12 ms·

How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language (2015)

149 points by dbrgn 10y ago

teddyknox 10y ago
Sometimes I use a 26 word language and it sure seem capable of saying everything...
- schoen 10y ago
  Maybe that's a 26-character writing system?
  - pmiller2 10y ago
    Maybe it's finger spelling. :)
- jacob019 10y ago
  I'm more comfortable using just two words.
schoen 10y ago
Previous discussions of this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406 (a year ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534 (two years ago) I learned toki pona in 2009 and I enjoy it a lot. Among other things, I used in this MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2012/puzzles/into_the_woodstock/sounds_good_to_me/ http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2012/puzzles/into_the_woodstock/s... Related, but with an extremely different ethos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage
neogodless 10y ago
I was surprised that https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ was not mentioned, but then again, he uses _a thousand_ words in his book!
- jerryszczerry 10y ago
  I think 1000 is a more realistic estimate of how much words you need in a language, than 100. Toki pona is nice in concept, but too restrictive in practice.
  - johan_larson 10y ago
    Voice of America, the international radio service, uses a restricted subset of English with about 1500 words and manages to sound natural rather than baby-talky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_English
zdean 10y ago
The focus on simplifying language reminds me of "Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity In Words of Four Letters or Less" http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html
- kej 10y ago
  That, in turn, reminded me of Guy Steele's "Growing a Language" [1] speech on programming language extensibility at the 1998 ACM OOPSLA conference. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
cortesoft 10y ago
Hmm, it seems like you intentionally CAN'T say some things in Toka Pona. I wonder if there is some minimum that is required to say EVERYTHING that can be said in a language? Something in natural language akin to 'Turing Completeness' for a programming language? I am not sure... in practice, words are continually added to a language when new things need to be described, although there was obviously a way to describe the thing before the new word came along..
- schoen 10y ago
  Answering this is a goal of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage One thing that's confused me about this project is how much they are relying on people's prior human experience to understand the explications -- maybe a question of how much they use extensional or intensional definitions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_definitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_de...
  - ZenPsycho 10y ago
    thanks for this link. I have been thinking a lot about what the language "primes" are, and my approach was looking at chinese writing's "radicals", a small list of symbols that it combines to form every written word. i wonder also how well you could get language primes to align with the axes of a word vector, as used in word2vec and other neural network based translation engines. what would a pure vector based language look like, I wonder?
    - throwaway7645 10y ago
      APL is a real programming language used in specialized domains like finance since the 70's I believe and can convey a lot of information in a single line of code. It looks like Greek symbols because it was developed by a mathematician. Pretty cool stuff. The primitive data type is the array so it works well with parallel calculations...etc.
  - 10y ago
nicklaf 10y ago
“Darmok! Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.”
- throwaway7645 10y ago
  Shakash, when the walls fell
FrozenVoid 10y ago
The idea isn't new, 1984 explores what such restricted language become: a tool for restricting thought(Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) by limiting the conceptual space of language speakers("Double-plus-ungood"). Toki Pona is a form of Newspeak, not some mind-expanding tool. By replacing signified concepts with primitive composition and generic fit-all 'thought-idea' it removes all abstract meaning to what is essentially emotional picture of a concept(e.g. "belly-feel" of 1984).
- mysterydip 10y ago
  "Avoid using the word 'very' because it's lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don't use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason boys - to woo women - and in that endeavor, laziness will not do." - Dead Poet's Society
  - trendia 10y ago
    > Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women Rule #1: Know your Audience
- crawfordcomeaux 10y ago
  Are you afraid widespread usage of Toki Pona will lead to a more Orwellian society because you don't trust people to use it in a balanced, nuanced way? I'm learning it after reading this article for the sake of testing the theory of if it promotes mindfulness. I'm also evaluating it in the context of nonviolent communication to see if it can adequately communicate fundamental human emotions & needs.
