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Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

133 points by lelf 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
katsura 7y ago
I learned it last year as a fun excercise, and found it pretty interesting that there are so many things you can express with so few words. However, in the end you'll end up wanting to express much more and the language is just not able to do that, you'll end up lost in the compounds, and things become unclear pretty quickly.
- jan_Inkepa 7y ago
  (long-time lurker here...) Yip, there are definitely topics I butt into where I hit a wall too -_- . But with time I got much better at navigating them and have had several-hour-long conversations IRL as well as online using just Toki Pona (without resorting to compounds really - I don't know if it's what you're referring to, but compound phrases with fixed meaning aren't really in the spirit of the language). There are people online who I talk with regularly exclusively using Toki Pona.
  - failrate 7y ago
    It may not be a concisely expressive language, but I like that the small number of word units means it would be easier to use as an intermediary language than Esperanto. Another practical step could be to identify a specific minimal set of language units required for any given popular nonconstructed language. Is this already a thing?
    - jan_Inkepa 7y ago
      >Another practical step could be to identify a specific minimal set of language units required for any given popular nonconstructed language. Is this already a thing? You mean something like this question? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19331307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19331307
    - Nzen 7y ago
      Presumably, that would depend on your conversatonal goal. We could refer to the Apollo lander as a spacecar[0] in a casual conversation but that could be tedious or misleading if a NASA representative were trying to pigdin with an ESA representative about the metal casing of a booster rocket ballooning past the expansion tolerance of the o-rings, using only the 3000 most common english words. [0] https://xkcd.com/1133/ https://xkcd.com/1133/
      - thaumasiotes 7y ago
        > We could refer to the Apollo lander as a spacecar[0] This seems to be reaching for exoticism for the sake of exoticism, given that the standard term is the metaphorically identical "spaceship". It can't even be justified by the restriction to "the 3000 most common words", since ship is #1208 in COCA.
    - urubu 7y ago
      Yes, those units are called 'semantic primes/primitives': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes
      - failrate 7y ago
        Thank you for the reference.
  - chrisshroba 7y ago
    Could you give some examples of things you talk about and things that you think would be difficult to talk about given the language's limitations?
    - jan_Inkepa 7y ago
      sure! Talking about daily life works pretty well (general chit chat - asking people how they’re feeling, what they’ve been doing, assuming you know something about their lives already there won’t be many ambiguities). online, I often share pictures as I go (they give points of reference). So I can say “mi pali e pan suwi” (i made sweet bread) and show a picture of a cake; my friend could say “ni li pona ala pona?” (is it good or not?) and I could reply appropriately. I could say if I plan to make it again, maybe talk about the ingredient composition slightly. Commonly also, sharing toki pona memes/making jokes, finding deliberately silly ways to refer to things. (A running game I have with a friend is referring to lots of places as “tomo awen” (waiting house). Hospital? “tomo awen”, because most of your time there is waiting. Waiting in line at a supermarket? “tomo awen”. And right now, our homes are also “tomo awen”, because we can’t go out...). One thing I’m looking forward to doing when it gets warm/we’re not quarantined anymore, is going to the zoo, walking around, and deciding how to describe all the different animals “soweli pi lawa sewi” (animal with a high head) for giraffe for instance. Going to a gallery or the like would also probably work pretty well - you can point at things, talk about how you feel about them. (It would be more about immediate experience than prior knowledge I guess). Any activity/situation with a lot of ready-to-hand context is likely to work. Doing activities where you have a fixed frame of reference a language with limited vocabulary can work quite well. I played 2-player local coop of Wilmot’s Warehouse ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAcyPIJYOx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAcyPIJYOx4 ), where the sould of the game is categorising packages with various random/abstract designs and deciding where to put them in a warehouse. That would probably be a good exercise for any language, but it worked in toki pona. I met up with someone I didn’t otherwise know and we talked about our professions, where we grew up, etc. (One cheat is that in Toki Pona’s 120 word count, borrowed words aren’t included - but there are conventions for transliterating words from other languages if you want to talk about English (Inli) or America (Mewika)). You can go shopping and cook with someone - trying to describe what ingredients you’re looking for is I guess a game, and once you have them at home you can probably issue instructions with enough accuracy using Toki Pona’s vocabulary. What’s difficult to talk about? Time and scheduling, especially under time pressure. Trying to clear up a scheduling confusion via txt messages with a friend was absolutely zero fun, especially when misunderstandings start creeping in that can’t be quickly rectified. Scheduling discussions have been the ones where I’ve hated Toki Pona the most. Talking about technical matters doesn’t work - I can’t talk meaningful about maths in toki pona beyond the absolute vaguest of euphemisms - and while people have tried to state theorems/etc., it basically doesn’t work in my experience. Talking without a concrete frame of reference can be hard. If I can’t see you, can’t share pictures with you, can’t use emoji, etc., the range of what I can communicate is severely limited. I can say I worked, I can say I’m feeling good, I can say what country I live in. I can talk about eating flat round bread with red paste on top (pizza), and that my girldfriend didn’t like it or whatever...which is still manageable chitchit I guess, but much more limited. (There are toki pona songs that work well at this level of speech though - e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjlwov4JiD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjlwov4JiD0 ).
