Lingua Franca Nova (pronounced [ˈliŋɡwa ˈfraŋka ˈnova]), abbreviated as LFN and known colloquially as Elefen, is a constructed international auxiliary language that was created by C. George Boeree of Shippensburg University, Pennsylvania, and further developed by many of its users. Its vocabulary is based primarily on the Romance languages, namely French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Lingua Franca Nova has phonemic spelling based on 22 letters from the Latin script (a Cyrillic script was co-official until 2021). The grammar of Lingua Franca Nova is inspired by the Romance creole languages. As most creole languages, Lingua Franca Nova has an extremely simplified grammatical system that is easy to learn.
History Boeree started to design Lingua Franca Nova in 1965, with the goal of creating an international auxiliary language simple, coherent and easy to learn for international communication. He was inspired by the Mediterranean Lingua Franca or "Sabir", a Romance pidgin used by European sailors and merchants as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean Basin from the 11–18th century, and by various creoles such as Papiamento and Haitian Creole. He used French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan as lexifiers. Lingua Franca Nova was first presented on the internet in 1998. A Yahoo! Group was formed in 2002 by Bjorn Madsen, and reached about 300 members who contributed significantly to the further evolution of the language. In 2005 Stefan Fisahn created a wiki for the language. The wiki moved to Wikia in 2009, then was hosted directly on the official website in 2019. In 2007, Igor Vasiljevic created a Facebook group, which now has over 740 members. LFN was given an ISO 639-3 designation ("lfn") by SIL in January 2008. In 2008 Simon Davies started to make important updates to the LFN–English searchable "master" dictionary. The dictionary is being kept up-to-date in the official website, with over 20,000 entries, and was even published in printed form in 2018. In 2012 a novel entirely translated into Lingua Franca Nova was first published in printed form: La aventuras de Alisia en la pais de mervelias, which is Simon Davies's translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In 2014 a new official website was launched on the "elefen.org" domain: it offers various teaching supports (such as word lists for travellers, complete grammar guides) available in several languages, and hosts a wiki and the searchable official dictionary. Some literary works entirely translated in Lingua Franca Nova are also publicly available on the official website for reading. The website now contains an example conversational dialog: La conversa prima for beginning learners. On April 18, 2018, Wikipedia in Lingua Franca Nova, called "Vicipedia", was officially launched as a regular Wikipedia project. On May 15, 2020 on the Web and on May 10, 2021 in printed form the first original literary novel written in Lingua Franca Nova was published: La xerca per Pahoa, by Vicente Costalago. On January 5, 2021, the language's creator, C. George Boeree, died of pancreatic cancer aged 68.
Pronunciation and spelling
Phonology
Vowels Lingua Franca Nova has five vowels like Spanish, Modern Greek, and Modern Hebrew.
Consonants
Orthography LFN is normally written using the Latin alphabet. Its orthography is highly phonemic.
LFN vowels (a, e, i, o and u) are pronounced as they are in Spanish or Italian (approximately as in bar, bait or bet, beet, boat or ball, and boot). The vowel sounds allow a degree of variation, especially a, e, and o. Diphthongs are ai [ai], au [au], eu [eu], and oi [oi] (approximately as in my, cow, "eww", and boy). The letters i and u are used as semivowels ([j] and [w]) at the start of a word before a vowel (e.g. ioga), between vowels (e.g. joia), in li and ni (not in the first syllable of a word) between vowels (e.g. folia), and in cu and gu before a vowel (e.g. acua). The letter n is pronounced as in think ([ŋ]) before g (e.g. longa) and c (e.g. ance), and in -ng at the end of a syllable (e.g. bumerang). The letters a, e, and o may vary in pronunciation with possible allophones being [ɑ], [ɛ] or [eɪ], and [ɔ] or [oʊ]/[əʊ] respectively. Although stress is not phonemic in LFN, most words are stressed on the vowel or diphthong before the last consonant (e.g. casa, abeon, baia). Words with no vowel before the last consonant are accented on the first vowel (e.g. tio). Words ending in a diphthong are accented on the diphthong (e.g. cacau). Those ending in the double vowels ae, ao, ea, eo, oa, oe, or ui are accented on the first of these vowels (e.g. idea). The addition of -s or -es for plural nouns does not alter the stress. The phoneme /h/ is highly marginal and may be silent. The letters k, q, w, and y (ka, qua, wa, and ya) are available for words and names from other languages. Variations in pronunciation are acceptable.
Vocabulary
Sources of lexicon The lexicon of Lingua Franca Nova is primarily founded on Italo-Western languages: French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan. Lingua Franca Nova does not derive the word form in a strictly logical way, but lexicon creators also consider sound beauty and other subjective factors. Generally, if a word is similar in most of source languages, this is adopted. Of course, each language has spelling and pronunciation variants. Generally, Lingua Franca Nova prefers pronunciation to spelling. When source languages share a native word from Latin, but they change it in various ways, Lingua Franca Nova prefers the oldest variant, namely a variant similar to Latin. For example:
But when the Latin form does not agree to the phonotactic rules of Lingua Franca Nova, its spelling is adapted (similarly to modern languages, especially Italian):
The lexicon of Lingua Franca Nova can accept foreign words being internationally important (for example names of modern nations, main languages, seas and other international geographic entities, important entities from various world cultures). Generally, words are phonetically transcripted, not orthographically (for example, letter c becomes s if the source language pronounces it as a sibilant, tx in words taken from Italian). A lot of exceptions are possible, especially when the pronunciation is uncertain; in such a case, orthography is preferably followed (for example, word "English" is transcribed as engles and not *inglix to retain a more recognizable form).
Grammar
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