  - jandrese 10y ago
    I have zero worries that Toki Pona will take over as a primary language in the foreseeable future. It's more of a research toy than a language for daily use.
    - throwaway7645 10y ago
clock_tower 10y ago
I'll admit, they had me fooled, and they weren't even trying to fool me; at first I thought that this was an authentic Amazonian or South Pacific language, until I started reading the article more carefully. The part about only having words for 'one', 'two', and 'many' particularly reminds me of Daniel Everett and the Pirahã...
vacri 10y ago
It seems more useful as a pidgin language to help people communicate the basics, rather than a language to be considered a prime candidate. "enough to get by" rather than "reasonably complete communication".
therealplato 10y ago
Upvote this thread if you're interested in seeing Toki Pona added to Duolingo: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/7016286 https://www.duolingo.com/comment/7016286
- BoiledCabbage 10y ago
  That'd be cool. I already started looking through the first link I found online for learning it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzWrG9iM9ac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzWrG9iM9ac
  - InfiniteBeing 10y ago
    Here are some resources I used to learn a bit earlier this year before I gave it up because there are other languages that I want to learn. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQIv3xnDxZqRaLfmxB2U5rJ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQIv3xnDxZq... http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/okamasona.php http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/okamasona.php https://aiki.pbworks.com/f/tp+in+76+lessons+English.pdf https://aiki.pbworks.com/f/tp+in+76+lessons+English.pdf http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/toki-pona-lessons_en.pdf http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/toki-pona-le... http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/dictionary.php http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/dictionary.p... There are also memrise lessons. forums & facebook group http://forums.tokipona.org/ http://forums.tokipona.org/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/sitelen/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/sitelen/
- ptman 10y ago
  There's toki pona on memrise
- GrantSolar 10y ago
  I feel like a duolingo course would be too prescriptive, which essentially defeats the point of Toki Pona. Toki Pona is not about direct translation, but reflecting on how to make yourself a better communicator by thinking about what other people hear instead of what you're saying
Gaelan 10y ago
Reminds me of of emoji almost. Ambiguous, short on vocabulary, but you can get ideas across. An advantage over Toki Pona is that everyone already "speaks" it, but I assume TP has more in terms of linguistic structure
- unhammer 10y ago
  There’s good reason to think that emoji are more like gesture than language. When you crunch the numbers (and I have), the face, hand, and heart emoji are by far the most popular — not the emoji that represent noun-like items. Furthermore, the vast majority of emoji are used beside words, not all by themselves in extended emoji-only stories. People aren’t using emojis as a substitute for language, they’re using it as an addition to it, just like you wouldn’t want to talk in person with your hands tied behind your back and a paper bag over your head. […] Emoji are a universal language the same way that pointing at stuff and grunting is a universal language. Useful, under a certain set of circumstances! But what makes language really powerful is its ability to talk about stuff beyond the here and now, beyond the easily visualizable. In other words, abstraction. […] For example, look at the tremendous difficulty that scientists have had in communicating the fairly simple concept DANGER THERE IS NUCLEAR WASTE HERE STAY AWAY in a way that will continue to make sense to humans for the next 10,000 years. Circle with a slash? Nope, could be a sideways hamburger. Skull and crossbones? Nope, could refer to the Day of the Dead and/or pirates. from http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-episode-1-speaking-a-single-language http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-episo... (via http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-episode-1-speaking-a-single-language http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-episo... )
mcphage 10y ago
