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On 2012-02-22 21:28, thomasruhm wrote:
Do the constructed romlangs have less latin loans than the natural ones?
Rhodrese definitely has, simply because it's more fun to derive/develop the 'inherited' forms! When I get time to go through my vocabulary I should take note of where French and/or Spanish has a Latinism and at least strongly consider demoting the 'inherited' form to be Old Rhodrese or dialectal. Sometimes I've simply botched up, as when I have _pliada_, but VL *PLATTUS (a) has TT and (b) is actually a rather late Greek loan (_plat�s_), so the *'inherited'* form should definitely be _plate_ /'platI/ -- not as 'interesting' but more correct!
If I make words I usually start from latin or a natural romance language and develop it to vulgar latin on to my system, which is always changing a bit.
I think it's the same for all of us. It definitely is for me. After all that derivational process is where the fun is in a Romlang, so it's natural to tend to go overboard with it. As I said above it's probably a good idea to check where the modern Romnatlangs have a Latinism and let that guide, perhaps listing the 'purisms' as historical/dialectal. For the reasons stated below Italian isn't of much use here, but French definitely is, and to a lesser extent the Iberian langs. Rumanian is more doubtful again simply because it has lots of recent loans from French and Italian which can be hard to tell apart from inherited forms for similar reasons to the Italian case. Then there is the bogey of *semilearned* forms, where at least I certainly could do better.
Which natural romance language has the strongest tendency to make puristic forms?
Probably Italian, in the strictest sense of *making* puristic forms: it's sooo close to Latin as to make adaptation trivial and almost 'invisible'. Italian is actually shock full of Latinisms and has a lot of Gallicisms, but they have all been more or less thinly disguised by adapting their spelling and morphology to the model of 'native' Italian words: an e > i here, a ct > tt there, and -e > -a as appropriate! There's AFAIK something of a puristic tendency in Catalan, but it's directed against Castilian rather than Latin. AFMOC Rhodrese more or less unintentionally has a degree of anti-French purism: I'll disprefer a form which is identical to its French 'cognate' as being less interesting. I definitely should tone down on that too! /Bendetx* *A semilearned form as good as any! ;-)