About Romániço

Romániço is a planned language combining a simple grammar with a lexicon based on re-Latinized Romance.

It was created in 1991 with the goal of harnessing the familiar* vocabulary of Common Romance (and, where possible, Anglo-Romance), the familiar morphology of the international scientific vocabulary, a conservative but regular orthography, a familiar but regular set of affixes for on-the-fly word derivation, and a consistent methodology of “evolution” from Latin to give the language a cohesiveness and predictability of character.

“Common Romance” here refers to whatever form of a word the modern Romance languages have in common etymologically. Usually that form is Vulgar Latin or reconstructed Proto-Romance, but not always: Romance words for “grandparent”, for example, mostly derive from Vulgar Latin aviolus (from Classical Latin avia, “grandmother”), words for “bird” mostly derive from aucellus (Classical Latin avis), but words for “to toast (someone)” come mostly from brind- (from German ich bring dir’s). The words in Romániço, therefore, are aviolo, aucelo and brinder. (Compare with Esperanto’s avo, birdo, tosti, Ido’s avo, ucelo, tostar, Interlingua’s avo, ave, toastar.)

The ambitions of Romániço are modest: it does not seek to prevent international conflict or supplant existing or future lingua francas. Nor is it meant as an improvement or rebuke of such languages; the merits of this artificial language or that one are, after all, only a matter of preference. Romániço does, however, grant access to the lexicon of Romance in a way that’s at once simple and lexically archetypical.

On this site, aspiring Románicists will find everything they need to start using Romániço today. Click here for some quick samples.

Note that this particular site is something of a backup of the site at www.romaniczo.com; except in layout, they are identical. Other copies of this site — particularly the various GeoCities spinoff sites — are not, and should be ignored.

Questions? Ask Οὖτις!

Romániço elsewhere

• Blueprints for Babel: Romániço. A summary of an earlier incarnation of the language, with critical review.

• Daughters of Esperanto. A survey of the various “Esperantidos” circa 2008 by Alan Libert.

• Romániço. The original version of this site.

• Omniglot: Romániço. A quick overview of the language, including alphabet and pronunciation, numbers, useful phrases and other translated texts.

• Wikipedia: Romániço. A quick summary of the language.

• Neolatioglossi: Romániço. A translation of part of this site into Neolatioglossi.

Other Sites in This Series

• A Practical Guide to Esperanto

• A Practical Guide to Ido