> “What is a car?” Lang mused recently via phone from her home in Toronto. “You might say that a car is a space that's used for movement,” she proposed. “That would be tomo tawa. If you’re struck by a car though, it might be a hard object that’s hitting me. That’s kiwen utala.” So then how would you tell other people that you were struck by a car? Would you say you were hit by a "kiwen utala"? "I was hit by a hard object". Okay, does that mean a book fell on your head? Or someone bumped into you? And if "towo tawa" is a "space used for movement", then how would you distinguish it between any of the other spaces used for movement, like a bus, train, airplane, elevator, shipping container, bobsled... One of the values of a word like "car" is it can be used to refer to something independently of how it's being used, which is helpful when things can be used in more than 1 way, and you want people to understand you're talking about the same object in each case.
- ars 10y ago
  > So then how would you You don't.
  - mcphage 10y ago
    Then why did she use it as an example?
    - schoen 10y ago
      I think Sonja thinks that the ambiguity of toki pona is a feature. (Another way to see it is as a challenge, like a puzzle or a form of constrained writing.)
      - posterboy 10y ago
        Underspecification is an inherent feature of language. Specificity is an (unrealistic) ideal.
- schoen 10y ago
  > bus, Maybe "tomo tawa kulupu" 'group travel space' > train, Maybe "tomo tawa linja" 'long stringy travel space' (or alternately "tomo tawa pi kiwen linja tu" 'travel space of two stringy solids') > airplane, I've previously used "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space' > elevator, Maybe "tomo tawa anpa" 'downward travel space' > shipping container, Maybe "tomo tawa esun" 'commercial travel space' > bobsled... Maybe "tomo tawa pi telo lete kiwen" 'hard cold water's travel space' I'll also add that there's been some debate between "tomo tawa" 'travel building, travel space' and "ilo tawa" 'travel tool' for vehicles. I would certainly regard a bicycle as an ilo tawa because you don't enter inside of it. (A problem with "tomo tawa" is that "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space' is arguably ambiguous between an airport and an airplane!) Although toki pona is super-bad for any kind of precision, you can often figure out how to express more than you might first think. :-)
Scaevolus 10y ago
Toki Pona inspired a fantasy non-linear hieroglyphic system, reminiscent of Mayan carvings: http://www.jonathangabel.com/archive/2012/artworks_lipu-lawa-pi-esun-kama.html http://www.jonathangabel.com/archive/2012/artworks_lipu-lawa...
yehi 10y ago
This reminds me of a Rabbi who I forgot his name. There are Jewish communities that like to speak in Yiddish and others where the members do not know Yiddish. There was a Rabbi who wanted to appease to a greater audience by giving his sermons in Yiddish. The only problem was that he didn't speak Yiddish, nor did a lot of people who wanted to hear him. So, he made a list of about 300 Yiddish words and small section about grammar. It was meant for people who knew Hebrew and English (Yiddish is basically German + Hebrew + Russian + Eastern European languages). He then learned how to use all of those words. The idea was that the Rabbi would only use the 300 words on the list (plus Hebrew, English, and Aramaic for quotes) during his sermon. That way, it wouldn't be to hard for a non-native Yiddish speaker to understand his sermons.
- fusiongyro 10y ago
  If you have more info about this, I'd love to see it!
  - yehi 10y ago
    I can't find that much online in English, but here is a picture of one page of a list of words used during sermons. https://i.stack.imgur.com/itgeU.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/itgeU.jpg
- jlebrech 10y ago
  the priest engineer, i like it.
yongjik 10y ago
I had to laugh at this point: > Numbers are also minimal. Lang initially only had words for one (wan), two (tu), and several (mute). Many Toki Pona speakers have expanded the word luka (hand or arm) to mean five, and mute to mean 10. Being a barely-used conlang, it already starts to behave like a real language and sprout random exceptions that non-native speakers will struggle to understand. I can picture the dialogue: "See, luka is hand, or arm, but sometimes it's five. It makes perfect sense!" "Okay, but when I hear luka how do I know if it is a hand or five?" "Oh that's easy. Pick one that seems natural." "Sure, yeah that's easy and natural to you: you speak the language. I don't!"
- dbrgn 10y ago
  The entire language is (and is meant to be) ambiguous. Compared to other examples, I find the use of "luka" as meaning five quite clear.
phorese 10y ago
> In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-watcher. I find this somehow very poignant :) What exactly does the author think "microscope" means? From Wikipedia: > microscope (from the Ancient Greek: μικρός, mikrós, "small" and σκοπεῖν, skopeîn, "to look" or "see")
- blipmusic 10y ago
  As someone who is only half a linguist, but who work closely with established researchers, this odd variant of "language exotism" is far too common, even in 2017. For others, it's far too English-centric (dismissals from well-established researchers such as "but it's simple to express this information-dense, single word in language X just by saying (insert long, not very representative English translation of language X word here)... etc)
- donquichotte 10y ago