- BelleOfTheBall 7y ago
  Honestly, a language like this could be quite beneficial if it was widely used (maybe even taught in schools) as a fallback method for cases where you need to communicate with someone without having a language in common. Instead of trying to puzzle out what the other person is saying, you just switch to Toki Pona and use these very basic concepts to slowly figure things out.
dk8086 7y ago
It feels like taking a picture and converting it to the lowest image format. Even if you know what was there previously, it's impossible to convert it back to a meaningful piece of information.
- masukomi 7y ago
  having played with it i will say that it was an interesting and valuable experience to try and distill something that's emotional to you down into the basic basic concepts required to try and express it, which is exactly the point of TP. It's not for trying to have real conversations in.
- jan_Inkepa 7y ago
  Trying to interpret sentences out of context in Toki Pona is indeed tricky! However, "sina wile ala wile moku e telo pimeja?" (Do you want to eat black water?) can be quite accurately reconstructed as "do you want a coffee?" if you know it was said outside of a cafe. With a given context that you can refer to (in a cafe, walking in the park, cooking food), the expressive power/range of reference of 120 words is vastly greater than, say, in a letter to a stranger. This is probably one reason why the meme community in Toki Pona is reasonably lively ( https://www.reddit.com/r/mi_lon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mi_lon/ ). I don't know how you extend that metaphor to image-decompression though! (I guess if you know you're decompressing a picture of a face you can train your decompresser on other picture of faces first :) ).
  - aasasd 7y ago
    > To view posts in r/mi_lon you must continue in Reddit app or log in. Ah, here's some new ugly stuff by Reddit.
toisanji 7y ago
semi related ( and work in progress): https://concepts.jtoy.net https://concepts.jtoy.net
elldoubleyew 7y ago
In high school I was the founder of our (small) Esperanto Club. I gave Esperanto lessons each week at our club meeting designed as a one year course, usually by the end of the year if someone attended each week and did moderate self study outside of class they could communicate in Esperanto really well. We even had one international student who really struggled with english that after a few months of attending our club could communicate with us in Esperanto more fluently than English! We had one a freshman join during my senior year who was a huge advocate of Toki Pona as a conlang. We decided to devote a month of the club to Toki Pona instead of Esperanto and it was mind boggling how quickly everyone was able to get a grasp of it. Granted Toki Pona is much more "wordy" than Esperanto, you often have to use many words to convey an idea that you could express quickly in a language with a larger vocabulary. Regardless it was an absolute blast to learn and I'm surprised by how much I remember. Once I got to college there seemed to be a severe lack of interest in Esperanto, or any conlang for that matter, amongst the student body. I could never really keep enough people interested the same way I could in high school so I gave up after my sophomore year. I really miss teaching people Esperanto. I believe the club at my high school still runs to this day, I'd love to be able to go back and visit one day.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  I bloody wish there were good modern Esperanto courses. I've found a Michel Thomas method Esperanto course once but it was incomplete. I would really love to buy a complete one (even for a price higher than what other languages cost). Intuition suggests I'm not the only one interested although there probably are not too many. This means the demand, albeit humble, certainly is higher than the offer. You might consider running a croudsourcing campaign and making some good modern Esperanto resources if you really feel interested in teaching people Esperanto.
