Latino sine flexione (
Latin without
inflections) is an
auxiliary language invented by the Italian mathematician
Giuseppe Peano (1858 - 1932) in
1903. It is a simplified version of Latin, and retains its
vocabulary. It was published in the journal
Rivista di Matematica, vol. 8, number 3, pp. 74-83, in an article entitled
De Latino Sine Flexione, Lingua Auxiliare Internationale, which explained the reason for its creation. The article argued that other auxiliary languages were unnecessary, since Latin was already established as the world's international language. The article was written in classical Latin, but it gradually dropped its
inflections until there were none.
Originally, Latino sine flexione was sometimes known as Interlingua but should not be confused with the later, better known Interlingua presented by the International Auxiliary Language Association in 1951. After Interlingua was introduced, Latino sine flexione was sometimes called Interlingua de Peano to distinguish the two languages.
Though Peano removed the inflections of Latin from nouns and adjectives, he did not entirely remove grammatical gender, permitting the option of a feminine ending for occupations. The gender of animals is immutable. All forms of nouns end with a vowel and are taken from the ablative case, but as this was not listed in most Latin dictionaries, he gave the rule for its derivation from the genitive case. The plural is not required when not necessary, such as when a number has been specified, the plural can be read from the context, and so on. Verbs have few inflections of conjugation; tenses and moods are instead indicated by verb adjuncts. The result is a change to a positional language.
Nouns that have no inflection are used as is ad, in, et, non, semper, heri, quatuor, etc. Others are as follows