  These descriptive names also exist in German: - turtle: Schildkröte (shield toad) - sloth: Faultier (lazy animal) - glove: handschuh (hand shoe) - squirrel: Eichhörnchen (oak horn. Admittedly that does not make much sense.) - slug: Nacktschnecke (naked snail) - headlight: Scheinwerfer (shine thrower) - gum: Zahnfleisch (tooth meat) - vacuum cleaner: Staubsauger (dust sucker) - squid: Tintenfisch (ink fish) - plane: Flugzeug (fly thing) - vehicle: Fahrzeug (drive thing)
  - azeirah 10y ago
    I suppose you got your eichhornen from us Dutchies. The story goes that a Dutch trader went to the UK, saw a squirrel, and wondered what it was. He pointed at the squirrel, asking a local "what's that?", the local thought he was pointing at the acorn the squirrel was holding and replied "that's an acorn". And that's when the "eekhoorn" was born.
    - mercer 10y ago
      Despite your sibling comment being more convincing, I rather prefer this explanation :). I've heard a similar tale about 'wisdom tooth'. The story goes that it's a translation of the Dutch 'verstandskies'. 'Kies' means tooth (molar?), and 'verstand' can mean 'far-standing', so referring to the position of the tooth. However, because 'verstand' more commonly means 'mind', it was mistranslated. Now, Germans also use the 'wisdom' version, and Belgians use 'wijsheidstand', where 'wijsheid' is another of wisdom, so probably this story is incorrect. Many of us Dutchies still choose to believe it, however, and so we just have to conclude that both the Germans and Belgians are just kind of silly for making the same mistake.
smnscu 10y ago
It's referenced in the article and I've never heard about it before: a gorilla, named Koko, that talks using over 1,000 ASL signs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNuZ4OE6vCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNuZ4OE6vCk
- OskarS 10y ago
  Don't believe the hype. She does know an impressive number of signs to signal things, but there's essentially no evidence that she has any kind of "language" in the sense of being able to use grammatical structures, and there's certainly no evidence of Chomsky-style linguistic recursion. You can teach animals to signal different things for different mental states (like teaching a drug-sniffing dog to sit down when he smells drugs) through conditioning, and it's seems like Koko's abilities are a very advanced version of that. She is absolutely an impressive animal, but she has no true language. That, alas, is still the exclusive domain of humans.
  - smnscu 10y ago
    I've just heard about it and my mind was understandably blown, but thank you for putting things in perspective.
ensiferum 10y ago
But does it have swear words??
- xaedes 10y ago
  Probably they are just the equivalent of "bad words".
- dbrgn 10y ago
  From http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/dictionary.php http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/dictionary.p...: - pakala (noun): blunder, accident, mistake, destruction, damage, breaking - pakala (verb): mess up, destroy, accident - pakala! (interjection): damn! fuck! or... - jaki (noun): dirty, nasty, trash - jaki (verb): to pollute, to dirty - jaki! (interjection): ew! yuck! Could also be used to insult other people and their relatives: - o! mama meli sina li jaki!
b0rsuk 10y ago
Slightly off-topic, but one of Ryszard Kapuściński's African reportages had an amusing story of traveling with a driver who only knew two (2) words in English. The words were listed as: Problem No problem Armed militia ahead ? Problem. It looks like they're going to let us pass ? No problem. Low on fuel ? Problem. Shelter found ? No problem. Storm is coming ? Problem. The remaining communication was done by hand waving (a snake, etc), watching his darkening or lightening facial expression, body language, various gestures. No, it wasn't expressive at all, but it got the job done. Ryszard traveled where he wanted, the driver got paid.
- jedimastert 10y ago
  Binary language. I can dig it
jlebrech 10y ago
If you go to a foreign speaking country you just need to buy two books, one for you language and one for the other. Why not just use emoji's for the toki pona and skip a step?
dbrgn 10y ago
Some of my favorites in Toki Pona: - ike li kama (bad comes): shit happens - telo nasa (crazy liquid): alcohol - telo nasa pan pi wawa ala (crazy liquid bread without power): light beer - mije li lon sewi meli (male positioned high relative to female): missionary position - pana e telo jelo (give away yellow liquid): urinate
DaveSapien 10y ago
How to say everything with a language with only two numbers...01
blinry 10y ago
I once translated the beautiful short story "The Egg" to Toki Pona: https://morr.cc/sike-mama/ https://morr.cc/sike-mama/ The original was written by Andy Weir (of "The Martian" fame). It features a side-by-side view and might be interesting if you want to look at a longer Toki Pona text.
LostCharacter 10y ago
This reminds me of Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe (of xkcd). Granted, that book uses 1,000 words instead of ~100, I think the concept is pretty much the same. https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/

