Wenedyk (in English: Venedic) is a constructed language of the naturalistic kind, created by the Dutch translator Jan van Steenbergen. Officially, Wenedyk 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. Unofficially, it tries to show what Polish would have looked like if it had been a Romance instead of a Slavic language. An artificial or constructed language (known colloquially as a conlang among aficionados), is a language whose vocabulary and grammar are specifically devised by an individual or small group, rather than having naturally evolved as part of a culture as with natural languages. ... Vulgar Latin (in Latin, sermo vulgaris) is a blanket term covering the vernacular dialects of the Latin language spoken mostly in the western provinces of the Roman Empire until those dialects, diverging still further, evolved into the early Romance languages — a distinction usually assigned to about the ninth century. ... The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia. ... The Roman Empire is the term conventionally used to describe the Ancient Roman polity in the centuries following its reorganization under the leadership of Octavian (better known as Caesar Augustus). ... The Romance languages, also called Romanic languages or New Latin Languages, are a subset of the Italic languages, specifically the descendants of the Latin dialects spoken by the common people in what is known as Latin Europe (Italian/Portuguese/Spanish Europa latina, French Europe latine, Romanian Europa latină) as Vulgar... The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia. ...

The idea for the language was inspired by such languages as Brithenig, Breathanach and Kerno. 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. Brithenig is an invented language, or constructed language (conlang). It was created as a hobby in 1996 by Andrew Smith from New Zealand, who also invented the alternate history of Ill Bethisad to explain it. ... Breathanach is a constructed language, or newly invented language, with Gaelic and Latin influences. ... Vulgar Latin (in Latin, sermo vulgaris) is a blanket term covering the vernacular dialects of the Latin language spoken mostly in the western provinces of the Roman Empire until those dialects, diverging still further, evolved into the early Romance languages — a distinction usually assigned to about the ninth century. ... Latin is the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ...

Wenedyk 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. Alternative history or alternate history is fiction that is set in a world in which history has diverged from history as it is generally known; more simply put, alternate history asks the question, What If history had developed differently?. Most works that employ this rubric are set in factful historical... Ill Bethisad is an ongoing, collaborative alternative history project with currently ca. ...

The dictionary on the WWW page linked below contains around 3000 entries.

External link

• Wenedyk (in English)