How Romániço Works

Romániço is a rigorously agglutinative language, which is to say that it is entirely made up of roots and regularized affixes. In this way the language is a lot like a set of Lego bricks, for one can combine most any root with any other root or affix to form words in any part of speech.

For example, from the root bel- (“beautiful”):

That all words in Romániço are built this way has the advantage of greatly reducing the number of words one needs to know in order to make oneself understood, for if one knows how to say to think in Romániço (penser), one automatically knows how to say a thought (penso), thinker (pensanto), thinking (pensanta), and so on — even if one has never encountered those words before.

Moreover, there are enough affixes in Romániço to let one coin words on the fly should the need arise; if one doesn’t know the word for ugly (feda), for example, one can always say desbela “the-opposite-of-beautiful”. Indeed, one could even get away with desjurno (“the-opposite-of-day”, i.e., “night”) if one had to.

It should be noted that Romániço is more exact than English in that a root can usually have only one part of speech. For example, “Google” is ordinarily a noun in English, but it can be used as a verb to mean “to search using Google”. In Romániço, the use of an instrument is indicated by -ij-, so “to google” is Google-ijer and “a Google search” is on Google-ijo. Similarly, “crown” can be both noun and verb in English; in Romániço, corono is the noun, coronizer the verb (-iz- meaning “to provide with”). A coronation is coronizo.

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