Minimal English (2018)
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This, I think, forces the writer to rely more on the semantics and subtext of what they are saying. A reader could infer, for example, that after waiting for hours in the queue, a customer at the DMV would be frustrated; using `they said in frustration` is redundant and telling rather than showing.
It also forces the writer to describe some physical behaviour of their character that reflects emotion.
Example:
> "Please," Paul whimpered, "I don't want a fight."
VS
> "Please," Paul said, burying his shaking hands in his pockets, "I don't want a fight."
The second sentence is better, because it allowed me to communicate that not only is Paul scared, but he is trying to hide it. He is acting brave-- which reveals something about how our character handles situations. Much of what good fiction writing hopes to achieve is illuminating a character's attributes in a way that seems to blend in with prose.
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My point is, by forcing a minimal style of writing, it actually forces the writer to think creatively. I have observed that creativity thrives with structure and rules, and rarely in absence of them.
>> "Please," Paul whimpered, "I don't want a fight."
> VS
>> "Please," Paul said, burying his shaking hands in his pockets, "I don't want a fight."
> The second sentence is better ...
Many of the same writers would say that "burying his shaking hands in his pockets" should also be omitted, and Paul's words and the context should convey it all. But few would say one style is objectively 'better', I think.
In general I agree that creativity thrives with structure and rules, but that's exactly what the ban on "said" hopes to achieve.
For example, instead of saying "before acceptance of unit, carry out the specified test procedure", you should write "before you accept the unit, you must do the specific test procedure." Also, the word "close" should only be used to mean "to move something to a position". Instead of writing "do not go close to the landing gear", one should write "do not go near the landing gear."
It's a special-purpose language and not meant to be a general writing standard, but the basic idea is similar to this project.
"before acceptance" vs "before you accept": These are quite subtly different. The first form really means passivity (something is done to you) and the second implies activity (I do something). Now, both forms are routinely used to mean the same thing but the second is correct in this case.
"carry out" vs "you must do": the first form only implies who does what. The second form spells out exactly who does what.
Alas, the standard will always lose out. Trying to pick English words with fewer meanings is always going to fail (tap - lol!) near vs close is not a useful distinction. Near can mean light years depending on context but close nearly always means within arm reach, a hair' breadth or whatever, except when it doesn't.
I think a better approach would avoid words like "close" or "near" - they are subjective. "Do not approach to within 5m of the landing gear" is objective and easy to understand. A formal risk assessment should surely find the right distance.
In many fields of Engineering, as soon as you find yourself using wooly mensuration terminology instead of clearly defined terms, you are probably gearing up for a funeral.
It does "simplify" English by disallowing the use of difficult grammar. One should give instructions in active voice, with simple verb tenses, and avoid the use of present participles or gerunds. The codified dictionary also only uses a basic subset of English words, difficult vocabulary is avoided to increase legibility.
It goes beyond that. "Carry out" is an idiom the reader may not be familiar with. It may confuse them because they don't know what is the concrete thing they are supposed to be carrying, and where the "out" is located in this context.
Verb + direction idioms are one of the most difficult parts of English as a foreign language. The direction often changes the meaning of the verb in an arbitrary way, and even the direction itself is often arbitrary.
Yeah: "How am I supposed to take the abstract concept of 'acceptance test' and lug / schlep / carry it out of the hangar into the fresh air outside???"
In the example sentence, in Minimal English, we could say "Do not go near the landing gear. 5m is too close." This still has some problems (e.g. people aren't good at estimating distance) but the verb "go" is better than "approach". The comparison "too" isn't necessarily translatable, but it probably okay for this context.
I seem to recall that Henry VIII (the one with six wives) ordered a standard King's English to be developed which is why we have the word church and not kirk or kerke or whatever etc. That was in C16th.
So, your job has a long and illustrious history. It also has the same challenges. I can imagine that it would be tempting to try and end up with something like an Anglicised Esperanto but I think you should accept that your goal will never be perfect, nor ever finally achieved. It will save lives though and you must concentrate on that and not perfection.
Good luck!
And yes, I agree with what you've said about measurements. Normally we would accompany something like "5 meters" with a real world comparison, which doesn't have to be perfect, but gives a point of reference. Perhaps for this specific group, a reference to another part they know about would be a good comparison. For pandemic restrictions we talked about being "not being so near to people that you can touch them" for example.
Our real goal is to get people thinking about how to communicate to people from different places, cultures, and life experiences more effectively. Which is one that will never be completed, but I hope we can at least make some improvements.
