West Germanic language
| Westgermanish | |
|---|---|
| Pronounced: | /wɛst.'geəːɹ.mɑ:n.iʃ/ |
| Timeline and Universe: | Present, on a parallel Earth |
| Species: | Human |
| Spoken: | West Germania (Federation of Schleswig-Holstein, Denmark, East Germany and Crimea) |
| Total speakers: | Unknown |
| Writing system: | Latin alphabet (West Germanic variant) |
| Genealogy: | Indo-European Germanic |
| Typology | |
| Morphological type: | Inflecting |
| Morphosyntactic alignment: | Nominative-accusative |
| Basic word order: | V2 |
| Credits | |
| Creator: | S.C. Anderson |
| Created: | July 2008 |
(New) West Germanic (Westgermanish) is a recent West Germanic language, which is closely related to others such as Dutch, English, Frisian and German as well as sharing some traits with North Germanic languages. West Germanic is a descendant of Old English, with an amount of vocabulary derived from Modern Dutch.
West Germanic grammar is similar to that of Dutch and German, particularly its syntax, but has undergone a degree of deflexion, much more so than Dutch but mostly not to the extent of English. West Germanic has retained the usage of three genders, yet these have become simplified because they now relate purely to biological gender.
As Dutch and English, the consonant system of West Germanic did not undergo the High German consonant shift. Complex consonant clusters are, typically of Germanic languages, allowed by the syllable structure.
West Germanic vocabulary could be said to be more Germanic in origin than its predecessors due to drawing neologisms from compounds of old words whereas others have shunned native words in favour of Latin or Greek equivalents; German followed a similar process, which has however been taken a step further in West Germanic.
History
West Germanic is artificially descended from the language - now known as Anglo-Saxon - of England's Germanic invaders, which displaced the indigenous Brythonic languages. As a result of this, New West Germanic maintains a link with the North Germanic family due to Old Norse's influence on English. Old English was deemed an appropriate root because, under the rule of Anglo-Saxon kings, it thrived, thought to have coined new words from native roots rather than borrow foreign words. This is a trend that continues in the West Germanic language. The Norman Conquest occurred in 1066, marking the beginning of the Middle English era; thereafter, there is no influence on West Germanic. Words borrowed into the lexicon come from modern Dutch, a widely-spoken, present-day relative of Old English, which has linguistically evolved little since the late 16th century. Mostly, neologisms are formed based on translations from other languages, notably German and Anglish, an anti-Romance constrained-writing project for English.
History on Jorde
West Germanic, on the parallel Earth Jorde on which it is most prominent, was created in 1887 by another S.C. Anderson, very similar in character to that on Earth, but whose family had moved to Denmark seeking a new life. His father, a historian, was particularly engaged in the history of the Germanic peoples and this had a great effect on young Anderson. During his school and college years, he devoted some of his free time to studying the Xenian language, finding it especially interesting as a West Germanic language isolated from others in Xenia (Earth's Crimea). However, considering the Greek influence to be distasteful in such a great language, he constructed his own version using only Germanic roots and derived inflections from Old English that were like to those of German: he believed that other tongues had become over-simplified, yet German preserved a delightful complexity.
The first world congress of West Germanic, then Piscean, speakers was held in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, in 1905. Since then well-attended world congresses had been held every year (West Germanic was Jorde's equivalent of Esperanto).
The West Germanic language first became widespread in 1921 when it replaced German in official functions in Schleswig-Holstein. This was one year after S.C. Anderson headed a successful campaign to persuade civilians there to vote for independence as opposed to joining Germany or Denmark, praising the 'distinctive' history of the region, and sixteen years after the first West Germanic World Congress. A continued political campaign after the declaration of independence highlighted the presence of the Anglic Frisian people, using this to romanticise an image of the Varangian Guard, whose descendants had settled in Xenia since defending the Byzantine Empire.
Anderson at first presented the artificial language as a dialect of Xenian, on which it was modelled minus the Greek influence and with added elements of German morphology. Later, his propaganda established the 'discovery' of philologists of a great language (named West Germanic after the family whence it came) comprising two dialects: Xenian West Germanic and German West Germanic. He had already planned to make Xenia a protectorate and now only needed an excuse to do so. This excuse arrived the the breakout of civil war.
The number of speakers reached its height in 1950, a year after the post-war East Germany was absorbed into West Germania, and the year in which West Germanic became adopted there as the official language. At this point, West Germania numbered four provinces: Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein, East Germany and Xenia.
