I do love a carefully-crafted auxiliary conlang. With English and French and a smattering of Spanish and Mandarin, I found myself able to understand almost all of it. Reminds me a fair bit of Lang...
I do love a carefully-crafted auxiliary conlang. With English and French and a smattering of Spanish and Mandarin, I found myself able to understand almost all of it.
So this type of thing is not usually something I am interested in, but the idea of a super minimalistic conlang did catch my attention. I spent about thirty minutes on the site and am amazed at...
So this type of thing is not usually something I am interested in, but the idea of a super minimalistic conlang did catch my attention. I spent about thirty minutes on the site and am amazed at how much I've picked up so quickly. Moreover, my partner's first language is Italian and mine is English. She is fluent in both, whereas my Italian is... not great. But we both were immediately able to understand each other when using this language for almost everything we tested. I am very impressed with this!
This brings us back to our original claim: that Mini is the simplest language. We can now refine that claim to be that Mini is the most expressive and natural-sounding language of its size. I will make no final judgement as to whether this project has been successful, but I will say this: Si a bon demo de ke uno linga i kan make! (It’s a good demonstration of what one language can do!)
The issue is that for real, spoken use you’d need at minimum another partner to talk and listen to, but realistically at least a small group if you really wanted the thing/language in this case to...
The issue is that for real, spoken use you’d need at minimum another partner to talk and listen to, but realistically at least a small group if you really wanted the thing/language in this case to stick around.
Honestly this is why I stopped trying to teach my son my native language (Dutch). We live in the Midwest, I've never once in 30 years of living here ran into another native Dutch speaker. My mom...
Honestly this is why I stopped trying to teach my son my native language (Dutch). We live in the Midwest, I've never once in 30 years of living here ran into another native Dutch speaker. My mom and I are the only ones who speak it. It would be nearly impossible to have him utilize it in a way that wasn't forced.
My mom and I found that even when we were being purposeful about teaching it, we ended up switching back to English because at least my wife and my stepdaughters then could understand us too.
Personally something like this is a lot more interesting to me than Toki Pona. I think there's probably a great sweet-spot for an auxiliary language that hasn't been found/popularized yet (or...
Personally something like this is a lot more interesting to me than Toki Pona. I think there's probably a great sweet-spot for an auxiliary language that hasn't been found/popularized yet (or maybe this is it), and I particularly thought the discussion of trade-offs in this article (https://minilanguage.medium.com/mini-the-minimal-language-3f3710e28166) was great.
100% this is far more approachable than Toki Pona due to its inherent similarities to existing languages. In particular I find that the Mini usage of cognates is also more approachable than that...
100% this is far more approachable than Toki Pona due to its inherent similarities to existing languages. In particular I find that the Mini usage of cognates is also more approachable than that used by Lojban.
I don't have much to add from a linguistic or worldly perspective but trying to read some of this... Just makes me think of minion speak. Might be a good language to use in a Dark Tower-esque...
I don't have much to add from a linguistic or worldly perspective but trying to read some of this...
Just makes me think of minion speak.
Might be a good language to use in a Dark Tower-esque apocalyptic society.
I do love a carefully-crafted auxiliary conlang. With English and French and a smattering of Spanish and Mandarin, I found myself able to understand almost all of it.
Reminds me a fair bit of Lang Belta in tone.
So this type of thing is not usually something I am interested in, but the idea of a super minimalistic conlang did catch my attention. I spent about thirty minutes on the site and am amazed at how much I've picked up so quickly. Moreover, my partner's first language is Italian and mine is English. She is fluent in both, whereas my Italian is... not great. But we both were immediately able to understand each other when using this language for almost everything we tested. I am very impressed with this!
From the Foundational Document:
These kind of projects are really cool, but I never find a practical use for them. I guess that’s OK though.
The issue is that for real, spoken use you’d need at minimum another partner to talk and listen to, but realistically at least a small group if you really wanted the thing/language in this case to stick around.
Honestly this is why I stopped trying to teach my son my native language (Dutch). We live in the Midwest, I've never once in 30 years of living here ran into another native Dutch speaker. My mom and I are the only ones who speak it. It would be nearly impossible to have him utilize it in a way that wasn't forced.
My mom and I found that even when we were being purposeful about teaching it, we ended up switching back to English because at least my wife and my stepdaughters then could understand us too.
Personally something like this is a lot more interesting to me than Toki Pona. I think there's probably a great sweet-spot for an auxiliary language that hasn't been found/popularized yet (or maybe this is it), and I particularly thought the discussion of trade-offs in this article (https://minilanguage.medium.com/mini-the-minimal-language-3f3710e28166) was great.
100% this is far more approachable than Toki Pona due to its inherent similarities to existing languages. In particular I find that the Mini usage of cognates is also more approachable than that used by Lojban.
I don't have much to add from a linguistic or worldly perspective but trying to read some of this...
Just makes me think of minion speak.
Might be a good language to use in a Dark Tower-esque apocalyptic society.
This is really interesting. I might learn it a bit more, but after spending an hour on it, I can already understand most speech
Is it just me or are all the links on the site (aside from the top one) non-functional?
I tried a few and didn’t find any that don’t work.