“The natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) is a linguistic theory that reduces lexicons down to a set of semantic primitives“
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>Assuming that reductive paraphrase can be made to work as a method of analysing meanings, it follows that every language has an irreducible "semantic core" which would be left after all the complex expressions had been dealt with. This semantic core must have a language-like structure, with a lexicon of indefinable expressions ("semantic primes") and a grammar, i.e. some principles governing how the lexical elements can be combined. The semantic primes and their principles of combination constitute a kind of "mini-language".
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.
There are so many different words for the same thing (just like in English). learning vocabulary is the most difficult thing for me.
I’ve read about various English subsets like Basic and Simple English, but are there examples of subsets for other languages? I haven’t found a Simple Spanish.
A similar idea that intrigued me was books written using only monosyllabic words. There are about 7,500 English words with only one syllable. An example rewriting of Alice in Wonderland:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wond...
Plus a number of books by Lucy Aikin:
It ends up like technical writing, where specific repeated phrases have specific meanings (I'm thinking legal writing and also Smith's The Wealth of Nations). Or Lisp written by Java programmers.
Galileo looked at the stars not like other people looked at them before. Because of this, he could see them well, not like people could see them before. When he was looking at them, he was holding something of one kind near his eyes. When someone holds something of this kind near the eyes, this someone can look at some places very far from the place where this someone is. A thing of this kind is called “a telescope.” When Galileo looked at the sky at night like this, he could see some places very far from the Earth well.
While recognizing its key goal of translatability, is it really true that many non-English languages lack abstract concepts? Sounds an anglo-centric proposition.
There's a reason that many loan words in English from other languages express concepts that are difficult to express naturally in English, e.g. 'schadenfreude', 'ennui'.
And this line:
[non-cross-translatable words]. These include key words of Anglo culture, such as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘fair’ and ‘rude’, ‘fact’ and ‘evidence’.
I realize that that allusion itself imports the religous background of English; and I can believe that _precise_ definitions could vary between cultures - even legal systems differ in what "evidence" is permissible in court... but is the casual, non-technical meaning really that different between cultures?
Or... am I just so immersed in English that its assumptions are transparent to me, like a fish who can't understand "out of water"?
I guess I would like to see specifically how some of those 6 examples are non-cross-translatable...
It's not that speakers of other languages necessarily lack the concepts (we can think of things which we don't have words for), but that the concepts map differently in the language. Wierzbicka often uses the example that in Polish, there is no exact equivalent for the English 'and' - there are several words which can be used in the same contexts, but they have overlaps with other English concepts such as 'or', 'but', etc.
A "telescope" is a tool.
A telescope makes distant things seem near.
Galileo looked at stars.
Galileo used a telescope to look at stars.
Edit: on second thought, maybe not. In my native language, "tool" can also be read as "weapon".
e.g. a telescope is a thing
because of a telescope, we can see things that are far from us (but this doesn't tell us *how* we use a telescope)
I am looking for words whose frequency in casual conversations matches with the words mentioned in this article.
https://www.abc.net.au/education/learn-english/words-to-use-...
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.
Unlikely. If anything, you will reduce the parsing load on the poor recipient.
I'm a Brit who has an employee who is Polish. His grasp of English is phenomenal, in my estimation. Now let's bear in mind that Polish and English are very, very different. I can't even pronounce his family name properly but then to be fair, neither can he pronounce mine properly either.
I deliberately use complex English idioms and language structures and Tom(asz) laps it up. It is quite obvious when I've gone too far because Tom asks me to clarify what on earth I've said. To my eternal shame, all I've managed is a few words in Polish. I can get by in French, I can survive in German, I can be laughed at in Dutch. I need to pull my finger out and get to grips with Slavic languages.
English is a lingua franca ie French! Keep it simple but not too simple. If you are being condescending or patronising then that is not due to your choice of words.
(Edit: Also, the english my code comments deserve) (Edit 2: and my commit messages)
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?
I think minimal languages are more like the general coding concepts than a specific coding language — if you know constant, variable, array, function, etc then you have a foundation for any coding language you want to look into, even if the expression of those concepts is different.
But will this carry all the meanings (including cultural ones) of those words to the translations to other languages ?
Also, this is the second[2] thread today that merits a mention of Steele’s Growing a language[3]!
Mine too. Some links:
https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/
References to 1984 with no context are so common and boring