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Gunnar_Zarncke comments on What are you learning? - Less Wrong
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Out of curiosity and because of the interest of my brother who has gift for languages we started to learn E-minimal. As its name suggests it is a quite minimal artificial language suitable for studying language properties. Above all it is small enough to aquire it quickly for real use.
I have created an Anki deck for E-minimal to learn the language and succeeded to aquire the complete vocabulary and grammar within about 50 hours (according to Anki). I'm relatively fluent in writing by now (I exchange mails with my brother in it).
E-minimal looks interesting. Can you estimate how many speaker the language has at the moment? Are there websites or mailing lists in which people use the language to communicate with each other?
There are no speakers that I know of. I tried to contact the author to get permission to distribute the Anki-deck but didn't get a reply.
I is mentioned some places on the web, so it is not completely dead, e.g.
http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?t=60182
http://archive.today/1O4fq
What made you decide for E-minimal? Esperanto is the most commonly used constructed language and even if you don't like it for many sloppy design issues, Interlingua seems well designed and has actual speaker and therefore even it's own Wikipedia.
My aim is not the learn a spoken language and to use it for significant communication. e-minimal is interesting precisely because of its minimalistic and compositional nature. Building on 'primitives' founded in science.
I have an interest in computer linguistics and having a toy language exposes some of the difficulties of aquiring a language more clearly than a real natural language does.
I don't want to invest lots of days in learning a real language. E-minmal being small but sufficiently complete allowed me to get away with minimal effort.