Lingua Franca Nova: a closer look

Update: the conclusions of this post are out of date. I subsequently changed my mind and came to appreciate that Lingua Franca Nova is perfectly fine for poetry. Accordingly I decided to actively study Lingua Franca Nova. What changed my mind was comparing LFN to poetry written in Esperanto; in that comparison LFN came off very favourably.

In my humble opinion, Lingua Franca Nova is a very great achievement. I have the utmost respect for the creativity and generosity of George Boeree in creating this remarkable language.

There is a very nice encyclopaedia written in Lingua Franca Nova, Vici de LFN. This gives the language a major advantage over other small language communities in that such a resource exists from which, by reading, one can ultimately become a capable writer more easily.

There is also a Yahoo! group with a respectable 242 members and they are helpful, friendly and welcoming. When I posted a query about obtaining a dictionary, I received a prompt and helpful reply. To be honest, however, overall the Yahoo! group is disappointingly inactive; in the last three months there have been a total of only 9 messages. This seems to be because the community puts most of its effort into the Vici de LFN instead, which is very active indeed (many changes every day) and contains 1,599 articles, including my personal favourite, the article on Dr Who.

The resources available for learning Lingua Franca Nova are quite good: clearly superior to those available for most other constructed languages which have small communities (that is, excluding the big players such as Esperanto). The official guide to the grammar is well written although not quite enough in itself to feel fully empowered to write in the language; one has to go hunting to find wonderful little gems like this guide to prepositions. Overall the impression is of a work in progress but a work of a very high standard indeed.

There are, however, frustrations, the largest of which is that there is no up-to-date, downloadable English-to-LFN dictionary. There is an excellent downloadable LFN-to-English directory, which is sufficient when one is working at a computer (since one can search the text for English words), but if you want an up-to-date, printable English-to-LFN dictionary you are out of luck. I made my own by tediously processing the LFN-to-English dictionary in a text editor and spreadsheet, but the result was far from satisfactory. This is not a reason not to learn the language, however, and I am sure this will soon be rectified.*

* Update: the online English-to-LFN dictionary is truly excellent.

I have no doubt that the Lingua Franca Nova community will continue to grow and I fully expect the language will come to be widely admired.

In summary, Lingua Franca Nova is a wonderful language, outstanding in its elegant simplicity, clarity and practicality. A creole par excellence.

And now, the buts...

So, as enthusiastic as I am about Lingua Franca Nova, something very strange and unexpected happened when I tried using it for literary purposes.

I didn´t like it.*

* Update: the conclusions of this post are out of date. I subsequently changed my mind and came to appreciate that Lingua Franca Nova is perfectly fine for poetry. Accordingly I decided to actively study Lingua Franca Nova. What changed my mind was comparing LFN to poetry written in Esperanto; in that comparison LFN came off very favourably.

Here is my humble, and no doubt deeply flawed, attempt to translate my original poem from Romániço to Lingua Franca Nova. You can find an English translation of the poem, and the original Romániço, in my previous post.

Lingua Franca Nova

          Me ia vole aprende linguas
          Me ia vole leje, scrive, sabe
          Me ia vole viaja, vide, esperia
          Cada cosa
          Cada bon cosa

          Me ia vole sabe arte
          Sabe leteratur, sabe comedia, sabe trajedia
          Sabe natur, siensa, musica
          Cada bon cosa
          Ante me es sene
          Ante me es polvo

                    Robert Winter
                    February 2010
                    Translated from the original Romániço

Well, what can I say? Only that the end result is enormously less satisfying to me than the original poem in Romániço. I can´t even say why.

The best I can put it into words is that LFN feels like a creole; it feels utilitarian, practical, everyday (which, as an international auxiliary language, is a very good thing). Whereas Romániço feels like Latin or Spanish; it feels artistic, expressive, richly beautiful, classical, formal (although Romániço can just as easily sound hip and playful, depending on how you use it).

For me there is no comparison and no competition: Romániço is clearly better for poetry (that is, for the kind of poetry that I personally like to write). Obviously this is nothing more than personal taste on my part; I am sure there is much very beautiful poetry written in Lingua Franca Nova and I do not mean in any way to belittle or disrespect that language. What follows is purely a description of my personal taste, my personal opinion, and I am sure many people would have a completely different (and no doubt wiser) opinion.

To use a musical analogy, Romániço seems to me like a duet between a bassoon and an oboe, with the deeply resounding, rich, woody tone of the bassoon, deeply satisfying and expressive, overlaid with the lighter playfulness of a soaring oboe. Whereas LFN seems like a piccolo, bright and clear and unmistakable in its meaning, cutting through any ambiguity, but lacking tone. Or, to put it more simply, LFN seems... too modern.

I can´t believe this is how it has turned out, since when I first saw the Romániço word volitionen (¨want¨) it seemed annoyingly long and difficult to me. Even now it is a bit of a mouthful to say (but, strangely, I like it that way). When I first saw the equivalent LFN word, vole, it seemed beautifully short and easy to me, the perfect and easy-to-remember word. Now vole seems dull and uninteresting, not sufficiently expressive, too modern, too cut-down.

All of the above the reader may safely ignore as personal taste.

However, there are practical concerns as well:

1. the spelling of words in LFN seems more irregular, unfamiliar, and difficult to remember, at least for the newcomer (leteratur, trajedia), even though I know that for phonetic reasons it makes perfect sense
   
   
2. the endings of words in LFN are much more irregular (when you look at the Romániço poem you can instantly recognise which words are nouns even if you hardly know the language at all; similarly, the fact that all the verbs in the same tense end the same way is a big help)
   
   
3. putting those two factors together, for me both vocabulary and spelling are going to be significantly easier with Romániço
   
   
4. Romániço is somewhat based on Esperanto, which means if you know Esperanto then Romániço is going to be even easier for you (and in my case, as I will be learning both languages simultaneously, the learning process of each will nicely complement the other); of course, this is of no importance if you don´t ever wish to speak Esperanto
   
   
5. Romániço has an excellent, up-to-date English-to-Romániço dictionary; unfortunately LFN currently lacks this (a temporary problem only)

And so, I am surprised to find that my choice is clear. For me personally, Romániço is the clear winner as the second constructed language I will learn along with Esperanto. I will use Esperanto for practical communication and will use Romániço for literary purposes such as poetry, short stories, and perhaps even use it in English-language novels in the dialogue of mysterious foreign characters. Wow, I never expected it to turn out this way.

I hope that my personal conclusion will not deter anyone from learning Lingua Franca Nova. It is an excellent language which deserves to succeed.*

* Update: indeed, I myself later changed my mind and decided to learn it actively

Well, now my problem is I am going to have to start a Romániço forum to get a community going. More about that in my next post.