*Before you comment:* *#1* - It has been brought to my attention several times now that the word for '5' in Britannian is unfortunately the same as a slur in English. I did not know this word when making this video, but after learning about it, I decided to change the word for '5' in Britannian so that it develops from Classical Latin "quinque" instead of Vulgar Latin "cinque", therefore avoiding palatalization and becoming "kink" (pronounced: /kɪŋk/). This change was made several months ago, but obviously not everyone who sees this video knows about the updates that have been made since, so I feel the need to put something here on this video. My apologies to Chinese viewers for my ignorance. *#2* - There is now a 'Britannian Redo' video that contains a few updates I have decided to make since this video and an official Britannian Info Page with tons of information about the alternate history and inner workings of Britannian. Britannian Redo: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MslxCbZUGpk.html Official Britannian Info Page: docs.google.com/document/d/1VSRNb0GJl_bHr3s4cnAbf2hkQSJpO5LhjTzg8ULvD2c/edit?usp=sharing *#3* - This video was made with an audience of conlang enthusiasts in mind (the kind that might watch Biblaridion or Jan Misali), which is why it contains a lot of fancy linguistic terminology. It seems that because of the concept and thumbnail it has attracted some viewers who are not familiar with conlanging or linguistics. Britannian is an "artlang", a conlang designed for the aesthetic pleasure of the artist. It is not a genuine analysis of history like you might find on AlternateHistoryHub, despite the amount of research that went into it. I made this for fun because I'm a nerd.
Had the blur not been put in place, I would have known one less slur; I really don't think that doing these inane censors benefit anyone. Moreover, the original word is still contained within some of the frames preceding the next section.
@@joshuachan6317 yeah, given that this is a completely different language from English we're speaking today, and it's totally common and accceptable to have homophones with english curses or slurs. btw i'm also chinese, and i think the original pronunciation is better(softer).
It sounds like an English speaker trying to speak French, except they only memorized a French dictionary and know absolutely nothing about French grammar. Also, they've never heard spoken French, so they just pronounce each word with the thickest possible English accent. I love it.
This is like the anti-Anglish. Where Brittanian tried to make English a full Romance language, Anglish tried to make English a full Germanic language. I would say Anglish is a bit easier to understand since it doesn't really change spelling, pronunciation, or grammer unless you want it to, combined with the most common English words generally being Germanic. The result is _almost_ normal English with the occasional Shakespearian construction.
I agree, although Anglish probably doesn't rise to the level of a full conlang, like this does. Anglish is more like a _katharevousa_ programme consisting of a list of terms to replace other terms, but the language remains Modern English. We might perhaps call it a con-register.
@@reptiliannoizezz.413 I forget where I first heard it. You can probably just search "Anglish" and find something. Alternatively: "Unclefting Beholding," which is an introduction to atomic theory written in Anglish that's fairly famous.
I really like it! I like how it's Latin based but still has that distinct "Englishy" sound. It sounds like it would be fun to learn as an English speaker.
I'll admit that I appreciate the effort that has been put into the phonology and etymology side of the video. However, the reason it still has that "englishy" sound is because the speaker has put relatively little effort into how the pronunciation would sound, and is simply using their native, modern english accent as a model of pronunciation
@@iamasalad9080 I disagree. If the language was entirely Romance then the sound changes would be different to the ones that our current language has undergone
@@igc8906 when doing a “what if?”, we assume everything but the thing we changed stays the same. Which sound changes happen out of all possible sound changes is pretty much random, so of course Britannian would sound completely different if history changed in any way, it’s like rerolling hundreds of dice. Still, I think it’s more fun to assume all “random” events happen in exactly the same way, because otherwise you very quickly move from alt history into a full-on constructed world. So yeah, they could’ve applied a different set of sound changes, but at that point it’s not “English if it were a Romance language”, but “a Romance conlang with Brittonic and Anglo-Saxon influences”. That would be cool too, but it’s not the purpose of this video.
@@felipevasconcelos6736 I'd say a good compromise is to apply the same sound changes but only where applicable. While protogermanic and protoitalic vowel systems probably aren't too different, old English and Latin vowel systems are pretty different. You can't really assume that old Britannian would share the same vowels as old English.
Nosaltres and Vosaltres, literally Catalonian-Valencian lmao 😂👏👏 As a Romance speaker that is the universe I wish I was born in, I literally understand everything in Britannian without any help from translation.
Native English speaker. While it's not 100% intelligible, I can understand most of it. I am probably more familiar with Latin than the average person though.
This Conlang Sounds REAL. Reading it and listening to it, I keep thinking: “I’d wager anything that this is spoken SOMEWHERE. If it isn’t, it bloody-well-OUGHT to be!”
