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Toki Pona: A created language that has only 100 words
- chippy 11y agoThe article also describes another more complex language. Toki Pona on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona Both languages seem to encourage thinking about language and how we describe things and the world. A bit like E-Prime (of which I'm a fan).
- kseistrup 11y agoThe other, more complex, language is called Ithkuil ⌘ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil
- zdkl 11y agoIun-niu ti casexh I keep thinking of implementing a crude translator for that lovely language but lack the skills. Anyone interested in playing around with it?
- nikolay 11y agoLink to the homepage: http://tokipona.org/ http://tokipona.org/
- nightmiles 11y agoOriginal article from July 2015: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/toki-pona-smallest-language/398363/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/toki-p... The BI copy doesn't even bother correctly distinguishing pull quotes from the following text in its copy-paste job.
- dang 11y agoThanks. Url changed from http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-smallest-language-has-only-100-words-and-you-can-say-almost-anything-2015-7 http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-smallest-language-h....
- monitron 11y agoThere was a nice episode of The Allusionist about Toki Pona, where you can hear people trying to learn and speak it: https://soundcloud.com/allusionistshow/tokipona?in=allusionistshow/sets/allusionist https://soundcloud.com/allusionistshow/tokipona?in=allusioni...
- peteforde 11y agoI actually know the woman who created Toki Pona, here in Toronto. She taught me that professional translators can only translate into their native language, which I found frustrating but it made sense.
- diskcat 11y agoWait what? This doesn't sound right to me at all. There is no arbitrary skill ceiling that can only be achieved by being a native speaker.
- gliese1337 11y agoYou're correct, and that's not a universal restriction. But it is true that there are a lot of translation & interpretation jobs which do require that the translator only go into their native language, especially for large-scale operations that only need to communicate one-way (like simultaneous interpretation for speeches).
- dibujante 11y agoI used to be a DE>EN and ES>EN translator. Although there's no skill ceiling, it is still a professional etiquette among translators to translate into their native languages.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoI can kind of see the logic. It's certainly possible for an adult to learn to speak another language indistinguishably from a native speaker, but in practice there's a surprisingly large gap between that and a person who can speak fluently on complex subjects with no fear of being misunderstood, but makes occasional minor errors--or even usages which are grammatically correct, but sound stilted--that betray them as non-native. There's a big jump between 99.9% and 100%, is what I'm saying, and if you want a really professional translation job, you're not going to settle for 99.9%. And the thing is, you can't tell the difference between 99.9% fluent and 100% fluent without being 100% fluent. So if you want to be sure you're getting 100% fluency, a native speaker is your best bet.
- escherize 11y agoToki Pona has a five-color palette: loje (red), laso (blue), jelo (yellow), pimeja (black), and walo (white). Like a painter, the speaker can combine them to achieve any hue on the spectrum. Loje walo for pink. Laso jelo for green. I wonder if there's a reason for using the pigment color combinations instead of the light combinations of color.
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- 2muchcoffeeman 11y agoBecause that is what most of us learn as children? Even now, other than white and black, I'd have to think what light combinations make what colour.
- mrob 11y agoI learned paint mixing as a child, but the only color mixing I do now is with RGB sliders. I find subtractive color much more difficult. And I know more people who make computer art than who use traditional media. I wouldn't be surprised if additive color systems have surpassed subtractive in popularity.
- david-given 11y agoOf course, one of the problems with colours is that different cultures have different colour values. The Celtic languages like Scots and Irish Gaelic distinguish between dearg, which is the red of paint or blood, and ruadh, which is the red of hair or heather. To them these are completely different colours, and a native Gaelic speaker would be really confused to find that English translates them both as the same word. Toki Pona's limited root vocabulary really just demonstrates its cultural biases.
- JshWright 11y ago
- personjerry 11y agoSo it's like the vi of languages? I.e. memorize the relatively few meanings of the "words" and then customize/combine them to the context. Seems like with languages there would be a lot more room for ambiguities though.
- solipsism 11y agoNo. vi has a grammar, like all natural languages, including this one I guess. vi's is simple, mostly combining a noun with a verb, plus some simple modifiers. It sounds like the interesting thing about this language isn't that it has a grammar, it's that it has so few (and well chosen?) words that virtually every noun and every verb must be expressed by combining these building-block words. vi doesn't seem like that to me.
- arethuza 11y agoPossibly a strained analogy - but for a very simple system that is Turing-complete there is always Combinatory Logic which only needs two very simple functions (S & K): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatory_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatory_logic
- zachrose 11y agoCool. There's a similar project put forth by linguists in the early 70s called Natural Semantic Metalanguage, with about 70 "primes" that all other words can be factored out as, like you would have to do if you wrote a dictionary without circular definitions. Unlike Toki Pona or the other languages mentioned in the article, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is mostly used for thought experiments and to analyze existing languages for ambiguities and double meanings.* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguag... *"Double meanings" may not be the right word, but is there a word to describe what happens when a system is non-orthagonal and the same piece winds up with multiple responsibilities?
