[HN Gopher] Minimal English (2018)
___________________________________________________________________
Minimal English (2018)
Author : raldu
Score : 30 points
Date : 2022-02-26 19:38 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (intranet.secure.griffith.edu.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (intranet.secure.griffith.edu.au)
| Naac wrote:
| Reading the paragraph about Galileo's telescope reminded me of
| Guy Steele's talk Growing a Language:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
| mwcampbell wrote:
| It does have a similar feel, but IIUC, Minimal English is
| trying to be systematic about restricting itself to true
| primitives, as opposed to starting with all of the words that
| happen to be one syllable in English. I imagine one can compose
| many hard-to-translate expressions out of one-syllable words.
| gmuslera wrote:
| My first thought when starting to read about this was xkcd's
| Thing Explainer.
|
| But will this carry all the meanings (including cultural ones) of
| those words to the translations to other languages ?
| Animats wrote:
| No. Read "Orwell, the Lost Writings", in which he discusses his
| job during WWII - translating the BBC news into Simple English
| for broadcast to the Colonies (mostly India and Hong Kong). He
| discovered that translating to Simple English required pounding
| out any political nuances into plain language, and that doing
| so was itself a political act. That was the genesis of Newspeak
| in "1984".
| addaon wrote:
| Also simple English, which has a surprisingly complete
| wikipedia translation (https://simple.wikipedia.org/).
| gumby wrote:
| Yea, I was wondering what the differences were when I read
| this article. I hadn't previously heard about Minimal
| English, while I had heard of Simple English.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| There's also ASD-STE100[1], a standard apparently for
| technical documentation and ATC communcation(?), though while
| it is designed to assist ESL learners, it probably doesn't
| exactly count as _simple_ from a native reading-level
| perspective.
|
| Also, this is the second[2] thread today that merits a
| mention of Steele's _Growing a language_ [3]!
|
| [1] https://asd-ste100.org/
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30481035
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30481443
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > Another obstacle is that simple vocabulary is a turn-off for
| some people, no matter how elegantly it is used and regardless of
| the content. Sometimes it comes down to a fear of sounding
| "childish".
|
| A related objection: I imagine that if I, as a native English
| speaker, were to speak to a non-native speaker in minimal
| English, it would seem patronizing. I wonder what the actual
| intended applications of this are.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Huh, I had never heard of this, but a quick search revealed a
| minimal English checker that works with the sample text in the
| article:
|
| https://learnthesewordsfirst.com/tools/CheckMinimalEnglish.h...
|
| I couldn't find a minimal English translator online though. The
| closest are these for simple English, which I hadn't heard of
| either until addaon's comment here:
|
| https://www.simplish.org/conversion/F1618DD6/
|
| https://www.online-utility.org/english/simple_basic_helper.j...
|
| https://seotoolzz.com/article-simplifier.php
|
| https://ds.gpii.net/learn/accessibility-masterlist/translate...
|
| I feel like if there was a semester class or certification to
| know how to convert one's language to minimal, and another to
| know how to convert between minimal languages, we'd be well on
| our way to being able to communicate with anyone.
|
| The alternative is to invent a language like Common in role
| playing games, and expect everyone to learn it. Unfortunately,
| that just doesn't work, as shown by Esperanto's lack of adoption:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_Wikipedia
|
| https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/
|
| To me, it looks a bit like the Spanish I know, but I can't really
| read it.
|
| Programmers have Lisp and the shell and assembly and SQL and even
| C-based languages like Javascript that they can fall back to when
| explaining something. It's been a long time since I looked at a
| piece of mainstream code and didn't immediately grok what it's
| generally doing.
|
| I feel like there's something to that. For example, I never had
| to "learn" PHP, because it stems from the context and metaphors
| used by the shell and C++. If you know how string interpolation
| works with "$var" and how associative arrays work with
| $array['dog'] = 'cat', then congratulations, you already mostly
| know PHP. But I never fully internalized how Ruby works, because
| it attempts to transcend the commonalities and be its own
| language, more like Perl maybe. I'm not quite saying that right,
| but maybe there's a term for that concept. Ruby might be more
| "expressive" than PHP, which can result in a steeper learning
| curve.
|
| So translating English to Japanese, for example, might be like
| Python to Ruby, but we'd be better off doing something like
| Python -> C <-> C++ -> Ruby. That way anyone who knew C or C++
| could generally communicate with anyone. But we don't teach (or
| even have) those common basis languages for communication?
| raidicy wrote:
| I have studied Toki pona for a little while in the past. It's
| emphasis is on minimalism and context. Especially since the
| Lexicon is around 130 words. It sounds like things can be
| ambiguous, but once you get a hang of it communicating is pretty
| easy.
|
| In my opinion this allows you to learn the grammar and how to
| speak relatively easily( which is also helped by the fact that
| there are relatively few grammar Concepts)
|
| Further there is an offshoot of the community called Toki ma,
| where it's emphasis is on building on the Concepts that are from
| Toki pona and extending them to be more of an aux lang and to be
| more fledged out as to be able to discuss complicated Topics.
|
| With all that said, I really would like to see some sort of
| version of this for other languages. From my limited language
| learning it seems there's a huge learning curve in the beginning
| that can somewhat taper off after you get a good handle on a
| language's grammar. For example knowing definitively three to
| four hundred words you must know to be able to speak basic
| Japanese/Spanish/French etc, cuts down on your study
| requirements.
|
| There are of course arguments against this, but it seems like a
| cool idea.
| WalterGR wrote:
| NSM, undefined in the article, appears to be
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguag...
|
| "The natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) is a linguistic theory
| that reduces lexicons down to a set of semantic primitives"
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-02-26 23:00 UTC)