
Mini: The Minimal Language - gruget
https://medium.com/@minilanguage/mini-the-minimal-language-3f3710e28166
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lioeters
Beautiful. To clarify for others yet to read the article, this is about an
artificially designed human language, along the lines of Esperanto and Toki
Pona ("a micro-language of 120–125 words created by Canadian linguist Sonja
Lang").

My favorite section:

> Speaking Mini means speaking like a caveman. Precise terminology is replaced
> with crude physical description. Words like bird, tower, or salsa in English
> are Minified as animo selo (sky animal), loke baton (cylinder place), or
> vasa veji fogo (fiery vegetable liquid). People are not beautiful or
> intelligent; they merely ave e mira bon (have a good appearance) or pensa
> bon (think well). One cannot run or cook; one can only kamino velo (walk
> fast) or fogo e manja (fire the food).

> Despite these limitations, Mini still functions as a speakable language and
> has been battle-tested in a way that most constructed languages have not: by
> being continuously spoken by myself and my (unfortunate) family members and
> acquaintances. The vocabulary and range of discussable topics may be quite
> limited, but the language works: people can successfully communicate in
> Mini.

I see some similarities with programming languages, in that the ones most
likely to "succeed" in terms of usage, are the ones that were dog-fooded by
the creator and associates, used in production over time to make it practical.

