History and Community
Boeree began working on LFN in 1965, with the goal to create a simple, creole-like international auxiliary language. He was inspired by the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a pidgin used in the Mediterranean in centuries past, and by creoles such as Papiamento, Haitian Creole, and Bislama. He used French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan as the basis for his new language.
LFN was first presented on the Internet in 1998. A Yahoo! Group was formed in 2002 by Bjorn Madsen and today has more than 250 members. Group members have contributed significantly to the further evolution of the language. Stefan Fisahn created a wiki for the language in 2005. In 2007, Igor Vasiljevic began a Facebook page, which now has over 70 members. LFN was given an ISO 639-3 designation (lfn) by SIL in January 2008. The site moved to Wikia in 2009. It has over 2500 articles as of January 1, 2012.
The searchable "master" dictionary (LFN - English / English - LFN) was updated by Simon Davies in 2008. As of January 1, 2012, it has over 15,000 entries. There is also a LFN - French dictionary and seven small dictionaries available in other languages as well as a wikibooks tutorial in eight languages. Introductions and "LFN for Travellers" are available in 12 languages. Many texts have been translated and included in the wiki, including Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol, Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth. and Shakespeare's King Lear. Many articles provide in-depth coverage of pidgins, creoles, and constructed languages. There are also many poems, both translated and original.
Simon Davies's translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is the first publication of a work entirely in LFN.
Read more about this topic: Lingua Franca Nova
Famous quotes containing the words history and/or community:
“All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The most perfect political community must be amongst those who are in the middle rank, and those states are best instituted wherein these are a larger and more respectable part, if possible, than both the other; or, if that cannot be, at least than either of them separate, so that being thrown into the balance it may prevent either scale from preponderating.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)