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Greetings Romanceconlang! Some of you may know me from Celticonlang, but I realise I haven't contributed too much to Romanceconlang, even though I've been subscribed for sometime. I'll give a short introduction and then discuss a couple projects I'm working on. My name is Eamon Graham and I live in the lovely town of Angers, France. Although my formal education is in philosophy and psychology (and, oddly, accounting) I've been studying linguistics on my own since an early age, concentrating mostly on historical and compartive linguistics and creolistics. Also, since the age of 9, I've been in to conlanging. When I first arrived on the Internet I was excited to see so many talented people - and terribly smart too - who did the same thing. Until then, my only resource on the field of conlanging was an article in an encyclopedia by linguist Mario Pei (which was actually more about Auxlangs). (My first conlang was actually an odd combination of the Gaelic I heard growing up, the Welsh my sister was studying and the Russian I had started learning from a library book) Being in the middle of a lazy French summer (and rather rainy French summer forcing me indoors quite a bit), I've been working on three conlang projects simultaneously and two of them may be of interest to our Romanceconlang family. The first originally started with the idea of a group of urban nomads, much like the Yeniche. My nomadic group lives in France and their French was shaped very much by non-standard varieties of French - "popular French," local dialects, French creoles, etc. - and the Occitan language. My name for this language was going to be - and may still be - "Caminaire" from a Provencal word meaning "traveller." The grammar might place it in the realm of the creoloid language - there's no grammatical gender, verb conjugations are reduced, etc - but not fully creolised, and there was no pidginisation phase. Pronunciation and vocabulary is based on local dialects and creoles. I also became inspired by overseas varieties of French such as Cajun and Quebecois - and two recent trips to Belgium further added non-standard inspiration. This forced me to bend my conhistory quite a bit to explain the presence of people from Louisiana and Quebec in my nomadic group, but World War I and the inter-war era helped me out here. My second language was inspired by several theses I've studied on Portuguese semi-creoles and Spanish creoles, leading me to the creation of a fictional Spanish semi-creole. The basis for this language is Latin American varieties of Spanish (I have fond connections and friends in Mexico and Argentina as well as an adventurer grandfather who spent some time in revolutionary Cuba) as well as the few Spanish Creoles (Palenquero, Chabacano and the partially Spanish Papiamento). Most of the remaining inspiration comes from working by analogy from Portuguese semi-creoles in Brazil and elsewhere. I have no conhistory for it as of yet, and this is a nameless language so far, but I hope to come up with something nice. Tangent: I'm really bad at coming up with language names; devising a euphonic name for a conlang is an art in itself, n'est pas? Sadly, I don't have anything really to present about either of these languages right now, but I hope to get a website up real soon. At any rate, I wanted to take some time to introduce my two projects and to say "hola" to the group! Cheers, Eamon