§1 Internal History

     The Kepper people are defined by their language. The word Cepper means "he who uses the letters." The Kepper people today are a group of genetically and linguistically similar people who dwell in the lands commonly known as the the Faeroe Islands, Scotland, Iceland, Newfoundland, and Greenland. Their capital is Finþaicg (Finthoke) in the south of Iceland, known as Þulla. Þulla is recognized as the birthplace of Kepper people. Germanic people from Sweden (Swerrland, or Wambsjoledda) settled the east of the island in c. 230 A.R.D. and found the west and south to be populated by Celts, come over from Ireland, about a century before. Aside from a few minor skirmishes, the two groups of people remained fairly well isolated from one another until the Goths threatened to take over in 412 A.R.D. Only by banding together were the Thullites able to save the island from Gothic rule. The forced companionship between the Celts and the Germanic people let to quite a bit of language-mixing and intermarriage. The Kepper people were born from the mixture of Celtic and Germanic peoples and today are neither completely Celtic nor Germanic.

     The Cepperjoleddicg language is by and large Germanic, but it does have some noteable Celtic features that set it apart. The vocabularly does contain quite a few Celtic loanwords, including the word joledda, "country," from a Celtic word meaning "honor." The language also uses different interrogative pronouns depending upon the sentence's tense, a Celtic grammatical feature. Finally, the language's orthography - the letters used to represent sounds - reflect a Celtic touch. Celtic c is used for Germanic k, for example.

     Today, the Kepper people are united under one power in the Þyþþlįcha Þrongland þasþas Aingacummanan Cepperjœledderer, the Socialist Repbulic of the United Kepperlands. They still do recognize a king, Røðjearr III and his wife Walgyrio, but the king and queen hold no true power -- they serve as symbols and occupy themselves by travelling across the country and doing philanthropic work to boost the morale.

§2 External History

     I began work Cepperjoleddicg in December of 1998. At that point, the language was called Arkan (thus the URL of this webpage) and it was written using a modified Roman alphabet, written right-to-left, designed by Paul Carter and myself. The vocabulary was mostly a priori, but I tried to give the language a Germanic feel. I got the idea for some of modern diph- and triphthongs as well as some of the other bits of orthography from a dream I had in which I was writing "Arkan" words. To this day, one of these words, juwðissian, is still a part of the Cepperjoleddicg lexicon.

     I quit work on Arkan for a three month period spanning August, September, October of 1999. I was reading more and more on Old English and when I began work again on the language around Samhain of 1999, most of the new vocabulary I accepted was Germanic. In a year's time, the language was nearly completely Germanic, though my interest in Gaelic was reflected in some "loanwords" and some old, now-defunct grammatical patterns. The language was at this point called Cepperjòleddicg -- "language from the land of the writers." I also decided in early April of 2000 that there would be more than one form of the language. These original two "dialects" (Grøn, Grœna and Bøffdeuja, Rauþøþlį) spawned the modern Grœna, Blaewa, and Rauþøþlį distinctions (the color names came from the color of the folders in which I kept my notes on each individual language).

     In June of 2001, I decided to weed out the Celtic elements from the language and turn my project into a fully-Germanic conlang called Kepperlændsk. I accepted many new words from Norse stock, and turned to Icelandic to get a feel of my new grammar. In August of that year, though, I had discovered Medieval Swedish and I reworked the orthography in Medieval Swedish's likeness. u and v merged, w became uu, and I allowed the lettes z and x into the language for the first time since I called it Arkan. Medieval Swedish laid the basis for the modern Cepperjoleddicg alphabet.

     The discovery of a cache of Old Cepperjoleddicg poems I had written over the course of 2000 inspired me to return to what I felt was the language's true heritage -- Western Germanic coupled with the occassional snippet of Gaelic. After I came across my first Gothic dictionary, though, the language began to take on a definitely Eastern Germanic look.

     Today, the language contains mainly Eastern Germanic and Scandinavian grammatical elements (I like to think of it as something akin to what was spoken in Sweden about 500 AD), some Celtic words and grammatical concepts, and an orthography based loosely on Medieval Swedish but with a definitely Fordsmendrian touch. Virtually the only thing that has remained constant throughout the language's history is a handful of words like juwðissian and, until I recently cleansed the language of my own words in favor of an a posteriori vocabulary, giþþess and fnall, and a sense that this was my language I was working on -- the language I was meant to create.

     The language has gone through many changes since its creation, and along with it the name has changed greatly. Below is a list of language's different name, the dates it existed in that form, and the openly line of the Lord's Prayer. The text in the first three forms of the language is reconstructed -- I didn't begin to keep a corpus until the end of 1999.