Anglecymrāeg

Introduction

This conlang was created for a school project, and while supposedly there is little to no record of the language, this article will go into (hopefully) great detail as to the many aspects that make up the language, more than could ever have been discerned by any manuscripts that would've survived the tests of time.

Englecymrǣc was a naturalistic language spoken by a small group of Welsh Anglo-Saxons who spoke a language which stemmed from Old English and Old Welsh. This language arose when a faction of the Saxon settlers rebelled and eventually left their people to travel West across Britain to modern-day Wales. There they met a small group of Welsh-speaking people. The group of Saxons didn't try to conquer the Welsh since they were few in numbers and half-starved. Instead, they were welcomed and thus assimilated into the village. For a few hundred years they lived there, until with one thing and another the population dwindled and the village was abandoned, the remnants scattering in different directions. they were never heard from again, until the late 20th century, when a wooden chest with various documents were found in modern-day Wales, some in Old English or Anglocumeric. It contained several unknown literary works of fiction, and excerpts from Beowulf. While most were in Anglocumeric, the Beowulf excerpts were written in both, which helped to decipher the lost language.

Phonology

Vowels

As Old English and Old Welsh merged, the /y/ sound and /ø/ sounds changed to /ɨ/ and /ə/ respectively, thus loosing the round front vowels. The /a/ sound became a merged form of the Old English /ɑ/ and the Welsh /a/, slightly more back than the Welsh, but still farther forward than the Old English. All vowels are written as their IPA symbols except for /ɨ/, which is represented by the letter y, and /ə/, which can be represented by e or y. All vowels had a short and long variants ― the short being one mora and the long being something approximating 1.67 morae, not quite two ― except for /ə/, which is only short.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i   iː	ɨ   ɨː	u   uː
Mid	e   eː	ə	o   oː
Low	æ   æː	a   aː

Consonants

	Labial	Labio-dental	Dental	Alveolar		Post-Alveolar	Palatal	Velar		Glottal
				central	lateral			plain	labial
Nasal	m			n				ŋ
Plosive	p   b			t   d				k   g
Fricative	(ɸ)   (β)	f   v	θ   ð	s   z	(ɫ)	(ʃ)   (ʒ)	(ɧ)	x		h
Trill				(r̥)   r
Approximant

Alongside this phoneme inventory, a number of unique affricates were created with the merging of the languages in a phonetic compromise. Perhaps most notably is that the Welsh sounds /m̥ʰ/ and /n̥ʰ/ changed to the affricates /ɧm/ and /ɧn/.