- mintplant 11y agoOverloading?
- zachrose 11y agoTotally, perfect!
- oneeyedpigeon 11y agoFor us geeks :-) others know such words as 'homonyms'.
- zachrose 11y agoBut within NSM scholarship, overloading is probably more descriptive than words that happen to sound the same but have well-known distinct meanings. In blurb form: "This book is based on two ideas: first, that any language--English no less than any other-represents a universe of meaning, shaped by the history and experience of the men and women who have created it, and second, that in any language certain culture--specific words act as linchpins for whole networks of meanings, and that penetrating the meanings of those key words can therefore open our eyes to an entire cultural universe. In this book Anna Wierzbicka demonstrates that three uniquely English words--evidence, experience, and sense--are exactly such linchpins. Using a rigorous plain language approach to meaning analysis, she unpacks the dense cultural meanings of these key words, disentangles their multiple meanings, and traces their origins back to the tradition of British empiricism. In so doing she reveals much about cultural attitudes embedded not only in British and American English, but also English as a global language." http://www.amazon.com/Experience-Evidence-Sense-Cultural-English/dp/0195368010/ref=pd_bxgy_14_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1ME4VECZ3R26YBX27A6Z http://www.amazon.com/Experience-Evidence-Sense-Cultural-Eng...
- yongjik 11y ago> The point is simplicity. And in Toki Pona, simple is literally good. Both concepts are combined in a single word: pona. That's how you end up with words like English "cool", which means low(-ish) temperature, except when it's about people, or "blue", a particular color, except when it's about feelings. It's anything but simple, and honestly it doesn't sound good to me, either.
- rosser 11y agoWhat about the word "mai" in Thai? Depending on tone, it has at least five different meanings. "/Mai \mai ^mai vmai mai" (tone marks added) is literally a meaningful sentence in Thai — and not one that's obviously constructed for lulz like "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo".
- maaku 11y agoWords differing in tone are only the same from a linguistically chauvinistic perspective.
- rosser 11y agoYou don't think there are differences in tone between many homonyms in English? No, it's not a "tonal" language, but that absolutely doesn't mean they don't exist, or aren't widely used. Or is your assertion that "Buffalo buffalo..." is pronounced by repeating the exact same pattern of sound eight times?
- peteretep 11y agoYou're confusing stresses and tones. I think if you say the phrase "to buffalo" and "a buffalo", you'll pronounce those words in the same way. It's only when putting a sentence together that you'll stress them differently to indicate their usage in that sentence. In tonal languages, you always say the word with the given tone, regardless of context.
- kybernetikos 11y ago
- rosser 11y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534
- thealistra 11y agoI can't see this kind of language used for technical documentation or at any kind of tech workplace. There are already nuances with current languages. This would be terrible.
- majewsky 11y agoA fruitful interpretation could be that there is no one language for all jobs. Just as programming languages are chosen for the specific task at hand, you can also choose a natural language by its effectiveness for the current task.
- a_c 11y ago> In Chinese, the word computer translates directly as electric brain. Computer has two translation in mandarin, while "electric brain" is the only translation in cantonese
- hawkice 11y agoThis is straight off the top of my head, but are you referring to 计算机？ I have always considered that best translated as 'calculator', but obviously it is used in a lot of places where the English wouldn't be calculator. Of all the massively incorrect reporting out there on Chinese language and culture, this seems pretty innocuous.
- sswezey 11y agoIf you think about it historically, calculator would be a more accurate translation - it was something that computed or calculated numbers for you. In German, calculator and computer are also both Rechner.
- V-2 11y agoInteresting. Eye is "oko" (same as in Polish), a man is Jan ("John"/"Ian" in Polish), a hand is "luka" ("ręka" or "renka" in Polish, "ruka" in Russian), a leg is "noka" ("noga"), a mouth is "uta" ("usta") etc. But the creator isn't Polish or even Slavic, even though the interviewed language fan (?) Krzeminska is. Go figure
- riffraff 11y ago"oko" is also similar to words of romance origin (compare: "ojo" in spanish and "occhio" in italian). Anyway, the author of the language basically just got random words off of many languages, see http://archive.is/6lxwq http://archive.is/6lxwq
- miseg 11y agoIs there a good sub-Reddit with interesting topics like this about language?
