andogigi:If anyone has a copy of the book "In the Land of Invented Languages" by Arika Okrent, there is a comprehensive (though not exhaustive) list of conlangs in the back. They're listed by chronological order.

How many?

By the way, did one took a look at Wikipedia

(the French one is also valuable)

Lingua Franca Nova cropped up in a recent thread, and I thought it would be more appropriate to talk about it here than to hijack that other thread.

Though I won't be learning it, I prefer LFN to Interlingua. However, having read about it, I see a few "deficiencies".

1. The personal pronouns are also used as possessive adjectives. This can lead to ambiguity, e.g. does "me mal" mean "my bad (thing)" or "bad me" ??

2. The pronoun "el" = he, she, or it. I'm aware that some natlangs are like this, but the romlangs aren't, and I can see it being confusing.

3. The letter C is always pronounced K, even before E and I. I'm sure that when rom-speakers see "ci", for example, they'll never think [ki]. I accept that it's probably the best all-purpose letter there (K being non-romance) but perhaps it would've been better to mutate C into Q before E and I.

Does anyone have any thoughts about this stuff?

@ Roberto

In terms of Lingua Franca Nova, I'd say it's best not to look at it with the same eyes we look at Esperanto/Interlingua with - if I had a way to compare the two, I'd say Esperanto and Interlingua are like continental, supranational languages (the Latin of the conlang world, with Volapük being ancient armenian or something cool like that ), where as Lingua Franca Nova is spoken in some asia-pacific archipelago like Indonesia or something. Another comparison would be Dutch vs. Afrikaans.

That said,

1. It's simple then, you probably won't be saying "bad me" in this language (then again, me mal "my bad" probably gives the same impression as "bad me").

2) This one could be problematic, but given romance languages, it was always gonna be problematic. In French, you have il and elle. In Spanish, it's él and ella. In Italian, I can't remember but isn't it something like lui and lei? Anyway, el sums it up nicely (the problem is, how do you show gender the romancy way, when there's no more gender?)

3) The methodology behind that is to make it 1 letter = 1 sound, and so there's just c (q would make that 2 letters 1 sound, and c before i = s or whatever would make that 1 letter 2 sounds, thus problematic). In Latin, C was always a "k" sound anyway, and it's not a big learning curve, just as bigger learning curve as learning that in European Spanish, "revolución" doesn't equal [revo'lusion] (stress on the u like in English), but [rebolu'thjon] (stress on the o). Or, for an Interlingua equivalent, what "ce", "ge", "j", etc all equal before soft vowels.

(I am biased on all 3 points though - first one because I'm learning Indonesian, and if you tried to say "my bad" in that, you've likely end up with saying "I'm bad" anyway, the second one I simply am not too fussed, and the third one because I'm a fan of the celtic languages, which always use a hard c (cé = who [ke:], and also I just don't like Q (it's ALWAYS been superfluous )).

That's my way of rationalising it without blowing my own brain up at least haha. Either way, like most conlangs, there not exactly big hurdles when compared to the creativities in natlangs, and they're all good fun to play with

But man that's some good spotting Roberto, the me mal thing never even crossed my mind before. A remedy could be "mal me" maybe, but unlike Esperanto I think LFN tends to stick adjectives at the butt end of words without fail.. Mmm...

EDIT: Further thoughts about "c",
I guess this letter will always be plagued by problems due to the variety of uses it has, and that most people will think of it in different ways. I've always thought of it sort of "k"ishly, yet at the same time I hate misspelling C as S. On the other hand, a Polish or Croatian speaker might prefer "c" to be [ts] because it's more natural to them, and an Indonesian might prefer "c" to be [tS] (ch) for the same reason. To a Norwegian speaker though, they might think of "c" as because that's all it's used for in most of the Scandinavian languages (c -> k in most cases, Swedish uses ck though, and all old versions of the Germanic languages tended to use c instead of K up until the middle ages when the obsession began with hellenic culture)

Re 1. I suppose that, with no context, they could indeed be considered the same, but there will be times when they need to be different. A solution would be to say that "me mal" = "my bad" and "mal me" = "bad me". In other words, adjectives that modify personal pronouns must precede them.

Re 2. The solution is to copy Ido and have il/el/ol. Simple!

Re 3. I was probably asking for too much here. (Would Q-always work? Maybe.) I'll let this one go.

I'd be interested to see an East-Asian LFN.

Roberto12:A solution would be to say that "me mal" = "my bad" and "mal me" = "bad me". In other words, adjectives that modify personal pronouns must precede them.

That seems rather good, I can't imagine someone misunderstanding it.

Re 2. The solution is to copy Ido and have il/el/ol. Simple!

That's what Ido's for - you don't want to put poor Mr. Ido out of business - he has a wife and 20+ (Esperantididos ) children to feed!

Well, either way el works well in LFN, and because of context and because there's only one 3rd person singular pronoun, there shouldn't be much confusion. "el" has homophones in the other romance languages that are both male and female, so it's sort of a positive neutral (il or le or something similar would probably be a bit more confusing).

Re 3. I was probably asking for too much here. (Would Q-always work? Maybe.) I'll let this one go.

Not really, you're free to opine dear sir - I'm just here to serve as the devils advocate (we REALLY need an evil looking emoticon )

I'd be interested to see an East-Asian LFN.

shinde shenghu hua? (yeah, I just grabbed random words for "new", "mutual" and "language" ).

The Chinese languages (and things like Indonesian/Malay) act like one, but not quite. Give Mandarin a 100 or + years at China's current sphere of influence and we should see a sort of simplified spoken chinese arise (more possible than ever thanks to the growing number of bisyllable words in Mandarin). Japanese could also influence language in the region in that amount of time (in that amount of time, we could all be slaves to robot overlords, in which case, VIVU LA ROBOTA REVOLUCIO!)