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 first set of tables indicate 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.