Speaking as someone with a linguistics background, I would say "cobbled together" is more accurate. Cheshire's "proto-Romance" was built by choosing words more

Speaking as someone with a linguistics background, I would say "cobbled together" is more accurate. Cheshire's "proto-Romance" was built by choosing words more or less at random from various Romance dictionaries (and a few non-Romance ones) without coming up with a rigorous explanation of the grammar or the sound changes which produced this result. Usually, if you're proposing a proto-language, you need to give a consistent and reasonable set of rules that have both explanatory and predictive capability in terms of one language becoming another. I can posit a rule, for example, that a Latin b in between vowels becomes a v in Italian: the Latin taberna becomes the Italian taverna, the Latin diabolus becomes the Italian diavolo, the Latin habere becomes the Italian avere. This rule means that given a Latin word, I can predict what an Italian word descended from it would look like, and similarly, if I have an Italian word, I can speculate what the Latin word it descended from would look like if it were indeed of Latin origin. The Cheshire paper makes no effort to explain the rules that get you from Latin to his "Proto-Romance", and in turn to modern Romance languages. It's all ad-hoc, based on grabbing whatever happened to resemble his decoding, which is why words are borrowed from wherever he could find a match. (Also: to be totally pedantic, the b-becomes-v rule mentioned above is not the complete story, and there are exceptions, e.g. Latin habitus becomes Italian abito. It's a good first approximation, though.)