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Mini – The Minimal Language

minilanguage.com

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Re: Mini – The Minimal Language

#21

Post by roetlich »

> The vowels are pronounced like they are in Spanish, Italian, German, and many other languages

... ok, this is annoying. Can't speak for Italian and Spanish, but in German vowels are pronounced differently depending on context. Later, it says the 'o' is meant to be pronounced like in "moment". Moment is pronounced differently in American and UK English. And neither are like Italian "momento" or like German "Moment".

> All of the consonants (b d f g j k l m n p r s t v) are pronounced exactly the same as they are in English. Phew!

Not helpful.

Re: Mini – The Minimal Language

#22

Post by jprogr »

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…

Vowels sound a bit more like in Spanish. The dictionary has pronunciations https://jprogr.github.io/buku-name/

Re: Mini – The Minimal Language

#23

Post by jprogr »

roetlich wrote: post #21

> The vowels are pronounced like they are in Spanish, Italian, German, and many other languages ... ok, this is annoying. Can't speak for Italian and Spanish, but in German vowels are pronounced differently depending on context. Later, it says the 'o' is meant to be pronounced like in "moment". Moment is pronounced differently in American and UK English. And neither are like Italian "momento" or like German "Moment".…

I think the best way to see it is like this: vowels like in Spanish and consonants like in English. The Duolingo Stories have pronunciation with a TTS engine https://duostories.org/mini-en and the dictionary has pronunciation with an actual human voice (mine) https://jprogr.github.io/buku-name

Re: Mini – The Minimal Language

#24

Post by tsuujin »

roetlich wrote: post #21

> The vowels are pronounced like they are in Spanish, Italian, German, and many other languages ... ok, this is annoying. Can't speak for Italian and Spanish, but in German vowels are pronounced differently depending on context. Later, it says the 'o' is meant to be pronounced like in "moment". Moment is pronounced differently in American and UK English. And neither are like Italian "momento" or like German "Moment".…

The article doesn’t say it, but the pronunciation is identical to Japanese, which I am fond of in general.

In college Japanese class we were taught the phrase “ah, we soon get old” for a, i, u, e, and o respectively. I found it to be simple and satisfying.

Re: Mini – The Minimal Language

#26

Post by bmacho » 

  Like Wilkins’ Real Character, a priori languages attempt to decompose the elements of thought into distinct atomic units and build up larger linguistic constructs from those simpler units.
  
  A posteriori languages like Esperanto take a very different approach: rather than starting from scratch with a set of basic concepts, they attempt to pave over the unnecessary grammatical quirks and complications of natural language to create something which is simple and easier to learn.
  
  Mini’s goal is to fully realize both of these visions: to have, at once, a set of linguistic primitives which can be combined to discuss any topic, while ensuring that those primitives are themselves borrowed as directly from natural languages as possible.
https://minilanguage.medium.com/mini-the-minimal-language-3f...

Yeah, I don't get it. In Esperanto you don't use particles, but you change the endings of the words, according to their roles in the sentence. How is Mini fundamentally different?

Re: Mini – The Minimal Language

#27

Post by bmacho »

roetlich wrote: post #21

> The vowels are pronounced like they are in Spanish, Italian, German, and many other languages ... ok, this is annoying. Can't speak for Italian and Spanish, but in German vowels are pronounced differently depending on context. Later, it says the 'o' is meant to be pronounced like in "moment". Moment is pronounced differently in American and UK English. And neither are like Italian "momento" or like German "Moment".…

> > The vowels are pronounced like they are in Spanish, Italian, German, and many other languages

> ... ok, this is annoying. Can't speak for Italian and Spanish, but in German vowels are pronounced differently depending on context. Later, it says the 'o' is meant to be pronounced like in "moment". Moment is pronounced differently in American and UK English. And neither are like Italian "momento" or like German "Moment".

I listened all four (UK/US English, German, Italian), and the 'o' in moment sounded the same to me.

Re: Mini – The Minimal Language

#29

Post by zogrodea »

eggy wrote: post #18

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 meanin…

I like Arabic's diacritic system which makes pronounciation of a word you've only previously read predictable.

I remember once pronouncing "stoic" as "stoyc" instead of "stow-ik" once in English for example. My limited knowledge of Arabic indicates that one diacritic produces "aah"-like vowels, another produces "ooh"-like vowels and another "iih"-like vowels, and even though some other modifiers come into play later, it's still predictiable how a word is pronounced just from reading it. Would be happy to be corrected if I am wrong.

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