Lingua Franca -

But here is its miracle — in that flattened, fractured, simplified speech, someone says I am afraid , and you understand not because the grammar is right but because the need is universal.

Its beauty is utility: a rope bridge over a gorge, a splint on a broken leg, a key that turns in a hundred different locks, none of them its own. lingua franca

Here’s a short piece titled — written as a reflective prose poem. Lingua Franca But here is its miracle — in that

It is imperfect by design: verbs stripped of their subjunctive dreams, nouns abandoned in the wrong gender, accents smoothed down like stones in a river. Lingua Franca It is imperfect by design: verbs

It is not beautiful, not in the way Italian is beautiful, or the precise cruelty of German, or the musical lilt of Yoruba.