simon.franova | Re: La letera H / The letter H
- Autor: simon.franova
- Tema: Re: La letera H / The letter H
- Data: 2008-12-13 09:34
- Mesaje: 2983 (a supra, presedente, seguente)
> At the risk of blowing my own horn, I might suggest my > essay "Thoughts on IAL Success" at > http://www.panix.com/~bartlett/thoughts.html . An excellent paper: I've been aware of it for some time. > Sooner or later tinkering has to stop with regard to > structure (vocabulary is another matter, to be dealt with > on its own terms) and the using begin. Yes, a language is doomed to failure otherwise. We've been doing a lot of tinkering with the vocabulary recently - because it wasn't regular enough, dammit! - but almost nothing has changed in the structure. We've been trying to pin down the unwritten parts of the grammar by examining interesting edge cases. > Lingua Franca Nova certainly has a grammar. A language > with no grammar is not a language. Many people confuse > "grammar" with inflectional morphology. I regret saying that LFN has "very few rules of grammar". What I meant was that its grammar can be (or at least ought to be able to be - and that's where the work lies) stated simply and concisely, with unnecessary complications eliminated. LFN's grammar undoubtedly has more rules than, say, Toki Pona, and can't be expressed in Backus-Naur form! > LFN has only a small inflectional morphology (noun plural > and a few verb inflections) It hasn't had verb inflections (-va, -ra) for a long time, unless you count the infinitive (-r) - which is so rarely used it barely exists - and the participles (-nte, -da) - which are derived from verbs, but not verbs themselves. > In LFN's early days, the vocabulary was modest. Then it > seemed to grow like weeds. I don't know what the vocabulary was like in the early days. The weedlike growth may be largely to do with technical words, which I believe are worth having, on the condition that you don't need them for ordinary communication. As I'm sure you're well aware, there are conflicting forces here: if the vocabulary is too minimal, its ambiguity goes off the scale; but if it's too expansive, it's difficult to remember. You want expressiveness, or the language becomes too dry. LFN seems to me - and yes, that's subjective - to have found a happy medium. > If LFN is intended as a simple, easy to learn auxiliary > language, it needs to avoid the luxuriant weediness of > vocabulary that English has. We have actually been trying to weed that area of the garden! The tendency is to prefer phrases to new words, but sometimes no suitable phrase presents itself. > My own suggestion is that in writing proper names, LFN > should allow use of the otherwise-unused letters of the > Latin alphabet and even diacritical marks. It remains to > be resolved how such words should be dealt with in speech. There are rules for this on the wiki at <http://lfn.wikia.com/wiki/Vici_de_LFN:Trascrive>. They currently recommend ditching the diacritics. Simon