[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)