Latino sine Flexione is an auxiliary language created by Giuseppe Peano.
The idea is to strip Classical Latin down to its simplest possible grammar while keeping its vocabulary recognizable. He hoped to create something learnable in hours rather than years.
- If the nominative neuter ends with -e, the Latino form is unchanged.
- If the nominative neuter ends with -um, the Latino form is changed to -o: novum > novo (new).
- In all other cases, adjectives are formed with the ablative case from the genitive, as is the case with nouns.
All noun declensions are abolished. Nouns appear only in their ablative singular form. There is no grammatical gender, and no agreement for adjectives. Plurals are either left unmarked or optionally indicated by adding -s to the stem.
- Basic form: ama (loves)
- Infinitive: amare (to love)
- Passive participle: amato (loved)
- Active participle: amante (loving)
- Imperfectum (past): amaba (loved), legeba (read)
- Future: amarà (will/shall love), legerà (will/shall read)
- Conditional: amarè (would love), legerè (would read)
Composite tenses can be expressed with auxiliary words:
- Praeteritum: habe amato (have loved)
- Future: debe amare / vol amare / habe ad amare (must love / will love / have to love)
- Continuous tenses: me es scribente (I am writing)
Verb conjugations are dropped entirely, every verb is used in its infinitive form: amare, videre, esse. Tense, mood, and aspect are expressed with auxiliary particles: es (present), era (past), va (future), habeo (perfect). Verbs are formed from the Latin by dropping the final -re of the infinitive. If needed, the past may be indicated by preceding the verb with e, and the future with i.
Only a small set of uninflected pronouns is used:
| Number | Sing. | Plur. | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st person | me | meo | nos | nostre |
| 2nd person | te | tuo | vos | vestro |
| 3rd person | illo (male), illa (female), id (neutral) | illos | ||
| Reflexive | se | se |
- Demonstrative: illo (that, as in "that book"), isto (this, as in "this book"), ipso (itself); for conjunction: que (me vide que illo es rapide = I see that it is fast)
- Possessive: meo, tuo, suo, nostro, vestro, (suo)
- Relative and conjunctive: qui (who, that human), quod (which, that thing)
- Reflexive: se
- Indefinitive: un, uno (One tells...), ullo (any), omne or omni (all, each, every), aliquo (anyone), nullo (nothing), nemo (no one)
There are no articles. Latin had none, and LSF keeps it that way. Adjectives are uninflected(no case, gender, or number endings). Comparatives use plus and minus; superlatives use maximo or minimo.
Since case endings are gone, prepositions do all the grammatical work of expressing relationships. Latin's existing prepositions are retained: de, ad, in, cum, pro, per.
Latin roots are kept as close to their classical forms as possible, making the language immediately readable to anyone with a background in Latin, Romance languages, or scientific/academic terminology.
Neologisms
Translating Rejoice into Gaude, I had to make up a few words to speak of computer concepts. Here is a short list:
- concatenative: concatenativa
- programming: programmatione
- encoded: codificato
- multiset: sacco
- symbol: symbolo
- denominator: denominatore
- numerator: numeratore
- instance / multiple: instantia
- logic gate: porta logica
- sentinel: sentinella
- loop: cyclo
- jump(address): salto
- meta(label): meta
- anonymous (meta): anonymo
- compiler: compilatore
- input: ingresso
- output: egresso
- predecessor: predecessore
- successor: successore
- repository: repositorio
- source(code): codice
- Latino Sine Flexione, Wikipedia.
