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I have decided to give my latest conlang romance vocabulary, but I want the phonotactics of this language to be as simple as possible and yet still be recognizably Romance. (I don't generally spend a lot of time on phonology when I conlang.)

With this in mind, I'd like to know which Romance language has the simplest phonotactics. I hope that the language or languages that meet this criterion are well-attested so that I can use an online dictionary to look up the roots.

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    How do you measure simplicity? Do you mean "most restricted" or "fewest prohibitions"?
    – user6726
    Aug 27, 2015 at 15:40
  • Thanks for making excellent points that I hadn't thought of. I guess I was looking for the simplest syllable structures and the fewest consonant clusters. Aug 28, 2015 at 19:47

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For every Romance language, the fun is spoiled by later borrowings (from Latin, Greek, English and other languages). Spontaneously, I'd vote for Italian because it simplified many medial consonant clusters by assimilation (like prodotto "product"). But it has acquired new initial consonant clusters (like /zbr-/ in sbrutto) from simplifying the prefix dis-.

In a conlang, you can go for an even simpler phonology, I think.

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