Language Families of




Anieth and Zelosia

I have made a map to show a gradient in the languages of Anieth from most conservative (green) to most continental (orange). The language spoken in Anieth is similar to Proto-Celtic, but without the Latinate influence. Proto-Celtic was re-constructed in two ways, from word commonality in the six extant Celtic tongues and from inscriptions on markers and tombs (heavy Latin influence.)

This map is similar to what we see in modern Europe, where Irish and Scots Gaelic are the most conservative of the Celtic tongues and Breton, Cornish and Welsh the most Continental. Bretton may be the closest we have to the old languages spoken in Gaul. For this reason, we have chosen to represent languages in our writings with Gaelic or Welsh spellings to give this flavor to our work. Since none of these languages were written down, the best we can do is with sound changes and grammatical modifications. These are usually influenced by neighbors. Those people on islands, behind mountain ranges or otherwise isolated tend to be more conservative in their language compared to those who are in constant contact with foreign influences.

This map shows the sound changes across Anieth, with quite a bit of overlap with the conservative map. This can be illustrated best with some names and the sounds of names. Unfortunately, our own spelling is a dead giveaway, so I shall try to do my chart with phonetical spelling only.

If you try to pronounce the words here, you will see that the west has much more aspirated consonants. This means consonants that are unvoiced and made with more air and a fricative sound rather than a fluid sound. Easterners say that Westerners sound like they are clearing their throats and spitting out their words. Westerners say that Easterners make mish-mash of their vowels so that everything that was two distinct vowels is not one diphthong. They also complain that Easterners turn everything into "g" sounds like they are gulping and lapping up their words. They also don't like the way that Easterners take a "ay" sound and turn it to "ee" or making broad sounds slender. The "r" sounds are also quite different. A linguist would classify these two extremes as different languages. In Anieth, the great middle zones did both extremes but without much logic. One valley might say "rail" and "feel" and another "reel" and "vale," and yet another "fail" and "wreel." I found this very irritating, expecting pockets where the older sounds had gotten "lost." I realized when I actually journeyed into Anieth, that this was because the people were not stationery, but traveled around.

More of this article is to come!