Mini – The Minimal Language
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Mini – The Minimal Language
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Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#2[flagged]
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#3I think the concept of "simplest naturalistic language" may be intrinsically broken -- a "naturalistic language" is not simple. Natural languages balance between regular rules (e.g. in English, we often add -ed to make the past tense of a verb) and exceptions especially for common cases ("went", "was", "had", "made", "did" because going, being, having, making, doing are all so common). This tension is partly about how much a language user must know/consider when speaking/listening and how efficiently you can say things.
I cannot find a citation quickly, but I recall years ago reading a paper about simulated agents "evolving" a language in a game context where agents had to indicate items to one another, by sending messages which were subject to a noisy channel. Items had multiple attributes (think "small red square", "big green triangle" etc), and experimenters could vary both the noise in the channel, and the entropy of the distribution over items. Naturally if "small red square" is 99% of the things you have to communicate, and there is low noise, agents invent an abbreviation for it. If there's a huge amount of noise and a relatively even distribution over items, then "small small green green triangle triangle" or similar becomes more likely. Languages very naturally reflect both the things people discuss and the environment in which they discuss them.
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#4Interesting, this reminded me of Toki Pona ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona), but it has different goals (Toki Pona was not intended to be an auxiliary language)
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#5I note that with a vocabulary of 1,000 words it is roughly 10x the size of Toki Pona, a conlang which also aims for minimalism.
That said, Toki Pona's goal is to help clarify thought, whereas this seems to intend to prioritize communication more highly.
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#6I think the concept of "simplest naturalistic language" may be intrinsically broken -- a "naturalistic language" is not simple. Natural languages balance between regular rules (e.g. in English, we often add -ed to make the past tense of a verb) and exceptions especially for common cases ("went", "was", "had", "made", "did" because going, being, having, making, doing are all so common). This tension is partly about ho…
Irregular verbs (go/went, and so on) congugate (change according to tense and subject) using rules just like regular verbs, except that they have different rules. The irregular verbs use Germanic conjugations (cf. man/men, child/children) whereas the regular verbs use grammatical constructions from other source languages.
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#7I note that with a vocabulary of 1,000 words it is roughly 10x the size of Toki Pona, a conlang which also aims for minimalism. That said, Toki Pona's goal is to help clarify thought, whereas this seems to intend to prioritize communication more highly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
Though if you speak Spanish and English you'll probably be able to guess most of the words, so you may find it easier to read initially than Toki Pona.
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#8Maybe I'm just dumb but it claims simple phonetics but even after reading the pronunciation ("Say it like you mean it") section I still don't really understand how it's supposed to sound?
The singular "a" between verbs and objects, is that a long or short vowel sound - do vowels have short and long distinctions at all? It says all the consonants are pronounced how they are in English - but consonants don't have just one sound?
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#9Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#10I note that with a vocabulary of 1,000 words it is roughly 10x the size of Toki Pona, a conlang which also aims for minimalism. That said, Toki Pona's goal is to help clarify thought, whereas this seems to intend to prioritize communication more highly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
There's an extended discussion about the relationship and differences between the two here:
https://minilanguage.medium.com/mini-the-minimal-language-3f...
"The spark that led me to create Mini was realizing that a micro-language like TP could actually work: there’s no reason in principle a language with a limited word-count couldn’t have a simple, complete, and unambiguous grammar alongside a vocabulary based on intelligible word roots designed to handle most aspects of everyday discourse...."