North African Romance conlang (

Azul toct i tzarâ!

I saw a couple of posts referring to a "North African Romance conlang" and I
was wondering if you may have been referring to Talossan, as I know of no
other Romance conlangs with a North African connection.

For anyone who is not familiar with it, I would like to offer some info about
it and links to web sites where interested parties can learn more. I'm pretty
deeply involved with the language -- I'm one of the world's two relatively
fluent speakers (the other is Ben Madison, who created it).

Talossan is the national language of the Kingdom of Talossa
(www.execpc.com/~talossa), a "nationette" (or "micronation", though many
Talossans don't care for that word) in Milwaukee, WI. The language is about
20 years old -- it was created in December, 1980 and Ben Madison has been
working on it ever since. There is a brief history of the language at
www.execpc.com/~talossa/glhetg.html. It started off as a sort of
English-Spanish hybrid, acquired influences from a wide variety of other
languages over the years (as the website just mentioned describes in detail)
but now, due to the nation's Berber connections (for details on this subject,
read "The Berber Project" at www.execpc.com/~talossa/berber.html -- suffice
it to say that, according to national myth, Berbers who had adopted the Latin
language via Roman African colonies such as Carthage sailed across the
Atlantic and settled in what is now Wisconsin) the single greatest source for
new vocabulary is North African Latin, which Ben has researched in great
depth. So while there is little or no North African influence on Talossan
grammar or the vocabulary of the first 18 years or so, there has been a great
deal of lexical influence during the last  couple of years, and the
language's self-identity is very much connected with the Latin of North
Africa. Ben wrote a very interesting paper called "El Glheþ Talossán: Qët Ça
Isch És Qët Eu Volt Që Ça Estadra" ("The Talossan Language: What It Is And
What I Want It To Be") which contains a lot of great information about the
North-Africanization of Talossan; unfortunately it's not on the web. However,
I may be able to get photocopies of it if anybody's interested.

Finally, I have a web site for Talossan which is in the process of being
updated so the grammatical information isn't up yet but it's coming! There
will be lessons too, as soon as I get the reference files done. If anyone
would like to see what's there so far, it's at:
talossan.tripod.com/glhetg.html (note: no "www"!). Please note that the
language homepage I mentioned above (on the ExecPC server) links to my old
Geocities site which no longer exists; all my Talossan pages are being
updated and moved to Tripod. Oh yeah, I should mention that I'm the presedînt
(president) of La Comità për l'Útzil del Glheþ (CÚG for short), which is the
national organization devoted to the development and promotion of the
Talossan language, and I will be happy to answer any further questions anyone
may have; just ask here or e-mail me. One of my personal missions is to get
as many people speaking Talossan as possible :-)

Aréivi nun,

Thomas Leigh (aka Tomás Gariçéir in Talossa)