  - D-Coder 7y ago
    Have you tried Duolingo (https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto)? If so, what did you think of it? It's free, with a subscription option for more features.
elliotec 7y ago
Check out this tokenizer for it as well: https://github.com/Xe/x/blob/master/web/tokiponatokens/toki_pona.go https://github.com/Xe/x/blob/master/web/tokiponatokens/toki_...
- xena 7y ago
  I used this for recompiling a subset of toki pona to a subset of prolog: https://github.com/Xe/x/tree/master/cmd/la-baujmi https://github.com/Xe/x/tree/master/cmd/la-baujmi. This is something I wish I had more time/effort to develop out more.
  - elliotec 7y ago
    Your blog has been a really exciting corner of the internet for me the past couple months. Thank you, big fan, keep doin what you're doin.
    - xena 7y ago
      Thanks! I'm working on a blogpost analyzing the speed gains I got by porting my webassembly environment to Rust. So far it's about 50x as fast on average, but most of the gain is from using an ahead-of-time compiler instead of an interpreter.
Piskvorrr 7y ago
Good. Ten times ten speak English also good? ;) In other words, it's a cute experiment.
- bitwize 7y ago
  "If this end of the ship is pointed toward space, you have a huge problem and will not go to space today."
kazinator 7y ago
> In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-watcher. In Latin, microscope is also "small-watcher", namely, microscopium.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  That's Greek. (Well, the -um ending isn't, but the rest is.) Latin for small is parvus, and Latin for watcher is visor[1], but Latin doesn't tend to form compounds the way the Greek does. [1] Visor is literally "watcher", an agent noun formed from the verb videre "look at". Microscopium just uses an ordinary noun ending, not an agentive construction. I don't know what happens in Icelandic.
- jhbadger 7y ago
  When I studied German I was initially amused that the German word for television was "Fernseher" (far seer). How quaint! Until I stopped and thought for a moment what "television" literally means -- tele from Greek meaning "far", plus Latin "vision".
  - anamexis 7y ago
    Ditto the Polish word for car, samochód, which translates literally to “self go,” and then.. automobile
    - kazinator 7y ago
      Thanks for that ó, which I can copy and paste to make "jidósha": 自動車: self-move-vehicle.
      - thaumasiotes 7y ago
        By contrast, in Chinese a self-going-vehicle 自行车 is a bicycle. A car is just 车 (vehicle) or 汽车 (gas vehicle).
- godelski 7y ago
  In English "microscope" is "micro-scope", namely small-view. I find it funny that many don't understand that this is how languages work, until they learn other languages. Especially with English, which is a bastardization of a lot of other languages. For example, if you learn French basically anything that is fancy in English is just the normal term in French (e.g. "house" -> "mansion" or "famous person" -> "celebrity")
jan_Inkepa 7y ago
Here are some (IMO) silly/potentially interesting tech projects in the Toki Pona world: --- ilo nanpa - a calculator using the Toki Pona number system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgWCLg4H_4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgWCLg4H_4U --- linja pona - a font for the Sitelen Pona hieroglyphic system with fancy character combination logic (goes way beyond the limits of my rudimentary font knowledge) - the text is all entered in latin but the font automatically converts toe Sitelen Pona (if you try copy/paste some text from the second site linked somewhere else you'll see it). https://github.com/davidar/linja-pona https://github.com/davidar/linja-pona https://davidar.github.io/tp/ https://davidar.github.io/tp/ a website made with it. --- I worked on a R-Pi based word processor computer thing with a custom keyboard/case/input system for the same writing system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2nYoi2dAk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2nYoi2dAk4 (I ad enough time with quarantine to get it finished this week, but it's not properly documented anywhere yet ). --- There's also been a long-standing effort to get the language an ISO code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona#History ). "In 2008 an application for an ISO 639-3 code was rejected, with a statement that the language was too young.[22] Another request was rejected in 2018 as the language "does not appear to be used in a variety of domains nor for communication within a community which includes all ages".[23]" --- For anyone interested in learning but too cheap/broke to get the official book (http://tokipona.org http://tokipona.org), the next best thing (in my educated opinion) is the course of jan Pije: http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/okamasona.php http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/okamasona.php .
