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I have always found Toki Pona incredibly creepy. It's like someone read about Newspeak in 1984 and decided "yes, that sounds great, let's do exactly this" uniro

I have always found Toki Pona incredibly creepy. It's like someone read about Newspeak in 1984 and decided "yes, that sounds great, let's do exactly this" unironically.

Karrot_Kream 9y ago
Sure, and Newspeak itself is based on a misguided belief in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Linguists have disproved Sapir-Whorf for the most part.
- wahern 9y ago
  They've disproved the strong Sapir-Whorf. At least according to Wikipedia there's some evidence for the the so-called weak version. In any event, languages at the extreme ends of the spectrum, like Toki Pona and Ithkuil, seem to show rather clearly how language can shape thought. Here's a fascinating point from an The Atlantic article, linked from the Toki Pona website: One student of the language [Ithkuil] claimed that it allowed her to “see things that exist but don’t have names, in the same way that Mendeleyev’s periodic table showed gaps where we knew elements should be that had yet to be discovered.” Tweak a single phoneme and arrive at a strange new variation of a thought. Tweak by tweak, a speaker could wander forever through an endless landscape of unique thoughts in a kind of linguistic dérive. -- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/toki-pona-smallest-language/398363/ Perhaps a better, more obvious example is simply the languages of mathematics. There are many concepts that simply cannot be expressed with any substantial accuracy in vernacular language. No amount of metaphor suffices to convey quantum mechanical concepts in a useful, utilitarian way. Heck, didn't Richard Feynman literally invent a new language, Feynman Diagrams, to teach quantum mechanics? (I understand that mathematical languages are perhaps better described as notation, but notation doesn't convey the fact that the concepts often can't be translated into the vernacular.) I'd argue that a corollary of Sapir-Whorf is that no language can express every possible concept. That, I think, is a far more agreeable claim.

I have always found Toki Pona incredibly creepy. It's like someone read about Newspeak in 1984 and decided "yes, that sounds great, let's do exactly this" unironically.

Karrot_Kream 9y ago

Sure, and Newspeak itself is based on a misguided belief in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Linguists have disproved Sapir-Whorf for the most part.

wahern 9y ago
They've disproved the strong Sapir-Whorf. At least according to Wikipedia there's some evidence for the the so-called weak version. In any event, languages at the extreme ends of the spectrum, like Toki Pona and Ithkuil, seem to show rather clearly how language can shape thought. Here's a fascinating point from an The Atlantic article, linked from the Toki Pona website: One student of the language [Ithkuil] claimed that it allowed her to “see things that exist but don’t have names, in the same way that Mendeleyev’s periodic table showed gaps where we knew elements should be that had yet to be discovered.” Tweak a single phoneme and arrive at a strange new variation of a thought. Tweak by tweak, a speaker could wander forever through an endless landscape of unique thoughts in a kind of linguistic dérive. -- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/toki-pona-smallest-language/398363/ Perhaps a better, more obvious example is simply the languages of mathematics. There are many concepts that simply cannot be expressed with any substantial accuracy in vernacular language. No amount of metaphor suffices to convey quantum mechanical concepts in a useful, utilitarian way. Heck, didn't Richard Feynman literally invent a new language, Feynman Diagrams, to teach quantum mechanics? (I understand that mathematical languages are perhaps better described as notation, but notation doesn't convey the fact that the concepts often can't be translated into the vernacular.) I'd argue that a corollary of Sapir-Whorf is that no language can express every possible concept. That, I think, is a far more agreeable claim.