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Mini – The Minimal Language
31–40 of 91 posts
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#32Reminds 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,…
If you're a fan of diacritics, you can write stoïc in English. Apparently the New Yorker uses them still. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#33I 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…
not saying those papers are wrong, but 136 years and millions of speakers from _most_ countries and Esperanto's speakers seem just fine without adding irregular verbs.
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#34> 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 "Mome…
And that's fine, a lot of sounds are hard to distinguish if you're not familiar with that language. For English, here's a dictionary entry: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/moment
Showing IPA for both US and UK: it's a slightly different diphthong. For German and Italian (I think), it shouldn't be a diphthong at all. Not everyone will hear a difference, which makes it even more helpful to precisely define what the sound should be. Or just don't put any rules in your instructions, or tell people that it's flexible or whatever.
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#35(2020)
By sheerest chance I read the same anonymous Japanese basket weaving forum where a link to this was posted just before its appearance here. Well played OP.
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#36I 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…
While completely true, I think this misses the point which makes minimal "natural" language interesting. Sure you don't use one of these constructed languages in practice the same way you don't build your websites with Turing machine tapes. The question of interest is not one of practice but of theory, what is the equivalent of Turing completeness for natural language? What is the minimum criteria of grammar and vocabulary needed to span the space of conversational ability? In other words, what is the minimum needed for a language to even theoretically be "naturalistic" (even if no naturally occurring language ever looks like it in practice)?
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#37> 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".…
In pretty much any language there's no single point on the vowel chart that actually identifies a vowel - it's a spectrum with numerous allophones. Conlangs like this one are generally constructed in such a way as to allow maximally wide spectrum that is still distinctive. So if you pronounce it the way you speak English, that's still fine.
If you want more precision, generally speaking, the value of the character in IPA will match the actual sound value, except for "j".
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#38> 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 "Mome…
In English, that "o" is a diphthong, for starters - something like [oʊ] usually
Whether it sounds the same to you or not in different languages/dialects depends on how many "o-like" sounds your native language has. If it's just one, then e.g. [o] and [ɔ] can be hard to distinguish, because you're used to treating them as the same thing manifesting in different contexts.
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ot…
That assertion about frequency really needs some data to support it, because the only example I can think of that is very common in that regard is the word "to be", which is special in many ways other than its frequency.
Re: Mini – The Minimal Language
#40Maybe 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…
There's no short/long distinction.
For consonants, when they say that, what it usually means is "consonant by itself" (i.e. not a part of a digraph like "th", and not followed by a vowel like "e" or "i").