Mini: The Minimal Language

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.