Venedic is a naturalistic constructed language, created by the Dutch translator Jan van Steenbergen (who also co-created the international auxiliary language Interslavic). It is used in the fictional Republic of the Two Crowns, based on the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, in the alternate timeline of Ill Bethisad. Officially, Venedic is a descendant of Vulgar Latin with a strong Slavic admixture, based on the premise that the Roman Empire incorporated the ancestors of the Poles in their territory. Less officially, it tries to show what Polish would have looked like if it had been a Romance instead of a Slavic language. On the Internet, it is well-recognized as an example of the altlang genre, much like Brithenig and Breathanach.
The idea for the language was inspired by such languages as Brithenig and Breathanach, languages that bear a similar relationship to the Celtic languages as Venedic does to Polish. The language itself is based entirely on (Vulgar) Latin and Polish: all phonological, morphological, and syntactic changes that made Polish develop from Common Slavic are applied to Vulgar Latin. As a result, vocabulary and morphology are predominantly Romance in nature, whereas phonology, orthography and syntax are essentially the same as in Polish. Venedic uses the modern standard Polish orthography, including (for instance) for and for .
Venedic plays a role in the alternate history of Ill Bethisad, where it is one of the official languages of the Republic of the Two Crowns. In 2005 Venedic underwent a major revision due to a better understanding of Latin and Slavic sound and grammar changes. In the process, the author was assisted by the Polish linguist Grzegorz Jagodziński.
The dictionary on the WWW page linked below contains over 4000 entries.
The language has acquired some media attention in Poland, including several online news articles and an article in the monthly .
Spelling and pronunciation
Venedic uses the Polish alphabet, which consists of the following 32 letters :
A Ą B C Ć D E Ę F G H I J K L Ł M N Ń O Ó P R S Ś T U W Y Z Ź Ż
Also, there are seven digraphs, representing five phonemes (ch being identical with h, and rz with ż):
Ch Cz Dz Dź Dż Rz Sz
Pronunciation is exactly as in Polish. Stress almost always falls on the penultimate syllable. A preposition and a pronoun are generally treated as one word, and therefore, when the pronoun has only one syllable, the preposition is stressed.
(In theory, the construction of Venedic enables relatively easy construction of other "Slavo-Romance" languages. The Romance "mirror" for Czech, for example, is called "Šležan"; another for Slovak, although somewhat looser than the other two as it uses a partially Hungarian orthography, is called "Slevan". )
Nominals
Venedic does not have articles. This is a feature that distinguishes Venedic from all natural Romance languages. The reason for this is that Vulgar Latin showed only a rudimentary tendency toward the formation of articles, and they are absent in Polish and most other Slavic languages.
Nouns, pronouns and adjectives can have three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), two numbers (singular, plural), and three cases: the direct case: used for both the subject and the direct object of a sentence. In the sentence: Miej poterz leże libier "My father reads a book", Miej poterz "my father" and libier "a book" are both in the direct case. the genitive case: used to indicate possession, for example: siedź potrze "my father's chair", rzejna Anglie "the queen of England". the dative case: used to indicate the indirect object of a sentence, for example: Da mi ił libier "Give me that book", Da mi łu "Give it to me". Venedic also has a vocative case. In most cases it has the same form as the direct case, but there are exceptions: O potrze! "Oh father!" In earlier version of Venedic, it used to have nominative and accusative cases, but later merged to form the direct case.
Nouns can be subdivided into four declensions. They are similar to the declension system in Latin: The first declension are all words on -a, the vast majority of which are feminine; the second declension are mostly masculine and neuter words ending with a consonant. It is a mixture of the second and fourth declension in Latin; the third declension are mostly feminine words ending with a soft consonant; the fourth declension are words on -ej, it matches the Latin fifth declension. However, the author treated the nouns with the 4th declension ending as irregular, see also the sections below.