149 points by dbrgn 10y ago

teddyknox 10y ago

Sometimes I use a 26 word language and it sure seem capable of saying everything...

schoen 10y ago
Maybe that's a 26-character writing system?
- pmiller2 10y ago
  Maybe it's finger spelling. :)
jacob019 10y ago
I'm more comfortable using just two words.

schoen 10y ago

Previous discussions of this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406 (a year ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534 (two years ago) I learned toki pona in 2009 and I enjoy it a lot. Among other things, I used in this MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2012/puzzles/into_the_woodstock/sounds_good_to_me/ http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2012/puzzles/into_the_woodstock/s... Related, but with an extremely different ethos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage

neogodless 10y ago

I was surprised that https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ was not mentioned, but then again, he uses _a thousand_ words in his book!

jerryszczerry 10y ago
I think 1000 is a more realistic estimate of how much words you need in a language, than 100. Toki pona is nice in concept, but too restrictive in practice.
- johan_larson 10y ago
  Voice of America, the international radio service, uses a restricted subset of English with about 1500 words and manages to sound natural rather than baby-talky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_English

zdean 10y ago

The focus on simplifying language reminds me of "Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity In Words of Four Letters or Less" http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html

kej 10y ago
That, in turn, reminded me of Guy Steele's "Growing a Language" [1] speech on programming language extensibility at the 1998 ACM OOPSLA conference. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0

cortesoft 10y ago

Hmm, it seems like you intentionally CAN'T say some things in Toka Pona. I wonder if there is some minimum that is required to say EVERYTHING that can be said in a language? Something in natural language akin to 'Turing Completeness' for a programming language? I am not sure... in practice, words are continually added to a language when new things need to be described, although there was obviously a way to describe the thing before the new word came along..

schoen 10y ago
Answering this is a goal of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage One thing that's confused me about this project is how much they are relying on people's prior human experience to understand the explications -- maybe a question of how much they use extensional or intensional definitions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_definitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_de...
- ZenPsycho 10y ago
  thanks for this link. I have been thinking a lot about what the language "primes" are, and my approach was looking at chinese writing's "radicals", a small list of symbols that it combines to form every written word. i wonder also how well you could get language primes to align with the axes of a word vector, as used in word2vec and other neural network based translation engines. what would a pure vector based language look like, I wonder?
  - throwaway7645 10y ago
    APL is a real programming language used in specialized domains like finance since the 70's I believe and can convey a lot of information in a single line of code. It looks like Greek symbols because it was developed by a mathematician. Pretty cool stuff. The primitive data type is the array so it works well with parallel calculations...etc.
- 10y ago

nicklaf 10y ago

“Darmok! Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.”

throwaway7645 10y ago
Shakash, when the walls fell

FrozenVoid 10y ago

The idea isn't new, 1984 explores what such restricted language become: a tool for restricting thought(Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) by limiting the conceptual space of language speakers("Double-plus-ungood"). Toki Pona is a form of Newspeak, not some mind-expanding tool. By replacing signified concepts with primitive composition and generic fit-all 'thought-idea' it removes all abstract meaning to what is essentially emotional picture of a concept(e.g. "belly-feel" of 1984).

mysterydip 10y ago
"Avoid using the word 'very' because it's lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don't use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason boys - to woo women - and in that endeavor, laziness will not do." - Dead Poet's Society
- trendia 10y ago
  > Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women Rule #1: Know your Audience
crawfordcomeaux 10y ago
Are you afraid widespread usage of Toki Pona will lead to a more Orwellian society because you don't trust people to use it in a balanced, nuanced way? I'm learning it after reading this article for the sake of testing the theory of if it promotes mindfulness. I'm also evaluating it in the context of nonviolent communication to see if it can adequately communicate fundamental human emotions & needs.
- jandrese 10y ago
  I have zero worries that Toki Pona will take over as a primary language in the foreseeable future. It's more of a research toy than a language for daily use.
  - throwaway7645 10y ago

clock_tower 10y ago

I'll admit, they had me fooled, and they weren't even trying to fool me; at first I thought that this was an authentic Amazonian or South Pacific language, until I started reading the article more carefully. The part about only having words for 'one', 'two', and 'many' particularly reminds me of Daniel Everett and the Pirahã...