- aasasd 7y ago
  > goes way beyond the limits of my rudimentary font knowledge - the text is all entered in latin but the font automatically converts toe Sitelen Pona It most likely utilizes ligatures—like when you write ‘ff’ or ‘fi’, the letters are joined into a custom glyph (in proper software and context), so this font does the same for custom longer sequences. This is popular lately with programming fonts and such.
  - jan_Inkepa 7y ago
    Yip, it uses ligatures, but it also has a system where you can say put a box around text by using the underscore character w/ square braces ("[_mi_pilin]" has the "mi" and "pilin" characters with a cartouche around them, like on the second line of the linked page below), and also I think does dynamic compounding of characters (see the current complete character list here - https://davidar.github.io/linja-pona/nimi https://davidar.github.io/linja-pona/nimi - I haven’t asked the author how they did it, but my guess is that there’s something fun/dynamic going on).
miles-po 7y ago
doubleplus-good
- lidHanteyk 7y ago
  Exactly. Is "kute pona" somebody who is good at listening, or somebody who is obedient? Like (Ingsoc) Newspeak, Toki Pona's poor vocabulary and overloaded semantics lead to a very simple and incurious language perfect for shrinking peoples' minds.
  - xena 7y ago
    Sed esperanto estas la lingvo kiu inspiris Ingsoc de Newspeak. Esperanto ne havas vorton por "bad"; esperanto havas malbona, aux "ungood". Simile maljuna por "old" ("not-young") kaj malgranda por "small" ("not-big").
    - lidHanteyk 7y ago
      Sure; the Ranto [0] explains why this is a poor way to build a language. [0] http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html
      - xena 7y ago
        Sed facila. Nenio malhelpas vin uzi vortoj sxati "vieila" (de la ina formo de la franca por maljuna) por "maljuna", sed multoj parolantoj de esperanto eble komprenos. Lojbano probable havas sistemo por vortoj tiel. Vortoj havas multojn lokojn en la "loko strukturo" de la vorto. La vorto por iri estas {klama}, difinita kiel: {x1 venas/iras al celita loko x2 el deirpunkto x3 tra vojo x4 per rimedo/veturilo x5} {lo klama} estas la viro de iri {lo se klama} estas la celita loko {lo te klama} estas la deirpunkto {lo ve klama} estas la vojo de vojagxi {lo xe klama} estas la ilo de iri aux la veturilo Multoj lokojn por substantivoj signifas tion {klama} estas kvin vortojn! Sed Lojbano havas la senvoĉan veluran frikativon (/x/ en la IPA aux "kh" en araba). Estas malfacila por anglalingvanoj.
        7y ago
yongjik 7y ago
I've said it before, but the problem with having only a hundred words is that they are the hardest one hundred words in any languages. To a foreign learner, easy words are hard, and hard words are easy. To someone learning English as a foreign language, "banish" is easy to understand: it has just one meaning, so once you memorize it, you can recognize it whenever it's used. "Turn out", on the other hand, has half a dozen meanings and you have to rely on context. In the extreme case, imagine explaining the word "the" to someone whose native language doesn't have an article.
- Florin_Andrei 7y ago
  Reading the article, I realized there must be some optimal sizes for vocabulary. I say sizes, plural, because there must be some layers there in terms of usage frequency. Toki Pona clearly goes to an extreme of simplicity in vocabulary space. But what is "optimal"? You would expect languages, in their natural evolution, tend towards it all the time.
