Ill Bethisad

Ill Bethisad is an ongoing, collaborative alternate history project which currently has about 50 participants, originally created by Andrew Smith from New Zealand. It began as the Brithenig Project in 1997.

Points of divergence

Instead of having one central point of divergence, Ill Bethisad has several:
*Latin developed into a Romance language in the British Isles (Wales, western England and Scotland) and Central Europe (Poland and Slovakia) as it did in France and continental Europe. The native word for French is Francien rather than Français.
*A Czech-like Germanic language developed in Bohemia and Silesia under pressure from the Hapsburg nobility, who wanted a unified language for the territory. Czech still exists, but as a minor language like Sorbian or Kashubian. Interestingly, Croatian has been made to strongly resemble Czech and Slovak, which otherwise doesn't exist in that world.
*The Bolsheviks in Russia were beaten by the White Army producing a nationalistic government.
*The Kingdom of Castille and the Catalan-Aragonese Confederacy never joined in Spain.
*Napoleon did not attack Russia, nor was he defeated at Waterloo.
* The Partitions of Veneda (historical alternative to Poland) were stopped by Napoleon, and the Venedo-Lithuanian Commonwealth exists as the Republic of the Two Crowns. Its present territories is roughly the same as that of interwar Poland, Lithuania, and East Prussia. One difference is that while the Veneds are Catholics like the Poles, the Lithuanians never converted to Catholicism.
* The American Revolution didn't happen and the USA doesn't exist as we know it.
* Brazil is the "Luso-American Union" and is made up of five independent countries (including Uruguay).
* Unlike in most constructed universes, overall there are more independent countries than there are in the real world.

Also, technologies that have either fallen out of favor or failed to develop in our world are explored and utilized. Example: zeppelins are still in use, both for war and peace uses. Computers are not highly developed and there is no 'Silicon Valley' of North America, but information technology centres are instead found in Ireland.

Efforts have been made within the group to find a common divergence point in recent years. This ecumenism has only yielded consensus that many of the changes in Ill Bethisad stem from a stronger Roman Empire.

Language influences

Constructed languages play an important role in Ill Bethisad. To date there are over twenty languages at varying levels of construction that play part. Among the languages spoken in Ill Bethisad are Brithenig (Romance Welsh), Wenedyk (Romance Polish), Pémišna (Germanic Czech), Dalmatian (Romance, similar to Romanian), Xliponian (another Romance language with a superficial resemblance to Albanian, spoken in our world's Epirus) and several Finnish-like "North Slavic" languages, including Nassian (spoken in our world's Karelia). The name Ill Bethisad itself is Brithenig for the universe, a calque from Welsh bydysawd or Latin baptizatum.

Other languages that are otherwise synonymous to those in the real world have been adjusted to effects that these constructed languages have made, with vocabulary and grammar changes integrated to create forms of the language specific to the project. One notable change is the "North American Sprachbund phenomenon," comparable to the Northwestern European Sprachbund where the alveolar trilled-r (as in Spanish and Portuguese) is supplanted by the uvular trilled-r (as in French, German). In Ill Bethisad this Sprachbund affects every language spoken north and east of the Missouri River.

Ill Bethisad, on the whole, seems to favor the minorities with minority languages such as Catalan, Occitan, Crimean Gothic as well as others maintaining a "hold" on their population when they have (almost) moved to near extinction in real life.

Group rules

Due to the large number of participants, Ill Bethisad functions under two overarching principles:

* Quod Scripsi, Scripsi: What is written is written. Because of the collective nature of the group, proposed revisions to prior "canon" material are subject to review by all members. It is a means of reining in and channeling everyone's creativity; it protects things that have already been worked out; it helps create continuity between all the threads that make up the tapestry and helps ensure that the tapestry is roughly the same shape at both ends.

* Quod Assumpsi, Assumpsi: What is assumed is assumed, meaning that unless a proposal is given about a particular region of the Ill Bethisad universe, it is the same as exists in our timeline. This serves both to protect the work of the participants, but also to leave open unexplored areas, that other participants might be involved.

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