vacri 10y ago

It seems more useful as a pidgin language to help people communicate the basics, rather than a language to be considered a prime candidate. "enough to get by" rather than "reasonably complete communication".

therealplato 10y ago

Upvote this thread if you're interested in seeing Toki Pona added to Duolingo: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/7016286 https://www.duolingo.com/comment/7016286

BoiledCabbage 10y ago
That'd be cool. I already started looking through the first link I found online for learning it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzWrG9iM9ac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzWrG9iM9ac
- InfiniteBeing 10y ago
  Here are some resources I used to learn a bit earlier this year before I gave it up because there are other languages that I want to learn. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQIv3xnDxZqRaLfmxB2U5rJ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQIv3xnDxZq... http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/okamasona.php http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/okamasona.php https://aiki.pbworks.com/f/tp+in+76+lessons+English.pdf https://aiki.pbworks.com/f/tp+in+76+lessons+English.pdf http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/toki-pona-lessons_en.pdf http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/toki-pona-le... http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/dictionary.php http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/dictionary.p... There are also memrise lessons. forums & facebook group http://forums.tokipona.org/ http://forums.tokipona.org/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/sitelen/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/sitelen/
ptman 10y ago
There's toki pona on memrise
GrantSolar 10y ago
I feel like a duolingo course would be too prescriptive, which essentially defeats the point of Toki Pona. Toki Pona is not about direct translation, but reflecting on how to make yourself a better communicator by thinking about what other people hear instead of what you're saying

Gaelan 10y ago

Reminds me of of emoji almost. Ambiguous, short on vocabulary, but you can get ideas across. An advantage over Toki Pona is that everyone already "speaks" it, but I assume TP has more in terms of linguistic structure

unhammer 10y ago
There’s good reason to think that emoji are more like gesture than language. When you crunch the numbers (and I have), the face, hand, and heart emoji are by far the most popular — not the emoji that represent noun-like items. Furthermore, the vast majority of emoji are used beside words, not all by themselves in extended emoji-only stories. People aren’t using emojis as a substitute for language, they’re using it as an addition to it, just like you wouldn’t want to talk in person with your hands tied behind your back and a paper bag over your head. […] Emoji are a universal language the same way that pointing at stuff and grunting is a universal language. Useful, under a certain set of circumstances! But what makes language really powerful is its ability to talk about stuff beyond the here and now, beyond the easily visualizable. In other words, abstraction. […] For example, look at the tremendous difficulty that scientists have had in communicating the fairly simple concept DANGER THERE IS NUCLEAR WASTE HERE STAY AWAY in a way that will continue to make sense to humans for the next 10,000 years. Circle with a slash? Nope, could be a sideways hamburger. Skull and crossbones? Nope, could refer to the Day of the Dead and/or pirates. from http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-episode-1-speaking-a-single-language http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-episo... (via http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-episode-1-speaking-a-single-language http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-episo... )

mcphage 10y ago

> “What is a car?” Lang mused recently via phone from her home in Toronto. “You might say that a car is a space that's used for movement,” she proposed. “That would be tomo tawa. If you’re struck by a car though, it might be a hard object that’s hitting me. That’s kiwen utala.” So then how would you tell other people that you were struck by a car? Would you say you were hit by a "kiwen utala"? "I was hit by a hard object". Okay, does that mean a book fell on your head? Or someone bumped into you? And if "towo tawa" is a "space used for movement", then how would you distinguish it between any of the other spaces used for movement, like a bus, train, airplane, elevator, shipping container, bobsled... One of the values of a word like "car" is it can be used to refer to something independently of how it's being used, which is helpful when things can be used in more than 1 way, and you want people to understand you're talking about the same object in each case.