  - csa 7y ago
    Optimal for whom? Any system is fairly trivial for native speakers — they just learn it. For non-native learners, the optimum level is probably the closest to what their native language is. Simple examples, it’s easier for a native speaker of Japanese to learn Mandarin since their is substantial overlap in vocabulary via the significant Chinese influence in the Japanese language. That said, all other things being equal, the number is probably on the low side. As a simple example, Indonesian seems to be a relatively easy language for folks coming from any language to learn, even if their native language is linguistically distant. I believe this is due to the relatively small amount of functional vocabulary.
- csa 7y ago
  Totally agree, and I have data to support this buried in some drive somewhere. Interestingly, I had a famous SLA researcher/professor tell me that this was a non-issue. I assume it was because she dealt mostly with Dutch learners of English, but I found it to be fantastically short-sighted.
- 7y ago
dang 7y ago
2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191186 (Links for the curious. Reposts are ok after a year: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
DapperZoom 7y ago
As a student of Japanese, I often get confused when listening to Japanese because there are so few sounds and therefore many homonyms. This gave me the idea of a language with only two sounds, "ku" and "ka", being used to express everything. Sort of an analogue to the idea of encoding everything using the binary digits of zero and one. kakakukukakakukukukuka, as the great philosopher once said.
- firethief 7y ago
  Let's make that into a complete language: ka := the S combinator ku := the K combinator Done. Now kakuku is as expressive as any other Turing-complete language. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus )
CarlRJ 7y ago
For a humorous taste of a limited language, without venturing outside of English, Randall Munroe (the XKCD guy) has a book called, "Thing Explainer", that's a sort of encyclopedia written using only the 1,000 most common words in English.
- natmaka 7y ago
  AFAIK the first edition of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), which "uses 2000 common words in the definitions to make understanding easy", was published in 1978. https://www.ldoceonline.com/about.html https://www.ldoceonline.com/about.html
imglorp 7y ago
This concept is used heavily in ASL (American sign language). Simple signs can be grouped to make other concepts. There are conjugations or tenses -- explicit number and time are their own signs -- and articles and prepositions are usually dispensed with, much like headlines. Example "teacher" is TEACH PERSON. Plural would be TEACH PEOPLE. Student is LEARN PERSON, etc. There are the equivalent of modifiers indicated by motion, facial expression, etc. This sounds wordy but in practice the bit rate is about the same as spoken because some signs stand in for multiple things, plus the omissions and modifiers as above are meaning multipliers.
RobertRoberts 7y ago
What about an English version of Toki Pona? (maybe Eng-Toki Pona?) Why? Because English is very common already, and it seems an easy way to not only have usable words in two languages (English and Eng-Toki Pona) but also it would be useful to actually learn. (foreigners could _actually_ use this for real) This is the biggest hurdle I have with made up languages, they have very little actual utility value. As an afterthought, a simple charades like game where you have the limited vocabulary on a board, card or print out where people have to describe an event,book/story, object, movie, etc... using Eng-Toki Pona. Everyone could do it right now (even kids), and learn a new language at the same time. (one of the easiest ways to learn something is by making it fun and a game) Edit: A reverse of this - Japanese-Toki Pona, all the same words, but in Japanese. Same with every other language (Russian, German, French, etc...). Then, after you learn one Toki derivative, you can easily pick up others. I figure it's possible you could learn the choppy/odd sentence building technique in your native language, and then add other languages later. Could also be fun as a group game once the English version gets easy. And all of these would be useful everywhere... not just speaking with other Toki Pona speakers.
- _abattoir 7y ago
  Most of Toki Pona sounds like English anyway: wan: one tu: two meli: female, from Tok Pisin mewi, from "Mary" (as in, the Virgin) lukin: looking ale: all en: and ike: icky jaki: yucky insa: inside jelo: yellow kalama: clamor kama: come ken: can kule: color lape: sleepy lawa: law linja: line lili: little lupa: loop mani: money mu: moo musi: amusing/music nanpa: number nimi: name open: open pilin: feeling sama: same selo: shell sike: circle suno: sun mun: moon toki: talking wile: will
  - RobertRoberts 7y ago
    I know, I've studied it. But I gave up because no one else cared to learn it with me.
