Italian constructs are interesting in the sense that they're quite uniform. The language is classified as romantic. I think simple constructs and a shallow learning curve are more important than terseness of words.
The elaborate emergence of language is a wonderful spontaneous phenomenon of social collaboration... just like the free market
"Conlangs" these experiments are called, and the best place to start learning about them would be http://www.quetzal.com/conlang.html and on Wikipedia. Could make for an interesting hobby in itself.
Now that you mention it, it's worth noting that the alphabet of the modern Irish language for instance doesn't have the letters j, k, q, v, w, x, y, z - although they are used if the word is a "loan" word derived from an English word.