[HN Gopher] Mini - The Minimal Language
___________________________________________________________________
Mini - The Minimal Language
Author : aethertap
Score : 69 points
Date : 2023-07-19 16:13 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (minilanguage.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (minilanguage.com)
| bmacho wrote:
| 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?
| abeppu wrote:
| 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 how much a language user must
| know/consider when speaking/listening and how efficiently you can
| say things.
|
| I cannot find a citation quickly, but I recall years ago reading
| a paper about simulated agents "evolving" a language in a game
| context where agents had to indicate items to one another, by
| sending messages which were subject to a noisy channel. Items had
| multiple attributes (think "small red square", "big green
| triangle" etc), and experimenters could vary both the noise in
| the channel, and the entropy of the distribution over items.
| Naturally if "small red square" is 99% of the things you have to
| communicate, and there is low noise, agents invent an
| abbreviation for it. If there's a huge amount of noise and a
| relatively even distribution over items, then "small small green
| green triangle triangle" or similar becomes more likely.
| Languages very naturally reflect both the things people discuss
| and the environment in which they discuss them.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| 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.
| abeppu wrote:
| 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.
| jonahx wrote:
| 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...
| coldblues wrote:
| I don't think many conlangs will ever succeed because of the
| relatively huge popularity of Esperanto.
| wilg wrote:
| Conlangs are fun, but what will probably happen is we will evolve
| more efficient communication protocols as bandwidth increases via
| multimedia communication, Neuralink, etc.
| riku_iki wrote:
| LLMs will talk to each other using embeddings.
| Rhapso wrote:
| FTR LLM embeddeds are a lot less efficient than ASCII for
| communication and are likely to stay that way.
| relyks wrote:
| Interesting, this reminded me of Toki Pona (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona), but it has different
| goals (Toki Pona was not intended to be an auxiliary language)
| Conlectus wrote:
| I note that with a vocabulary of 1,000 words it is roughly 10x
| the size of Toki Pona, a conlang which also aims for minimalism.
|
| That said, Toki Pona's goal is to help clarify thought, whereas
| this seems to intend to prioritize communication more highly.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
| hedgehog wrote:
| There's an extended discussion about the relationship and
| differences between the two here:
| https://minilanguage.medium.com/mini-the-minimal-language-3f...
|
| "The spark that led me to create Mini was realizing that a
| micro-language like TP could actually work: there's no reason
| in principle a language with a limited word-count couldn't have
| a simple, complete, and unambiguous grammar alongside a
| vocabulary based on intelligible word roots designed to handle
| most aspects of everyday discourse...."
| Y_Y wrote:
| Though if you speak Spanish and English you'll probably be able
| to guess most of the words, so you may find it easier to read
| initially than Toki Pona.
| eggy wrote:
| 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.
| zogrodea wrote:
| 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.
| nateb2022 wrote:
| Mini's logo appears to be the M from MIT's logo.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2020)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| More writeup from the dev when they did a Show HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24386863
| its_ethan wrote:
| 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 one sound?
| jprogr wrote:
| Vowels sound a bit more like in Spanish. The dictionary has
| pronunciations https://jprogr.github.io/buku-name/
| anyaya wrote:
| [flagged]
| chadams wrote:
| https://github.com/chadams/mini-lang
| mahoro wrote:
| I'm excited about the language but it's impossible to google
| anything about it :(
| roetlich wrote:
| > 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.
| bmacho wrote:
| > > 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.
| tsuujin wrote:
| 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.
| jprogr wrote:
| 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
| boredumb wrote:
| Reads like an invalid trying to speak spanish and italian
| simultaneously
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-19 23:01 UTC)