Anglecymrāeg

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.

Introduction

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/ 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

In the merging of Old English and Old Welsh, a few changes occurred. Firstly, the Welsh /ɸ/ and /β/ were lost since the Germanic /f/ and /v/ proved easier phonetically to pronounce that thus favored over the former. Additionally, the Welsh /ŋ̊ʰ/ was lost altogether, while /m̥ʰ/ and /n̥ʰ/ changed in form to the affricates /ɧm/ and /ɧn/ respectively.

	Labial	Labio-Dental	Dental	Alveolar		Post-Alveolar	Palatal		Velar		Glottal
				plain	lateral		plain	velarized	plain	labial
Nasal	m			n					(ŋ)
Plosive	p   b			t   d					k   (g)	(kʷ)
Affricate					tɬ	tʃ   (dʒ)
Fricative		f   (v)	θ   (ð)	s   (z)	(ɫ)	ʃ		(ɧ)	x   ɣ	(xʷ)	h
Approximant					l		(j)			(ẘ)   w
Trill				(r̥)   r

The sounds surrounded by parentheses are allophones of the non-parenthesized phonemes.

Sound Changes

The most notable sound changes of Englecymrǣc are of the allophonic variety, which are listed below.

• /ŋ/ is an allophone of /n/ when followed by a /g/ or /k/.
• /v/, /ð/, and /z/ are allophones of /f/, /θ, and /s/ when occurring between low or mid vowels, when clustered with sonorants, or when word-finally. An exception is made if the grapheme is doubled, in which case no change occurs.
• /g/ is an allophone of /ɣ/ when occurring word-initially or when preceded by /n/.
• /j/ is also an allophone of /ɣ/ when occurring alone between to vowels or at the end of a syllable if the coda doesn't contain other phonemes.
• /ɬ/, /ʍ/, and /r̥/ are allophones of /l/, /w/, and /r/ when preceded by /h/, /x/ or /ɧ/.
• /h/ is an allophone of /x/ when preceded by a front or central vowel.
• /ɧ/ is also an allophone of /x/ when occurring word-initially.

Orthography

Grapheme	/Phoneme/	Notes
a	/a/	Slightly farther back than a typical /a/, very occasionally pronounced as full /ɑ/.
ā	/aː/
æ	/æ/	When in an unstressed position.
	/eː/	When in a stressed position. The Germanic /æ/ was sometimes as misinterpreted as /eː/ by the Welsh, who disliked the sound, resulting in /æ/ > /eː/ when stressed. Stress and length were almost always related, denoted by a macron (¯).
ǣ	/æː/
ae	/aɨ/	Not to be confused with /æ/, which comes from Old English. The ae marking was borrowed from Old Welsh.
āe	/aːɨ/
æg	/æj/   /æʲ/	Differentiation between soft and hard palatalization is extremely inconsistent. Usually, however, the soft palatalization was used only word-finally, and the hard palatalization was used everywhere else.
aġ		This grapheme was the most commonly used, favored because of its marginal simplicity, but other graphemes are used occasionally.
æġ		Very rarely used, mainly in older texts.
b	/b/
c	/k/
cj	/tʃ/
cw	/kʷ/
d	/d/
ð	/ð/
ðð	/θ/	The doubled /ð/ changes back to /θ/. This was a common feature in both Old Germanic and Brittonic languages.
e	/e/
	/ə/	Only when appearing directly before a stressed syllable. This came directly from Welsh, since the Old English didn't have this feature.
ē	/eː/	Note that /eː/ doesn't change to /ə/ when before stress,
	/e/	Only when appearing before a stressed syllable. This comes from the attempt to avoid a long /əː/ so it is articulated as /e/ but not long.
ea	/eɨ/
ēa	/eːɨ/
f	/v/	When post-vocalically.
	/f/	When word-initially.
ff		Replace f when unvoiced and post-vocalically.
g	/ɣ/	When medially or word-finally.
	/g/	When word-initially.
ġ	/j/
h	/x/	When initially or medially.
	/ɧ/	When finally.
hm	/ɧm/
hn	/ɧn/
hl	/ɬ/
hr	/r̥/
hw	/ʍ/
i	/i/
ī	/iː/
ie	/jə/
īe	/iə/
io	/ju/
īo	/iu/
l	/l/
ll	/ɬ/
m	/m/
n	/n/
ng	/ŋ/
nk	/ŋk/
o	/o/
ō	/oː/
oe	/oɨ/
ōe	/oːɨ/
p	/p/
r	/r/
s	/s/
sj
t
þ	/θ/
	/ð/