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--- Padraic Brown skrzypszy:
> >Is there any definitive (or at least exhaustive) list of the
> >romconlangs (or at least the major/well known/most developed) floating
> >around out there?
>
> Big questions indeed! I doubt there is a definitive list,
> though I've seen copious (if not exhaustive) lists.
> Langmaker, now apparently defunct, used to be a good source.
> I'm not sure where to find such a list anymore.
Langmaker used to be a great source and I still hope for its comeback. But the Langmaker pages haven't been accessible since almost a year now. :( Anyway, the Wayback Machine helps:
http://web.archive.org/web/20071015020540/http://www.langmaker.com/db/Category:Romance_conlangs
A nice set of romlangs participated in Conlang Translation Relay 10/R:
http://steen.free.fr/relay10/list.html (rings Q, R, S)
I have a few lists of romlangs on my own PC. When I have time, I'll try to dig it up and post it here.
> As for the other question, how do we quantify "major", "well known"
> (shades of Wikipedia bickering that one!) and "most
> developed"?
That's always a hard question. Personally, I'd distinguish between "major" in the sense of wikipedia notability (press coverage and the like) and "major" in the sense of: great, well-developed languages that really add something valuable to the panorama of conlangs. In my personal view, the fact that a language has been discussed in the media or published in a book doesn't make it a better or more interesting language at all. In fact, I'd even go as far as to say that the best-known languages are rarely as "good" as some of the lesser-known.
> For both "major" and "well known" I would propose about three
> Romance conlangs: Brithenig, Wenedyk and Lingua Franca Nova.
You're doing yourself too short, Padraic. I certainly would like to add Kerno to the list. It's one of my personal favourites and it has something I can't really describe that both Brithenig and Wenedyk lack. It has a really well-written, complete grammar, an interesting con-history and lots of great texts written in it.
Other Romance conlangs that certainly deserve mentioning are: Talossan, Tundrian, Carrajena, Aingelja~ (sorry, I don't have a-tilde on this keyboard), Fortunatian, Patrienish, Þrjótrunn, Jovian...
From the auxlangs (or somewhere between aux- and artlangs) I'd mention: Latino Moderne, Romanova, Romanica.
I don't mention Interlingua and the like, because even though the draw mainly on Romance vocabulary, they are partly based on other languages as well, like English and German.
> As for "well developed"...I don't know. I am
> undecided as to what even counts as well developed!
It does matter, IMO. Now that we have nearly 5000 conlangs around, it's necessary to enable use to subdivide them in several ways. Apart from the obvious categorisation by purpose and the a priori/a posteriori distinction, I think the level of completeness also makes a difference. For all of the languages mentioned above goes that they have a (fairly) complete grammar and a vocabulary big enough to write in them pretty freely. But there are hundreds of Romance conlangs that have been mentioned somewhere or even in part been presented and from that moment never been heard from; conlang sketches that were never developed into real languages and probably neglected by their authors.
Jan