ars 10y ago
> So then how would you You don't.
- mcphage 10y ago
  Then why did she use it as an example?
  - schoen 10y ago
    I think Sonja thinks that the ambiguity of toki pona is a feature. (Another way to see it is as a challenge, like a puzzle or a form of constrained writing.)
    - posterboy 10y ago
      Underspecification is an inherent feature of language. Specificity is an (unrealistic) ideal.
schoen 10y ago
> bus, Maybe "tomo tawa kulupu" 'group travel space' > train, Maybe "tomo tawa linja" 'long stringy travel space' (or alternately "tomo tawa pi kiwen linja tu" 'travel space of two stringy solids') > airplane, I've previously used "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space' > elevator, Maybe "tomo tawa anpa" 'downward travel space' > shipping container, Maybe "tomo tawa esun" 'commercial travel space' > bobsled... Maybe "tomo tawa pi telo lete kiwen" 'hard cold water's travel space' I'll also add that there's been some debate between "tomo tawa" 'travel building, travel space' and "ilo tawa" 'travel tool' for vehicles. I would certainly regard a bicycle as an ilo tawa because you don't enter inside of it. (A problem with "tomo tawa" is that "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space' is arguably ambiguous between an airport and an airplane!) Although toki pona is super-bad for any kind of precision, you can often figure out how to express more than you might first think. :-)

Scaevolus 10y ago

Toki Pona inspired a fantasy non-linear hieroglyphic system, reminiscent of Mayan carvings: http://www.jonathangabel.com/archive/2012/artworks_lipu-lawa-pi-esun-kama.html http://www.jonathangabel.com/archive/2012/artworks_lipu-lawa...

yehi 10y ago

This reminds me of a Rabbi who I forgot his name. There are Jewish communities that like to speak in Yiddish and others where the members do not know Yiddish. There was a Rabbi who wanted to appease to a greater audience by giving his sermons in Yiddish. The only problem was that he didn't speak Yiddish, nor did a lot of people who wanted to hear him. So, he made a list of about 300 Yiddish words and small section about grammar. It was meant for people who knew Hebrew and English (Yiddish is basically German + Hebrew + Russian + Eastern European languages). He then learned how to use all of those words. The idea was that the Rabbi would only use the 300 words on the list (plus Hebrew, English, and Aramaic for quotes) during his sermon. That way, it wouldn't be to hard for a non-native Yiddish speaker to understand his sermons.

fusiongyro 10y ago
If you have more info about this, I'd love to see it!
- yehi 10y ago
  I can't find that much online in English, but here is a picture of one page of a list of words used during sermons. https://i.stack.imgur.com/itgeU.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/itgeU.jpg
jlebrech 10y ago
the priest engineer, i like it.

yongjik 10y ago

I had to laugh at this point: > Numbers are also minimal. Lang initially only had words for one (wan), two (tu), and several (mute). Many Toki Pona speakers have expanded the word luka (hand or arm) to mean five, and mute to mean 10. Being a barely-used conlang, it already starts to behave like a real language and sprout random exceptions that non-native speakers will struggle to understand. I can picture the dialogue: "See, luka is hand, or arm, but sometimes it's five. It makes perfect sense!" "Okay, but when I hear luka how do I know if it is a hand or five?" "Oh that's easy. Pick one that seems natural." "Sure, yeah that's easy and natural to you: you speak the language. I don't!"

dbrgn 10y ago
The entire language is (and is meant to be) ambiguous. Compared to other examples, I find the use of "luka" as meaning five quite clear.

phorese 10y ago

> In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-watcher. I find this somehow very poignant :) What exactly does the author think "microscope" means? From Wikipedia: > microscope (from the Ancient Greek: μικρός, mikrós, "small" and σκοπεῖν, skopeîn, "to look" or "see")