- cromwellian 11y agoFirst thing i thoughtof was Darmok and Jilad at Tinagra. :)
- scottyates11 11y ago“What is a car?” “You might say that a car is a space that's used for movement, tomo tawa” Luckily, it is not widely used. Otherwise, it would be a nightmare of translators, especially for Google Translate developers! Before I wiki it, I thought it was a language used by the tribes in Africa or ancient civilization, but it was created in 2001! Find out more about it on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
- kaoD 11y agoToki Pona isn't meant as a universal language to be translated from nor to translate into (unlike e.g. Esperanto). When you translate from/to, a lot of subtleties are lost (which is exactly what Toki Pona intends). Toki Pona is just a "toy" language (for lack of a better adjective), somewhat like yoga for the language (for lack of a better simile). Each person uses Toki Pona in their own way: for some it's pushing language to the limit, for some it's just fun, some others consider it an experiment in psychology, an experiment in language construction, an introspection tool, a challenge, poetry in and of itself... Obviously it's not the best to communicate precisely, just like yoga asanas aren't meant to walk.
- sago 11y agoPerhaps 'recreational' rather than 'toy' is a better word. :) The analogy with yoga is good, or plenty of programming languages. They make you better as a person, stretch you, widen your knowledge, and expand your mind, without necessarily being directly useful. For me it is enjoyable, definitely poetry. Though the opportunities to actually speak it is very limited. sina sona ala sona e toki pona? (do you know it?) ... if so: sina kama sona tan seme?
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- kaoD 11y agoI assume "sina kama sona tan seme?" means "where did you learn it from?". Did I get that right? A small nitpick: proper nouns have to be preceded by a Toki Pona common noun or noun phrase (in this case toki, language) and then the proper noun in capitalized case. E.g.: toki Toki Pona, telo Coca Cola, etc. I.e. proper nouns must modify a preceding common Toki Pona noun. --- mi toki e toki Toki Pona. taso mi jo ala e tenpo mute. tan tenpo suli la mi toki ala e toki Toki Pona. mi kama sona tan tan mute. lipu Tokipona.net en lipu Tokipona.org en lipu Reddit.com/r/tokipona li pona. lipu Tokipona.org li anpa. taso lipu Forums.tokipona.org li pali. sina wile la sina ken toki tawa mi lon ni: "el" en nimi mi pi lipu HN, lon kulupu Gmail. (I speak Toki Pona, but I don't have a lot of time. It's been a long time not talking Toki Pona. I've learn it from many different sources. tokipona.net, tokipona.org, /r/tokipona are good. tokipona.org is down but forums.tokipona.org is still working. If you want, you can contact me at "el" concatenated with my HN username at gmail.)
- Houshalter 11y agoThis reminds me a lot of a natural language processing tool called word2vec. It reduces words into vectors, where each dimension represents something about the meaning about the word. E.g. whether it's a place, or if it's male or female. And these vectors are not designed by humans, but learned from data. It's optimized so that words that occur in similar contexts have similar vectors. E.g. places tend to occur near words talking about places, like "there" or "go", and male names tend to occur near "he" and "his", etc. You can do really interesting things with these vectors. Like 'King'-'man'+'woman'='queen'. Recently a computer program beat the word analogy part of an IQ test using this. It's useful in computer translation. Take two languages and constrain a few identical words to have the same vector. Then all the other words also end up with similar vectors. Anyway, with something like this, the actual words and symbols don't matter, just the 100 or so dimensions needed to accurately represent the meaning of every word. Of course speaking a 100 dimensional vector is way less efficient than a single word or symbol. But perhaps using this, we could come up with an absolute minimal set of symbols necessary. And some rules for combining them to get all words. I know a lot of the comments here are complaining that this doesn't make a good natural language. But that's not the point of an auxiliary language. The main thing auxiliary languages should optimize for is how easy it is to learn. Simpler is better. Reducing the words and grammar is hugely important. Another advantage of such an approach, is that it might be more amenable to machine translation. Which is another advantage for an auxiliary language.
- rhaps0dy 11y agoThat may be the way to reduce duplication and bloat in the Lojban [1] root-word list. Currently, about 1300 root words exist. A lot of them have overlapping or redundant meanings, and it has already been proposed to (manually) unify them and reduce their number. Combined with the already existing rules for word composition, and the grammar, it could make a very nice language. The idea is still very far from possible completion though. One (of several) things to look at is: how do we characterize word composition? word vector adding? averaging? I guess the operation could be learned too. [1] Lojban is an artificial language based in predicate logic http://lojbo.org/ http://lojbo.org/ . Source for the "could be used in AI" claim in that website: http://www.goertzel.org/new_research/lojban_AI.pdf http://www.goertzel.org/new_research/lojban_AI.pdf .