Re: Workshops Review #4

Jan van Steenbergen wrote:

> What was the name of your romlang?
As a working title I was using the highly unimaginative name
"Romanesco" (I know, I know) until I found something better, but as
Yitzik once told me, there's nothing more permanent than a temporary
thing.  (Apologies to Yitzik if I butchered his quote)

> I think you have mentioned it once. Of course, I don't want to > distract you
> from your Bauhinese and Bahasa Vijaya, but I would always > appreciate you
> posting something about it, either here or on > Romanceconlang.
I'd be happy to say a few words about it, and then maybe some time
in the near future I can post something more elaborate.   I began
working on it in 1999 and the only real idea behind it was to have
an expression of creativity involving the terribly fascinating and
user-friendly Romance languages.

It could be called a bit of a hodge-podge or a grab bag - as an
artist I prefer "collage" - but I think of it as a systematic
collage none-the-less, and everything is meant to combine in to a
harmonious whole.

My basic methodology was take whatever features of the Romance
languages that were beautiful, interesting, inspiring or simply cool
that I enjoyed and then work them in to a language in a way that
makes everything work together (I can't stress enough that I'm
trying to make everything harmonious).

When I last left it I was working on a "Grand Master Plan" for
deriving the vocabulary from Vulgar Latin in a regular and
systematic way; even here though I was inspired by the sound changes
from many Romance languages.

Although, of course, I was looking at big languages like Spanish,
Portuguese, Italian I also looked at languages like Catalan,
Occitan, Romanian, Rhaeto-Romance, whatever I could get my hands on.

The result will hopefully someday be something very original and yet
something that looks and sounds like it could really exist. :)

> > I have several Semitic and Caucasian conlang ideas... perhaps I
> > should post my own conlang catalogue.
>
> Yes, please! And after that, I will compile mine! ;)
I will certainly do that in the next day or two!

Cheers,
Eamon