papoanaya | Lingua Franca Revisited by a Spanish Speaker (Reply)

Slow News Day

It is a slow news day. There's not much happening here. I finished with all my reviews in queue, but I am not sure if there is anything else to do. I told my boss, he'll figure out something for sure. Otherwise, I can hang about the house and shoot the breeze. That usually does not last long, I am sure that something will come down one hour before ending the day.

Learning Lingua Franca Nova

Ok, I am taking this one a bit more serious, which is insane being that I am a native Spanish speaker. Why do I want to bother with "broken Spanish"? I think I am doing it for the fun of it and to annoy people :D.

So how similar it is to Spanish ? Well, a lot and a little. See below:

English: The brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
Spanish: La zorra marrón saltó sobre el perro vago
LFN: La volpe brun ia salta supra la can pigra.

The past, the present and the future

The part that I really like about LFN is the way it handles verbs compared to other Latin based languages. It uses three distinct modifiers.

ia: for past
va: for future
ta: for conditional

That applies for all verbs. This is as simple as Esperanto while still minimizing unnatural sounding constructs. How does this map in real life? Let's use "I went to my house" as an example.

LFN: Me ia vade a me casa.
Spanish: Yo ya fuí a mi casa.

I am forcing the use of the word "ya" being that you do not need it, but you can see where the idea came from. The same would apply for future tense: I will go to my house.

LFN: Me va vade a me casa.
Spanish: Yo voy a ir a mi casa.

In this case "voy a" takes the job for the future tense, but this changes the meaning slightly to "I am going to my house", being that in Spanish, perfect future tense is: "Yo iré a mi casa". However the mechanics used by LFN are fairly reasonable, for sure, a lot simpler than Kotava.

A single verb to rule them all

Verbs do not change for gender or number which is the bane of all Latin based languages. This peculiarity happens to come from the mother of all of them, Latin, that contains inflections or changes based on those on verbs or adjectives. For example:

Third person singular feminine