For me that I speak Spanish, this is amazing, this is so easy to understand and has the same English pronunciation. Each word makes sense. "Cursed" is English like it is now
This is fantastic. The parallel evolution of Britannian with English, going through the Danelaw, loss of case, the Great Vowel Shift, and even North American colonialism is just brilliant. What an enjoyable thought experiment and a lot of work, too!
So I totally forgot while recording this that in Old Britannian, stress was shifted to the first syllable of every word (ignoring prefixes) and all following syllables were reduced under the influence of Germanic languages. Which means the verb endings should actually be *even more reduced* than what they are in this video lol.
I’m making an official Britannian info page where I’ll fix any mistakes. I just wanted to get this video out before the end of summer. Sorry for being so messy. 😢
After watching the video, I could not help but think: "What if we did this in reverse with French?" So instead of using French as the template for Romance English, you would use English as the template for Germanic French.
@@zuarbrincar769 Yes it would! Though now that you bring it up, according to the Frankish -> French rule, Latin England should be called Anglia, by its latinised form
I boded this! The anti-Anglish has arrived! They said I was crazy, but here you are! Now seriously, fun experiment and nice job. These kinds of conlangs which include a change in history are great!
Azorean Norse I gotta hear! And so far we've got two of the three alternate forms of English. Anglish (Germanic) and Britannian (Latinate/Romance), what we have left is Neo-Brittonic (Celtic).
This is a very cursed but fun experiment, it looks really great As a speaker of Romance Lothringian (also known under its French name "Lorrain"), thank you for mentioning some of our sister languages ! My language didn't get represented, but I am still happy to see others of our family getting this representation, as it almost never happens My language is one of the things I cherish the most in my life, speaking it is a joy, but it often gets quite depressing and lonely to be a speaker of a dying language
As someone who speaks both French and English - this is just what I sound like when I accidentally drop English words into French. Or like a high school guy in French 1 who really doesn't want to be there but his parents forced him to do a language
I also made a language like that: it's called lethigne, [l3thªin] ! 😃😁 it also has a english feel,but is somewhat diffrent, I made it cause I once thought I heared english to much on the radio, I live in a non english country,and love romance language sounds, and thought what if I made an english sounding romance one, so evry time I hear english there is an oportunity to think about anglo-romance. Edit after watching I love it, and I dont mind it's englishy, I also like some of your words are the same or pointment to my lethigne words ! 😁 only my orthography is diffrent and made to pronounce it moastley litteralment.
Lethigne is a semi-art sound change romance language resembling english , the orthography is more standardised so there is more chlarity on pronounzation, I took inspiration from french in many forms,but the infinnitive verb is almoast like the english 'to -verb', but in it's form resembles romanian. The language has easy conjugation, germanic loans, umlaut and writes in latin script. It is not designed for a fictional people but a model to play with, per example poems,christian hyms and songs. The project is not finnished yet, I'm currently working on an other romance conlang. The text below is an unfinished note, Legenda: -The ~ means is from -The litteral written words are lethigne -Between hooks is the English translations from commentary -The longer versions of words are derivations like 'lousage' (pronounced as written) may means lighting, I did not finish the note. Cays ~ case = huis (house) caysed ~ bebouwing (build buildings) Louse ~ lus = licht (light) lousage ~ Yumb ~ lum maakte louse archisch (yumb , said with -b replaced louse,making louse archaïc) Bouwrey ~ burg = kasteel (castle) bureypeople (I don't know this one anymore) Nouw ~ nube = wolken (clouds) nouwt = bewolkt (cloudy) Larbuor ~ abre = boom (tree) arbored = boomgrd (orchard?) Aygue ~ aqua = water (the same) aysgue (?) Flaudhiighl ~ flodecle? bloem (flower) A faowle ~ ad fable? spreken (to speak) Cidhey ~ citèt? stad (city)
There is now a 'Britannian Redo' video that contains a few updates I have decided to making since this video and an official Britannian Info Page with tons of information about the alternate history and inner workings of Britannian. Britannian Redo: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MslxCbZUGpk.html Official Britannian Info Page: docs.google.com/document/d/1VSRNb0GJl_bHr3s4cnAbf2hkQSJpO5LhjTzg8ULvD2c/edit?usp=sharing
As someone who studied Latin for four years in high school and two in college (with a mother who taught French for a living)... it's unsettling how much of this language I can mostly understand from root words... I feel like it would be easier for me to learn Britannian than actual Portuguese xD
This is just awesome, the video is really entertaining and the end result is really interesting. You made it still sound englishy with the alveolar approximant realization of the R, great vowel shift, aspirated stops, 'weak dipthongs'(/eɪ/ instead of /ei/) and syllabic resonance, I was afraid you wouldn't keep these 'quirks'. I really like this
Wouldn't be surprised if there was a timeline where this video was the exact opposite, making English a Germanic language instead, using this version of the language
Oo, I love the concept of making a language be influenced by another a as a conlang!! I myself made my own concept, Portugaléz! It's basically Portuguese from the 16th-18th centuries, but strongly Castilianised. Not like Galician, a little different in this case!
