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.

Lots of the world's languages have exactly five vowels corresponding to [a], [e], [i], [o], [u], but Japanese is a bit unusual in that the Japanese [u] is unrounded, so it can be more precisely (narrowly) transcribed as [ɯ]. Spanish has a more "typical" set of five vowels. You would presumably be understood all right if you used Spanish vowels in Japanese but you wouldn't sound like a native, so pronouncing [ɯ] correctly usually wouldn't be one's first priority in learning Japanese. In Russian and Turkish, on the other hand, you would have to make a distinction between [u] and [ɯ]. (I'm not an authority on any of this; I just dabble in phonetics.)

That clarifies a bit, but still leaves me confused at some of the choices made.

Why include both sounds "r" and "l", when they can be tricky to distinguish for some speakers, and then use Japanese as pronunciation guide? The sounds "m/n" are also easy to mix up. Same with "b/v", which are pretty much interchangeable to a lot of Spanish speakers. I think the number of consonants could have been reduced considerably.

I like how the language flows though. It seems like a goal has been to avoid consonant clusters. It feels kind of like Swahili, though I don't speak that at all. The only input I would have on this point is that the verb/noun/adjective markers "i/a/e" would be hard to distinguish against words ending in a vowel, which seems to happen a lot. In rapid speech I see that becoming a problem that would cause it to flow less well, or breed forth a need for a de facto fixed word order for clarity.

What if every word started with a consonant and ended in a vowel, including those three markers? What if we completely got rid of problem pairs like "rl/mn/bv", by removing one or both in each pair? Could we get by using mainly voiced consonants? I kind of want to fork this project and try it out.

To be clear, while I am being critical in this comment, I want to explicitly say also that it is an impressive job to have made a new language, and refine it to this level of minimalism. Perhaps I am wary after having "wasted" a lot of time on Esperanto.

If you noticed, a ton of lexical material in Mini comes from Germanic and Romance languages, so even basic knowledge of English / German / Spanish / French is immediately helpful. Ditching the R/L distinction, or B/V distinction, or M/N distinction would kill most of this familiarity.

Indeed - it is pretty easy to "get" the language as it is (for Europeans). But I'm sympathetic to the suggestion of ditching those distinctions - not everyone has a Indo-European language background. My Japanese wife still can't distinguish those sounds, even after a decade of trying. She has to watch me closely to separate those sounds. Plus F/H, which is also a problem.

In pretty much any language there's no single point on the vowel chart that actually identifies a vowel - it's a spectrum with numerous allophones. Conlangs like this one are generally constructed in such a way as to allow maximally wide spectrum that is still distinctive. So if you pronounce it the way you speak English, that's still fine.

If you want more precision, generally speaking, the value of the character in IPA will match the actual sound value, except for "j".

You are going to get a lot of weirdness mixing a, e end i up.

Yeah, I mixed up two unrelated things that I shouldn't have They don't recommend using English as a guide for vowels for that exact reason - it's one of the most nonsensical orthographies in that respect. But the website only says "like English" for consonants, where it kinda sorta works (although they forgot to say that "g" is always hard).

That's true going between English and Romance languages anyway

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

> 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!

"T" as in "Trent" is the same as "T" as in "butter" for this person?

"S" as in "pass" is the same as "S" as in "passion" too?

"G" as in "go" is the same as "G" as in "gel" as well?

There's a reason humans invented the IPA.

That sounds like they mean the default pronunciation, and those are pretty clear.

C and G have some ambiguity, but they didn't include C and it should be obvious that G is not going to be the same as J.

> There's a reason humans invented the IPA.

99% of people can't use IPA without an example chart.

But also: "Each letter matches its International Phonetic Alphabet pronunciation with the exception of J, which is the English /dʒ/."

> 99% of people can't use IPA without an example chart.

How many % of people who are interested in constructed languages?

"G" as in ".gif", of course! And why not "T" as in "potion". :)

> > 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.

In English, that "o" is a diphthong, for starters - something like [oʊ] usually

Whether it sounds the same to you or not in different languages/dialects depends on how many "o-like" sounds your native language has. If it's just one, then e.g. [o] and [ɔ] can be hard to distinguish, because you're used to treating them as the same thing manifesting in different contexts.

And that's fine, a lot of sounds are hard to distinguish if you're not familiar with that language. For English, here's a dictionary entry: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/moment Showing IPA for both US and UK: it's a slightly different diphthong. For German and Italian (I think), it shouldn't be a diphthong at all. Not everyone will hear a difference, which makes it even more helpful to precisely define what the sound should be. Or just don't put any rules in your instructions, or tell people that it's flexible or whatever.