Wenedyk

Wenedyk (in English: Venedic) is a made-up language. Jan van Steenbergen, a linguist and translator from the Netherlands, made it in 2002. The idea behind it is this: what would have happened if the Polish language had developed from Latin instead of Old Slavic? Wenedyk is a possible answer to that question. It is a Romance language, so almost all words are family of words in French, Italian, Romanian, and so on. But they look very different and much more like Polish. The rules for spelling and pronunciation are completely based on Polish. Other parts of the language, like grammar and sentence structure, are a mixture of Polish and Romance.
Together with other made-up languages like Brithenig (which does the same thing with Welsh), Wenedyk is part of the group of so-called "alternative languages", languages that could have existed if history had been different. With Brithenig, it is the best known example of this sort of languages. Wenedyk became known in Poland after it was written about on the Internet and in the monthly paper Wiedza i Zycie ("Knowledge and Life").
Wenedyk is used in Ill Bethisad, a made-up world in which the Roman Empire was stronger than in real history. It is the most important language of the Republic of the Two Crowns, a country similar to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but not broken up by partitions like Poland was.
Spelling and pronunciation
Wenedyk uses the same letters as Polish does:
A A B C C D E E F G H I J K L L M N N O O P R S S T U W Y Z Z Z
Also, there are seven sounds written by two letters:
Ch Cz Dz Dz Dz Rz Sz
Wenedyk is pronounced just like Polish. Stress almost always falls on the second-last syllable. A preposition and a pronoun are treated as one word, so when the pronoun has only one syllable, the preposition is stressed.
Grammar
Wenedyk does not have articles, words like "a" and "the". This is an important difference with the other Romance languages and also with made-up languages like Esperanto and Ido. The reason is that Polish and most other Slavic languages do not have those words, and even in Vulgar Latin they were not so strong yet.
Words in Wenedyk can have many forms. English words have only a few (cat, cat's, cats; work, working, works, worked), but in Wenedyk a lot of forms exist where English would have used other words, like prepositions or modal verbs. In the case of nouns, pronouns and adjectives these forms are called "cases". Wenedyk has three cases:
the direct case: used for both the subject and the direct object of a sentence. In the sentence: Miej poterz leze libier "My father reads a book", Miej poterz "my father" and libier "a book" are both in the direct case.
the genitive: used when English uses 's or of, for example: siedz potrze "my father's chair", rzejna Anglie "the queen of England".
the dative: used when English uses (or can use) to, for example: Da mi il libier "Give me that book", Da mi lu "Give it to me".
Wenedyk also has a vocative (used for calling someone). Often it has the same form as the direct case, but not always: O potrze! "Oh father!"
There are three genders and four declensions (different ways of making forms). They are very much like the declensions in Latin:
the first declension are all words on -a, almost all of them 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.
Here is a chart of the pronouns (words like I, you, we, they, and so on) in Wenedyk:
Verbs have a lot of forms, too. Every pronoun has its own form:
jemu - I love
jemasz - you love
jema - he/she loves
jemamy - we love
jemacie - you love
jema - they love
Most tenses have special forms:
jemar - to love
jemu - I love, I am loving
jemawa - I loved
jemie - I have loved
joru jemar - I will love, I will be loving
jemaru - I will have loved
jemarsi - I would love, I would have loved
jem - love!
jemec - loving
jematy - beloved
Word list
The word list of Wenedyk, made public on the internet, has more than 4000 words. This chart of 30 words shows what Wenedyk looks like when compared to other Romance languages:
Sample
The Lord's Prayer:
Potrze nostry, kwaly jesz en czalor, saciewkaty si twej numie.
Owien twej rzen.
Foca si twa wlatac, komod en czalu szyk i sur cierze.
Da now odzej nostry pan kocidzany.
I dziemiec now nostrze dziewta, komod i nu dziemiecmy swor dziewtorzor.
I nie endycz nosz en cietacen, uta liwra nosz dzie malu.
Nak twie sa rzen i pociestac i glurza, o siaprz. Amen.
References
Dorota Gut: Now@ Mow@ ("New Language"), Wiedza i Zycie, February 2004.
Tilman Berger: Vom Erfinden Slavischer Sprachen .
Ziemowit Szczerek: Swiat, gdzie Polska nie jest Polska , Interia.pl, 26 September 2008.
Other websites
Wenedyk
The Republic of the Two Crowns
Romance glossary (a list of common words in all Romance languages, also Wenedyk and Brithenig)
Constructed languages