Borchennymendi

General information
Borchennymendi is the native language spoken by aapproximately 3,200,000 inhabitants of the Kingdom of Borchennymi, situated in the Atlantic Ocean, to the south of the Azores and to the west of the Canary Islands. It is a language isolate, featuring complex verbal constructions. Its orthography retained an archaic character, while its modern pronunciation is the result of a clearly phased development under the influence of the Portuguese tongue in the 15th and 16th centuries and the English language in the late 17th and early 18th, although Borchennymi was never colonized. A British attempt to do so in 1768 failed after 44 years, when the foreign oppressors were expelled after a short and rather peaceful insurrection in 1812. The Borchennymendi vocabulary shows some Latin influences as an effect of missionary activities from Gaul as early as the 5th century and from the British Isles in the 9th. A few words are derived from the Portuguese.

Alphabet
a b c d e g i (h only in digraphs) l m n o p r s t Digraphs:æ œ  bh ch dh gh lh mh nh ph rh sh th Capitals are not in use. There is only one punctuation mark ( . )or.

Phonotactics
The Portuguese and English influences caused several and considerable changes in the pronunciation of medieval Borchennymendi. Before the 15th century it already lost all palatal, velar and uvular plosives and fricatives (except the uvular fricative often represented by rh in written texts). The velar plosives k and g were gradually replaced with lateral fricatives. The Portuguese merchants, who settled predominantly in the southern coastal regions, introduced the further nazalisation of vowels followed by the digraphs mh and nh. Influences from the English pronunciation may be seen in the elision of end-consonants like gh and dh and in the treatment of the dental fricatives th and dh, wich used to be aspired plosives.

Important characteristics of modern Borchennymendi are the modification of consonants by following vowels and the modification of vowels by subsequent consonants. The correct pronunciation, however, is fairly irregular and can be represented by the following tables, which are only indicative. Exceptions are as numerous as the rules.

The tables indicates the pronunciation of every possible VC combination within one syllable. The column on the rightmost side represents the modification of the original sound of c (k), when it precedes one of the combinations in the rows left of it. In the right column of each pair the regular pronunciation is indicated according to IPA.

Table 1
Vowels not modified by subsequent consonants.

Table 2 Modification of vowels by subsequent consonants and digraphs within syllables.

Table 3
Vowels modifying precedent consonants.

Table 4
Modification of consonants.

Counting from one to twenty.
1 reainsoidhn (reainsoidhn is the dual of reain, which means: a half. The suffix for the regular dual is - soidhn.) 2 steidhm

3 chuidhnaelh

4 staedhm

(This is the irregular dual of steidhm. There are about twenty irregular dual forms. Some of them are ordinals, others refer to objects that appear in pairs, e.g. eyes, ears, hands, legs, shoes etc. These dual forms are more or less similar to English plurals like mouse-mice, woman-women etc., but their use is restricted to the dual.) 5 tledhl

6 chudhnalh

(The dual of chuidhnaelh, three.) 7 ertg

8 staedhmsoidhn

(This is the regularly formed dual of staedhm, which is the irregular dual of steidhm. Nouns with an irregular dual can take the suffix -soidhn for a second dual formation: sechoedhr: a (woman's) shoe, seachadhr: a pair of shoes, seachadhrsoidhn, two pairs of shoes). 9 tlaedhlreainsoidhnchuidh (= ten minus one. -chuidh is the suffix for the diminutive case.)

10 tlaedhl

(Another dual.) 11 tlaedhlreainsoidhnagh (= ten plus one. -agh at the end is the copula 'and', similar to the Latin -que.)

12 adhouidhsuin

 ("Twelve" is a peculiarity. adhouidhsuin is obviously borrowed from 'a dozen', because the hypothetic tlaedhlsteidhmagh is experienced as hard to pronounce and chudhnalhso in, very much alike in orthography and pronunciation, is a serious term of abuse. A legion of soccer supporters incidentally may be heard chanting 'Twelve, twelve' after an inappropriate decision made by the referee.)

13 tlaedhlchuidhnaelhagh

14 aertg

(The dual of ertg. You may notice that there are only five basic ordinals below 10, sc. 1/2 and the prime numbers 2, 3, 5 and 7. The words for 20, 100 and 1000 come from the Latin: leintg - viginti, gadhnt - centum, meighl - mille.) 15 tlaedhltledhlagh

16 tlaedhlchudhnalhagh

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal">17 tlaedhlertgagh

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal">18 tlaedhlstaedhmsoidhnagh

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal">19 leintgreainsoidhnchuidh  (Analogue to the formation of "nine".)

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal">20 leintg

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal">("Forty" is lantg, the dual of leintg; "Eighty" becomes lantgsoidhn: two pairs of 'twenties'.)