Providing a natural language interface to ontologies will not only offer ordinary users the convenience of acquiring needed information from ontologies, but also expand the influence of ontologies and the semantic web consequently. This paper presents PANTO, a Portable nAtural laNguage inTerface to Ontologies, which accepts generic natural language queries and outputs SPARQL queries. Based on a special consideration on nominal phrases, it adopts a triple-based data model to interpret the parse trees output by an off-the-shelf parser. Complex modifications in natural language queries such as negations, superlative and comparative are investigated. The experiments have shown that PANTO provides state-of-the-art results.