As a native romance language speaker, that is also fluent in English, I can say that I would not have much difficulty understanding this language, at least in the way you present it.
great video! just rewatched it again super slowly to take everything in and i read all the comments too lol this is a super fun idea and you executed it really well! I would have liked to have seen a bit more on what you did with the copula(s) and other irregular verbs but anyway you should definitely keep working on it and maybe make a discord or subreddit? it seems to have really resonated with a lot of people so there would surely be interest in joining a community to practice (including from me! lol) that being said one tiny piece of criticism i have is that I don't think Britannian should have lost gender altogether in nouns (not including pronouns)-I think it would have made more sense for it to have done what French did when it lost the final vowel that marked gender, it maintained the distinction (in the singular) using articles-even if Britannian were to have lost its inherited grammatical gender in its entirety (outside the pronominal system), I still think due to heavy influence from French, it would have developed a productive gender affix or two, much like English did in our timeline e.g. -ette as in bachelor/bachelorette (and Smurf/Smurfette lol); -e as in financé/fiancée and blond/blonde; and -ess as in waiter/waitress, actor/actress, and host/hostess. If we assume Britannian saw the same degree of French influence as English did in our timeline, I think Britannian would have redeveloped feminine singular definite and indefinite articles specifically because (1) it borrowed so many words with a feminine suffix that at least one was likely to have become productive (like -ette in English in our timeline) and (2) in addition to that, the articles were already very similar to those of French-also the pronominal system preserved vestiges of grammatical gender-and sociobiological gender is much more straightforward than gender for nonliving things, which I believe is why -ette became productive in English. tldr I think Britannian would have redeveloped feminine articles to use with (1) inherited nouns that are semantically feminine (e.g. medre (mother), ser (sister), fille (daughter), etc.), (2) feminine nouns derived from masculine nouns via feminine affix (bachelorette, blonde, actress, etc.), as well as with (3) words that are morphologically unmarked for gender, and only sometimes semantically feminine (e.g. adulte, infant, sclave, etc.) In any case, keep up the good work!
For a moment I thought this was going to be about Anglese, another alt English conlang that only bases its vocabulary from Romance tongues though xD while it does looks a bit constructed I echo the same that it does sound real, almost like a subset of French. I really like the word for sky, "cheall".
This is really interesting stuff! Minor nitpick - I do like the choice of music but it's really hard to hear your voice over what ought to be background music. I'd love to see more videos on this awesome conlang idea but please turn the music down a bit in future!
This was fun to think about! Do you suppose the people of this alternate universe would have resisted the great vowel shift to a certain extent? This making some of the vowels sound more like their romance cousins? By which I mean some staying with one sound rather than developing a plethora of extra sounds. (Like how many ways does real English pronounce an OU?)
I think the 1and 2 person pl would have remained because the accent falls on them in latin, in fact in french are retained, and i don t think that the fonological changes would be so similar to modern day english, maybe something but not precisely every change, because the vowel system would be of a romance type, not a germanic type, the absence of grammatical gender is possible but a little bit forced in my opinion
Love it! Alt history languages are just cool as hell. I wonder how much easier it'd be for a Britannian speaker to learn the other Romance languages. Probably similar for French speakers irl I asusme It'd be super cool to see a Greek-Latin fusion. Either the Greek population in Eastern Rome acclimating to Latin more, or perhaps the Eastern Romans holding on to Italy longer after they reconquered it, giving more time for the languages to mix (which would possibly have some gothic thrown in too)
Very interesting. I feel like I want to play around in it more. Did you create this yourself, and would you consider writing a document for those of us who might want to experiment with it?
Would it even use the letters "k" and "w" in it's spelling if it were a romance language? Those two seem to be a no-no in the modern romance language tree
They are not that uncommon in Romance languages that have been influenced by Germanic languages has always been very common in Romance Lothringian (my language, an eastern Oïl language), it would be very unpractical not to use it given our phonology, and used to be common in Old Oïl
Intetesting, sounds like a translation from english to 3 or 4 of modern romance languages at the same time, with some not translated words and english accent.