blipmusic 10y ago
As someone who is only half a linguist, but who work closely with established researchers, this odd variant of "language exotism" is far too common, even in 2017. For others, it's far too English-centric (dismissals from well-established researchers such as "but it's simple to express this information-dense, single word in language X just by saying (insert long, not very representative English translation of language X word here)... etc)
donquichotte 10y ago
These descriptive names also exist in German: - turtle: Schildkröte (shield toad) - sloth: Faultier (lazy animal) - glove: handschuh (hand shoe) - squirrel: Eichhörnchen (oak horn. Admittedly that does not make much sense.) - slug: Nacktschnecke (naked snail) - headlight: Scheinwerfer (shine thrower) - gum: Zahnfleisch (tooth meat) - vacuum cleaner: Staubsauger (dust sucker) - squid: Tintenfisch (ink fish) - plane: Flugzeug (fly thing) - vehicle: Fahrzeug (drive thing)
- azeirah 10y ago
  I suppose you got your eichhornen from us Dutchies. The story goes that a Dutch trader went to the UK, saw a squirrel, and wondered what it was. He pointed at the squirrel, asking a local "what's that?", the local thought he was pointing at the acorn the squirrel was holding and replied "that's an acorn". And that's when the "eekhoorn" was born.
  - mercer 10y ago
    Despite your sibling comment being more convincing, I rather prefer this explanation :). I've heard a similar tale about 'wisdom tooth'. The story goes that it's a translation of the Dutch 'verstandskies'. 'Kies' means tooth (molar?), and 'verstand' can mean 'far-standing', so referring to the position of the tooth. However, because 'verstand' more commonly means 'mind', it was mistranslated. Now, Germans also use the 'wisdom' version, and Belgians use 'wijsheidstand', where 'wijsheid' is another of wisdom, so probably this story is incorrect. Many of us Dutchies still choose to believe it, however, and so we just have to conclude that both the Germans and Belgians are just kind of silly for making the same mistake.

smnscu 10y ago

It's referenced in the article and I've never heard about it before: a gorilla, named Koko, that talks using over 1,000 ASL signs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNuZ4OE6vCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNuZ4OE6vCk

OskarS 10y ago
Don't believe the hype. She does know an impressive number of signs to signal things, but there's essentially no evidence that she has any kind of "language" in the sense of being able to use grammatical structures, and there's certainly no evidence of Chomsky-style linguistic recursion. You can teach animals to signal different things for different mental states (like teaching a drug-sniffing dog to sit down when he smells drugs) through conditioning, and it's seems like Koko's abilities are a very advanced version of that. She is absolutely an impressive animal, but she has no true language. That, alas, is still the exclusive domain of humans.
- smnscu 10y ago
  I've just heard about it and my mind was understandably blown, but thank you for putting things in perspective.

ensiferum 10y ago

But does it have swear words??

xaedes 10y ago
Probably they are just the equivalent of "bad words".
dbrgn 10y ago
From http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/dictionary.php http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/dictionary.p...: - pakala (noun): blunder, accident, mistake, destruction, damage, breaking - pakala (verb): mess up, destroy, accident - pakala! (interjection): damn! fuck! or... - jaki (noun): dirty, nasty, trash - jaki (verb): to pollute, to dirty - jaki! (interjection): ew! yuck! Could also be used to insult other people and their relatives: - o! mama meli sina li jaki!

b0rsuk 10y ago

Slightly off-topic, but one of Ryszard Kapuściński's African reportages had an amusing story of traveling with a driver who only knew two (2) words in English. The words were listed as: Problem No problem Armed militia ahead ? Problem. It looks like they're going to let us pass ? No problem. Low on fuel ? Problem. Shelter found ? No problem. Storm is coming ? Problem. The remaining communication was done by hand waving (a snake, etc), watching his darkening or lightening facial expression, body language, various gestures. No, it wasn't expressive at all, but it got the job done. Ryszard traveled where he wanted, the driver got paid.

jedimastert 10y ago
Binary language. I can dig it

jlebrech 10y ago

If you go to a foreign speaking country you just need to buy two books, one for you language and one for the other. Why not just use emoji's for the toki pona and skip a step?

dbrgn 10y ago

Some of my favorites in Toki Pona: - ike li kama (bad comes): shit happens - telo nasa (crazy liquid): alcohol - telo nasa pan pi wawa ala (crazy liquid bread without power): light beer - mije li lon sewi meli (male positioned high relative to female): missionary position - pana e telo jelo (give away yellow liquid): urinate

DaveSapien 10y ago

How to say everything with a language with only two numbers...01

blinry 10y ago

I once translated the beautiful short story "The Egg" to Toki Pona: https://morr.cc/sike-mama/ https://morr.cc/sike-mama/ The original was written by Andy Weir (of "The Martian" fame). It features a side-by-side view and might be interesting if you want to look at a longer Toki Pona text.

LostCharacter 10y ago

This reminds me of Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe (of xkcd). Granted, that book uses 1,000 words instead of ~100, I think the concept is pretty much the same. https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/