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Mini – The Minimal Language

minilanguage.com

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Re: Mini – The Minimal Language

#11

Post by abeppu »

cjs_ac wrote: post #6
abeppu wrote: post #3

I 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.

In every language, for every word, there will be some history and source. And one can always declare a "different rule" around exceptional cases ... but that's kind of vacuous, and speakers have to remember which words are subject to a minority "rule", so claiming they aren't "exceptions" seems disingenuous.

But if you look at the words in English for which we have "different rules", and you look at which words in other languages which have "different rules" ... they typically line up with frequency. You'll note that the small list of verbs listed above also happen to be irregular verbs in a lot of languages.

Re: Mini – The Minimal Language

#12

Post by jonahx »

abeppu wrote: post #3

I 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…

Your general point is a good one but I don't think irregular verbs are the best example of error correcting redundancy, or evolved shortcutting. In most cases they are just a relic of genealogy, and don't serve those purposes:

> Most English irregular verbs are native, derived from verbs that existed in Old English. Nearly all verbs that have been borrowed into the language at a later stage have defaulted to the regular conjugation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_irregular_verbs#Develo...

Re: Mini – The Minimal Language

#13

Post by anyaya »

its_ethan wrote: post #8

Maybe 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…

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Re: Mini – The Minimal Language

#15

Post by wilg »

Conlangs are fun, but what will probably happen is we will evolve more efficient communication protocols as bandwidth increases via multimedia communication, Neuralink, etc.

Re: Mini – The Minimal Language

#18

Post by eggy »

Reminds me of some similarities to Arabic. Arabic uses root words, usually 3 consonants, that mean many similar things with surrounding letters. K-T-B means writing. Kitab means book. Kitaba is writing.

The script is hard, and you have to learn enough of the roots and recognize them to get the meaning. Indonesian is slightly similar: tinju is boxing and petinju is boxer. Prefixes on roots to build up and guess meaning from context.

Re: Mini – The Minimal Language

#20

Post by Rhapso »

riku_iki wrote: post #19
wilg wrote: post #15

Conlangs are fun, but what will probably happen is we will evolve more efficient communication protocols as bandwidth increases via multimedia communication, Neuralink, etc.

LLMs will talk to each other using embeddings.

FTR LLM embeddeds are a lot less efficient than ASCII for communication and are likely to stay that way.
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