Salveto Q & A

Word Derivation
Miscellaneous

Word Derivation

From what languages were Salveto's word roots created?

Salveto's vocabulary was derived from Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and English. I sometimes refer to the trio of French, Spanish, Italian as FSI.

Why weren't more Romance languages used in determining word roots?

Mainly for reasons of practicality. Having to look up a word in four different dictionaries is time-consuming enough. To expand that to include Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian, and other languages would have bogged down the project. Also, Catalan and Portuguese share many of the same roots as Spanish, so I felt that using them would give undue weight to that language branch.

Exactly how were word roots chosen?

Here is the basic algorithm that was used. It is a cascading set of tests designed to be applied one at a time until a test can successfully be applied.

wherever possible, ignore any words that contain a prefix (per-, con-, com-, ex-, ob-, re-, and so on)
if all three FSI languages have a similar root, use FSI root
if Latin has a commonly-known root (e.g., audio, video), use that root
if one or more FSI language has a root similar to Latin, use that root
if two FSI languages have a similar root, use FSI root
if one or more languages have same root as English, use that root
if all else fails, use Latin root

The determination of whether roots are similar is one of those things that's easier done by a human than a computer. For instance, accipio, accepter, accettare, aceptar are all similar, though obviously none are an exact match.

Which brings up the next question: with similar but non-identical roots, which one is chosen? To be honest, that is something of a black art. If the Latin root is also similar, that one is often used. Otherwise, the Spanish version is usually preferred, though I often convert many Spanish o's to u's. Sometimes a new spelling is in order, that combines common elements of the shared roots. This is where the "black art" comes into play quite a bit.

Here's an example of how the word for let (allow, permit) was selected:

The roots are:

L: concedo, permitto
F: laisser
S: permitir, dejar
I: lasciare

After deleting words with prefixes (rule 1), we're left with:

L: (none)
F: laisser
S: dejar (de- is not a prefix in this case)
I: lasciare

Rules 2, 3, 4 do not apply. Rule 5 does apply, however, so I use laisser/lasciare. In Salveto, I've tried to remove most of the "Frenchness" and "Italianness" of word roots, so French "ai" usually becomes "a" or "e", and Italian "scia" usually becomes "sa" or "sca". I felt the simplest version of the root would be "lesar" or "lasar". Usually I favor spelling that matches original spelling over original pronounciation, so I chose "lasar". Happily, this also coincides with "lassen" (German).

Here's another example: yellow:

The roots are:

L: flavus, luteus, croceus
F: jaune
S: amarillo
I: giallo

Rules 1-5 do not apply. We're torn between rules 6 and 7. The Italian "giallo" is close to "yellow". However, Salveto cannot have a word root that ends with "o", and it's not possible to remove the "o" and still retain the full sense of the root. So I chose to use rule 7 instead. Since there are three different words I could use, I chose the first: "flav".

And yet another example: red:

The roots are:

L: ruber
F: rouge
S: rojo
I: rosso

Here we have all four roots in relative agreement. Certainly the word we choose will begin with "ru" or "ro". Whether we follow that with "b", "g", or "s" is up for debate. I decided on "rub" since that is the Latin root. Salveto uses the same root for ruby. I could have used Italian's "ros" for red, but I thought that would be better suited for pink/rose.

Why such a complicated method of choosing word roots?

Because one of my goals was to make Salveto as easy as possible to learn for people who already speak a Romance language (either natively or as a second language). Yet, wherever practical, I wanted to make sure it retained strong Latin roots. I felt this series of rules was the best way to accomplish that. I could have decided to use all Latin roots, but that would actually be more difficult to learn for everyone but Latin scholars.

Miscellaneous

Why did Salveto get rid of the letters J, K, Q, W, X, Y, Z?

Short answer: for ease of pronounciation. I wanted Salveto to offer a minimal mental load in terms of how many different letters and sounds to learn if one is coming from a non-Latin alphabet. I also wanted to make sure that all sounds in Salveto could be mapped to a single spelling ("one sound, one spelling").

Long answer:

Latin did not originally have this letter, and it is pronounced a different way in almost every language that does have it. It was added in the middle ages to represent non-syllabic "I". In Salveto, however, "I" can be either syllabic or non-syllabic, depending on whether is followed by a vowel. There is no real need for a separate letter.
A prior version of Salveto did include "J" with a "ZH" sound, but after much thought I removed it since the sound is relatively uncommon, and easy enough to find a substitute for.
This letter is not commonly found in Latin literature, and was most likely a late addition to the language, probably from Greek. Most scholars agree that the letter "C" in Latin was always pronounced like a "K", never like an "S", and since Salveto maintains that each pronounciation must map to a unique letter, there is no need for "K", since "C" is much more common.
An argument could be made that one could use "C" as a "CH" or "SH" sound, and that would work for some words (e.g., centimeter vs. kilometer) but in the end it would require a respelling of too many established words, changing C's to K's.
A redundant letter that would violate the "one sound, one spelling" rule. Using "C" instead of "Q" works just fine.
This is essentially just a non-syllabic "U" sound, which is ably represented by the letter "U" itself.
This is a relatively rarely used letter, and different languages disagree over its pronounciation. I could not have kept the English "KS" pronounciation, since that would violate the rule of having a unique spelling for every combination of sounds. I could have gone with a "ZH" sound, which is used by some languages, but frankly I didn't see a pressing need for it due to its unpopular nature to begin with, and the fact that there would be too much temptation to bastardize words by using "X" to approximate their original pronounciation (e.g., original => orixinal, magic => maxic, measure => mexur).
Like "J", this is also essentially just a non-syllabic "I" sound.
Considering the relative rarity of this letter, I felt there was no real need for a soft "S" sound. Eliminating that sound, along with "SH", allows for a wide variety of "S" pronounciations without confusion.

Why did Salveto keep the letter V when it's clear that Latin V is actually just U?

It's true that Latin did not actually have a letter "U": its letter "V" eventually split into modern-day "U" and "V", the former being the vowel form and the latter being the consonant form. However, the letter "V" is so well established today that it is very difficult to remove it. So while I agree that "V" has a dubious history, it is nevertheless here to stay.