I have recently learned Spanish and I like to look at the other romance languages, and am also learning dutch, so reading and listening to this was so confusing. Sounded like an English speaker reading in Spanish but trying to pronounce it like French, while also adding some English words in because they want to.
Very well done, it seems so lifelike, like a real language. Couple of years ago I had the same ideo but with Dutch and German instead of English. The Dutch variant is called Salenic (after the Salian Franks), here is a sample: Neurtes peer qi etter lans himelon, qe nome dou sere sanctifa. Voui kunidon vienres. Voui volenter sere fete, zur terra kom est a himelon Don noui neurt peun cotide, Endi perdone noui neurt offens, Kom noui perdone a ceu qi noui facs offens, Endi ne noui frotelomos pa la tentanou Mous deliver neurt de mal. Por sine lan kunidon endi la pouvor, endi la glore. Por eternen endi a toujurs. Amen.
So I know how annoying it can be when you make a new original thing and someone pops up like "this is just like [_]!!" no matter how well meaning it is, and I do not enjoy being that guy... But it is very interesting to see the similarities and differences between this project and Brithenig: the same idea taken into different paths (in the case of Brithenig, taking Vulgar Latin and making it more closely follow the development path of the Celtic roots, instead of going with the Germanic-influenced Vulgar Latin of yours) Fun fact, I developed yet another take on alt-history English: one where some part of the Old English speaking population fled to the north of the Iberian Peninsula following the Dane invasion of Britain, and developed alongside Spanish, which I will showcase in my channel soon (TM). You may find some old version on the internet under the name of Ainglej, or Firgerej (current name is still the same). Edit: AYYY THE DEDALVS SENTENCE I also considered for a short while to make a Spanish-like conlang derived from Old Norse, so I'm exited to see your Azorean Norse lmao
I see another Polish speaker has expressed a similar sentiment here. Listening to this is like how for Polish speakers it is to listen to Czech or Kashubian. Overall there's intelligibility, but there's clearly been different changes and borrowings which make it more difficult to understand unless you know another similar language.
By the way, I've heard that you have also produced another "what I think if" language: one based on what would've happened if the Vikings had colonized the Azores. Is there a way I can find out anything about that one?
C'est surprenant (ou peut-être pas...) que je comprends le Britannian comme si c'était un mélange de vieux français et de langue d'Oc. It's amazing (or may-be not), that i understand the Britannian, as if it was a mix of old french and Lengadoc (Occitan language).
I disagree with you about loss of grammatical gender in Britannian, because in actual English this drop was most probably because of process of creolization between Old English and Norman after the conquest (both Germanic and Romance languages have genders, but namely clash of these different gender system was part of simplification during creolization). In your hypothetical history, however, it would impossible to have creolization as Anglo-Saxon superstratum would be incorporate like Frankish, hence when you have new contact after the conquest the languages too relative to initiate creolization. So I would predict in Britannian two genders like in French and most other Romance languages. And BTW your background music is sometimes too loud to focus on what you say.
I would replace a Normal invasion with a Dutch/German invasion in this alternate universe, to keep the symmetry. After all, the Romanised-Celts-meet-Anglos language should be quite similar to (Old) French already, as they have a very similar origin.
I essentially just take the Latin word and pass it through a list of sound changes. There are also some irregular ones based on French, like 'tott', from Vulgar Latin 'tottus', a variant of Latin 'tōtus', which would've produced 'tood' in Britannian and 'teut' in French.
I think the Britons being less Romanized linguistically was only half or maybe even a third of the reason English didn't start as a romance language. For one thing, The Gallo-Romans had inherited much of Roman law and infrastructure, and still had outpost of Roman rule even past the fall of Rome it's self. This might've partially due to the fact many Romans actually settled in Gaul, while little if any settled in Britain. Britain however was completely abandoned by the Legions, and the Roman infrastructure had essentially collapsed before the Anglo-Saxons even began to arrive. The second reason I think, is because Britton was a less populated country than Gaul at the time, and thus there was more room for more Germanic people in England, than in France. My final reasoning, is that the Franks had been exposed to Roman culture and law, at least a couple centuries before it's collapse. The same can be said of various Gothic peoples like the Visigoths, as well as the Suebi who went to Galicia. The Saxons were a couple tribal territories removed from Roman rule for all their history, and the Angles even more so. Not dismissing your project, it's a neat project, but these are the reasons I'd give that it isn't reality. Perhaps in an alternate world were more Romans decided to settle in England, Britannian might've been real.
You're absolutely correct. To be honest, when I was researching I got tired of reading about all the complex reasons British Vulgar Latin went extinct in the real world. 😅 The main reason I left all that out, besides the fact that I don't completely understand it, was to shorten the intro.
