Categories
Analysis

“Alternate History Languages”, “Lost Languages” and their approaches to simulating diachronic change: Comparing Brithenig, Cumbraek and Modern Gaulish

Joe Wellington is a Bachelor’s Student in Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, with a passionate interest in the Celtic languages (particularly Modern Welsh) and constructed languages. Their interest in languages extends to constructed ones having spent many hours obsessing over the interesting systems devised by seasoned conlangers and even more time scribbling and erasing declension tables to make their own.

This paper discusses the different strategies for simulating diachronic change in planned languages comparing the approaches of Brithenig (Smith, 2007a), Cumbraek (Whalley, 2022) and Modern Gaulish (2023). The author analyses the techniques used by each conlanger in service of their design goals and discusses the extent to which these goals determined the diachronic techniques used.

Version History

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License