LFN

> [mailto:AUXLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of steve rice
> LFN has two problems, IMO; Larry has already alluded to one.
>
> 1. Like English, LFN is so easy it's difficult. Without
> markers for part of speech, for example, it's easy to lose
> track of what's what. On the LFN list there are a lot of
> examples of phrases that seem workable at first, but are
> actually ambiguous.
Yes, and I can somewhat see the point as evidenced by some of the
ambiguous newpaper headlines given as examples though we do tend to
figure those out without much effort.

> 2. The idea of a Romance-based auxlang has pretty much
> passed. A century ago, the cultural importance of French and
> Italian kept the Romance languages workable, but now (apart
> from the largely American situation with Spanish) it isn't so
> much. Designing for the present and the foreseeable future
> means using English and hoping to reach the disgruntled
> masses who know a little English (or perhaps a fair amount
> passively) but can't manage to use it well. This is why I
> advocate something along the lines of Bislama. For that
> matter, if the lexical design of LFN were applied to English,
> and some part-of-speech marking added, the result would be
> pretty close.
Yes, English is the way of the present and foreseeable future.  That
doesn't mean we can't leverage some of the vocabulary common to both
Romance *and* English.  I see no problem with "un, du, tri" instead
of "wan, tu, tri" because the first forms are still known to
anglophones as prefixes.  I can also see leveraging some technical
terminology as well.  If this is truly going to be a language aimed
at the educated as you seem to advocate as a good target group, they
should be familiar with many of these Latinate or Hellenic terms
commonly found in science, medicine, politics or law.


> On the other hand, LFN has pioneered a new type of at-sight
> project: one that does not slavishly follow the grammar of
> its source languages (as Interlingua generally does) but
> simplifies the grammar. It also derives its vocabulary based
> more on speech than on writing, which is the less common approach.
This is also why I like it better than the other contenders we hear
the most about.

I'm still contemplating a lot about which direction to take Ingli.
I'm open to suggestions and idea from others.  I'm leaning kind of
in the direction you have just mentioned by making something similar
to LFN except with an English core instead of the traditional
Latino-Romance.

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