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• Where did Romániço come from?
• How are new words adopted into Romániço?
• How is Romániço different from Esperanto?

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Where did Romániço come from?

Romániço began as an attempt to teach Esperanto to friends, all of whom were native English speakers. Unfortunately, certain features of the language proved to be unsurmountable hurdles for many of them:

• The accusative case. At best, most people either tended to treat this as an oblique case, adding the accusative -n after both direct objects and nouns following a preposition (Donu la libron al min), or didn’t use it at all. At worst, they got frustrated and lost interest in the language altogether.
  
  
• Agreement of adjectives and nouns. This would seem simple enough, as most of us were familiar with the idea from whatever language we were studying in school, but unlike the accusative case, which was never fully understood, grammatical agreement was most often simply forgotten.
  
  
• The plural in ‘j’. Most of the time this was not a problem, but often enough people forgot they weren’t speaking or writing in Spanish and used s for the plural.
  
  
• Pronunciation. One would think that the no-exceptions pronunciation of Esperanto would have made it easier to work with, but in fact most everyone tended to speak it in a more naturalistic way, saying, for example, império instead of imperío. They also tended to slur the ends of words, which made the present tense hard to distinguish from the future, and adjectives hard to distinguish from nouns. That some of them took great liberties with Esperanto’s freer word order only aggravated the problem.

To deal with these and other difficulties, I began introducing various “house rules” to the language. At first, the accusative case was simply ignored. Then, little by little, other minor adjustments were made to make the language more immediately usable for people who had little time to spend on it, until what began as Esperanto became so different that it needed its own written grammar and dictionary, and was dubbed, at different stages of its development, “Romanico”, “Romániço”, and “Romániczo”, from the Latin romanice “in the manner of the Romans”, which later became, in English, romance.

Years ago, a brief account of the language appeared (and still does, I think) in “Fafa Floly”’s Blueprints for Babel site, and mentions of Romániço have appeared here and there throughout the Net; this site is the first attempt to make a full presentation of the language.

How are new words adopted into Romániço?

Romániço’s lexicon is built using a method of “etymological Romance”, which gives the language a consistently Romance look and sound, as well as an unvarying formula for introducing new words. This approach, used for existing as well as new words, can be summed up as follows:

• Find the common root used by French, Spanish, Italian, and, where possible, English. For example, the words “ear”, “nation”, and “peace” are oreille, nation, and paix in French, oreja, nación, and paz in Spanish, orecchio, nazione, and pace in Italian — all of which come from Latin auriculus, natio, and pax, which appear in English auricular, nation, and peace.
  
  (Most planned languages simply adopt this or that national permutation of a word, eg. Esperanto and Ido orelo from French, Interlingua aure from Latin; Romániço adopts the immediate source form of modern Romance words, the ones in use before national spelling variations were applied to them.)
  
  
• Recast nouns in the ablative case, simple verbs in the present tense stem, affixed verbs in past participial stem, and indicate irregular stress, if any: aurículo, natione, pace, rid-, and deris- (these last two from Latin ridere “to laugh” and deridere, -risum “to deride”).
  
  
• Change hard c to ch before e and i, soft c to ç at the end of a noun or adjective root; keep final -que as -che (not -cue); hard g to gh before e and i, soft g to j at the end of a root; sce-, sci- to ce-, ci-; -nct-, -mpt- to -nt-; double letters to single; the final vowel in nouns to o; verb endings to -er: aurículo, nationo, paço, rider, and deriser.
  
  
• Violate any of these rules to avoid homonyms: Latin sol (“sun”) becomes solelo in Romániço (from French soleil) instead of solo, since sola (Latin solus) already means “alone”.

How is Romániço different from Esperanto?

Those familiar with Esperanto, the famous planned language created by Dr. Zamenhof in 1880, will no doubt notice a good deal of similarity between it and Romániço. Indeed, Romániço, like most planned languages that came after Esperanto, is largely based on that language; it might even be thought of as an Esperanto dialect. The differences between the languages can be summed up as follows:

• Lexicon. Romániço takes its word stock almost exclusively from the etymological common denominator of modern Romance words, and has a definite formula for introducing new words (see “How are new words adopted into Romániço” above). Esperanto’s lexicon, in contrast, is a mélange of Latin, French, Italian, English, German, and others.
  
  

  LATIN	ITALIAN	SPANISH	FRENCH	ESPERANTO	INTERLINGUA	ENGLISH	ROMÁNIÇO
  adiutare	aiutare	ayudar	aider	helpi	adjutar	to help	adjuter
  aquila	aquila	águila	aigle	aglo	aquila	eagle	ácuilo
  bibere	bere	beber	boire	trinki	biber	to drink	biber
  cadere	cadere	caer	tomber	fali	cader	to fall	cader
  cal(i)dus	caldo	cálido	chaud	varma	calde	warm	calda
  caecus	cieco	ciego	aveugle	blinda	cec	blind	ceca
  navis	nave	nave	navire	ŝipo	nave	ship	navo
  talis	tale	tal	tel	tia	tal	such	tala

  
  
• Grammar. Romániço has a more streamlined grammar than Esperanto in that:
  
  
  • It completely does away with inflexions. Inflexions are useful in preserving the original word order of a translated text, but many languages rely on word order to convey meaning, and too fluid a word order often results in confusion between speakers of different languages. Like many pidgin and creole languages, Romániço employs a simple, unvarying word order in lieu of inflexions, and uses a preposition to indicate the direct object should the usual word order ever be strayed from.
    
    
  • It forms its plural nouns by adding -s, the method of French, Spanish, and English.
    
    
  • It does not require adjectives to agree with nouns in number: malvatia cuniculucio, malvatia cuniculucios (“evil bunny, evil bunnies”).
    
    
  • It makes more logical use of the definite article “the” (la), and features a special definite article il for referring to a noun’s entire class: server la humano (“to serve the human”), server il humano (“to serve humankind”).
    
    
  • With the gender-neutral pronoun li, it solves the problem faced in many languages of having to specify a person’s gender when that gender is unknown or irrelevant.
  
  
• Pronunciation and Spelling. Romániço avoids difficult consonant clusters and retains, except where noted above, the internationally familiar Latin spelling system. Eg., Romániço exacta (“exact”), Esperanto ekzakta.