George Boeree | Re: [LFN] Solo de Stelas III

• Autor: George Boeree (“cgboeree”)
• Tema: Re: [LFN] Solo de Stelas III
• Data: 2005-05-03 12:08
• Mesaje: 1113 (a supra, presedente, seguente)

Paul is quite right.  LFN, like any other auxiliary language, is a
balancing act.  In Chinese, for example, there is no syntactical
(grammatical) way to distinguish singular and plural, active and
passive voice, past and present tense, or comparative and superlative
adjectives.  All these and more need to be expressed with extra words
-- i.e. semantically -- but are, in fact, usually left unexpressed.
The intended meaning is left to the context (like in LFN, baia means
both bay and bark, but it would be a rare sentence that leads you to
make an error!). On the other hand, they have topic head sentences
(equivalent to something like "as for my mother, health not so good")
and required classifiers (like "three head of cattle").

In LFN, we retained quite a few west-European constructions:  the use
of an article, past-present-future, comparative-superlative,
singular-plural, and so on.  We allow some freedom (such as dropping
articles or the plural when the meaning is otherwise clear), but we
also need to remain consistent.  The decisions are based on the
patterns found in the Romance languages (the source languages for our
vocabulary), English (due to its large number of speakers), and
especially the Romance Creoles.  It is simply not possible to satisfy
everyone -- we wish we could!

As for vocabulary that expresses nuances in various languages, we can
only try to do our best.   In English, we have the word "home," which
is basically one's own house but carries strong sentimental meaning.
We can approximate it (perhaps "casa propre"), but mostly it must be
understood from context.   In Dutch, we have "gesellig", meaning
socially pleasant, warm, inviting, cozy.  The lists go on and on....

Excuse the English -- I still express myself best in it!  :-)

George

On May 2, 2005, at 10:12 PM, Paul O. Bartlett wrote:
>
>       One thing we must be aware of is that if a constructed language
> is
>  genuinely intended to be an auxiliary language for people of more than
>  one language group, then we are going to have to get used to the idea
>  that the constructed language will not always do things the same way
>  that our native tongues will do them.  What seems "necessary" to
>  speakers from one language group may seem like "useless baggage" to
>  speakers from another language group.  For example, many languages get
>  along perfectly well without a subjunctive, and to speakers from such
>  languages, having a subjunctive in a constructed language seems as
>  unnecessary as it may seem desirable to speakers of languages which do
>  have a subjunctive.  And so on.
>
>       If an auxiliary language is to be truly international beyond
> just a
>  single language group, then we simply must get used to doing things in
>  unfamiliar ways.  If everybody were already doing things the same way,
>  there would be no need for the auxiliary language!  I am interested in
>  the idea of Lingua Franca Nova, but only if it is intended to be used
>  by people outside the Romance languages as well.  If it is only for
>  people who already speak a Romance language, then I am not interested.
>  And if LFN is larger than just the Romance languages, then Romance
>  speakers may have to get used to the idea of doing some non-Romance
>  things.
>
>  --
>  Paul O. Bartlett
>
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