinction of Romano-British and Old English becoming the language of the cities. While the initial amount of Anglo-Saxons were small, more migrated from Germany and Denmark in large numbers. Germanic laws applied to all who could speak a Germanic languages, as language was the main way to determine ethnicity in the time period. The Celts within the territory felt incentives for learning Old English and raising their children. To make the Norman scenario more plausible, Anglo-Saxon law would need to have a bizarre difference from all other Germanic law, the Anglo-Saxons might have to come in larger numbers, and economic power needs to shift to Celtic speaking areas.
In the first scenario, Celtic language which is grammatically and lexically like a mix of the others spoken in between the Celtic and Romance zones (kind of like Mozarabic) would be closest correspondent to Brythonic English. As it becomes the language of London, the Fens, and the British Vikings, it might achieve an Old English-like dominance of Britain. A good name for the language would come from the local name for London or from the border tribe which originally spoke it (like the Dobunni). The main influences on the language, in order of greatest to least, would be: Welsh and the North British tongues, as they would be the closest related languages; Latin, which provides words about government and Christianity; the Anglo-Saxon tongue (which would have more Celtic influence and way less Latin influence) of wherever the Anglo-Saxons settle; Cornish; Old Norse; Breton; Old French; and Scots. All languages after Old Norse are pretty weak influences.

[hwhatting]

To make the Norman scenario more plausible, Anglo-Saxon law would need to have a bizarre difference from all other Germanic law, the Anglo-Saxons might have to come in larger numbers

Actually, there numbers would have to be lower - it has been argued that Germanic languages replaced Romance (or other languages) in those parts of the Empire where Germanic tribes settled in bigger numbers and introduced their own economic system, while in those areas where they settld in a öless compact manner and just put themseleves on the top of the existing system as an elite, they adopted the existing language.

[Salmoneus]

It should be pointed out also that the shift from a Romano-Celtic to an Anglo-Saxon population wasn't a matter of cultural assimilation, legal systems and so on, it was a matter of genetic population replacement. The children of the celts didn't assimilate to the saxons: the children of the celts just didn't exist.

[mèþru]

Genetically, there is not much difference between the English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish that live in the UK and Ireland. The Anglo-Saxon and subsequent invasions did not change much.

[Salmoneus]

Genetically, there is not much difference between the English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish that live in the UK and Ireland. The Anglo-Saxon and subsequent invasions did not change much.

This is not actually true.

To take the most obvious markers, here is a map of R1b-L21, a stereotypically celtic male descent linneage:


And here is a map of R1b-U106, a stereotypically Anglo-Saxon male descent linneage:


In total, around 25% of Welsh men are descended from recognisable Germanic linneages, compared to nearly 70% in eastern England. And that's after 1500 years of gradual intermingling.
At a superficial level, this can be seen just by looking and people's hair, and the relative frequency of blond hair (associated with Germanic descent) in England, Wales, and Ireland.


[The Viking and Roman invasions are also genetically noticeable even today]