    - _abattoir 7y ago
      There's a ton of active communities these days! https://www.reddit.com/r/tokipona/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tokipona/ https://t.me/tokiponaTelegram https://t.me/tokiponaTelegram https://discord.gg/uzCUNE https://discord.gg/uzCUNE https://discord.gg/VUd5Gt https://discord.gg/VUd5Gt https://tokipona.fandom.com/wiki/Where_is_Toki_Pona_used%3F https://tokipona.fandom.com/wiki/Where_is_Toki_Pona_used%3F
richard_todd 7y ago
It's funny that they only have 120 or so words, and one of them (pu) means "interacting with the official Toki Pona book."
anselmio 7y ago
It's weird to see so many words that I already "know" from the Tokipona language just because I'm Finnish and lived a few years in Poland. The words in Tokipona have of course a "wider scope" in their meaning, but here's a few I spotted scrolling through a Tokipona dictionary [1]: "Kala" is a fish both in Finnish and Tokipona, "nena" is a nose in Tokipona which is "nenä" in Finnish, "sina" (you) is "sinä" in Finnish, "nimi" (name) is the same in both languages, "noka" (leg) is "noga" in Polish, "ona" (she) is the same in Polish. There's more that I'm easily able to remember like "linja" (line in Finnish) which has a similar meaning in Tokipona, not to mention numbers like "wan" and "tu" and words like "mama" (mom) and "mani" (money) etc. [1] http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/dictionary.php http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/dictionary.php
- jan_Inkepa 7y ago
  There’s a compiled etymology list here, for those interested. http://ucteam.ru/toki-pona/ http://ucteam.ru/toki-pona/
- stevekemp 7y ago
  I'm currently wondering if learning a "toy" language would help me learn a real language, in my case Finnish.
  - anselmio 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure the best way is just to jump straight into Finnish, no point of getting confused by other languages or even toy languages. If you don't speak any other language than English (your website says you're Scottish) there's some positives in that also as you will have a strong place in your brain for Finnish as that "other language" and you won't freeze so easily when you must speak it. What I'm trying to say is that I at least find myself very often "frozen" when having a conversation in a language in which my level is similar to another language. Polish and Spanish are both languages that I'm able to survive with but if I'm looking for the word e.g. for "Saturday" in Polish I might suddenly find myself stuck in the Spanish word for it. Add Swedish to the confusion and I might as well give up and hope to be understood in English, which is also not my first language, but at least I have a much more strong grasp of it than other languages (except Finnish) so that it isn't subject to the confusion most of the time. YMMV but I hope you get the point and maybe even find some encouragement in it to just start learning Finnish straight away. Also, since you are Scottish you might already be able to roll your R's and pronounce the letters "ä" and "ö" the "Finnish way" since at least some Scottish accents have those "sounds", which is not the case for e.g. Australian, North American or Southern English accents. Let me know if you want a Finn to talk to and I'll shoot you an email. ;)
yiyus 7y ago
I like the idea of a very small language and I think it may be very useful for science and technology, but Toki Pona does not fit the requirements. Eg: it lacks words to express numbers. Lojban looks interesting for this purpose, but it's way too complicated.
gweinberg 7y ago
I'm not sure how well this works in practice. Unless you already know a horse is a wonder dog and a hippopotamus is a water horse, when someone says "river wonder dog" will you know what he means?
- DonaldFisk 7y ago
  Like many languages, you'd have to learn more than the base vocabulary. If you were learning Chinese, could you guess what an electric brain (diànnǎo, 电脑), a vertical rise machine (zhíshēngjī, 直升机) or a cat head eagle (māotóuyīng, 猫头鹰) was? Maybe not, which is why you'd learn the Chinese for computer, helicopter, and owl.
  - jan_Inkepa 7y ago
    This is how many languages works, but the spirit of Toki Pona is genuinely different (though many learners come in with the impression). Learning compound phrases won't really help you much. One could say that the idea is to, if you have to refer to something in a given context, you try to cobble together a description, just enough to differentiate it from other things. "sike tu" (two circles) will be useful to differentiate a bicycle from a car, but if you want to differentiate them from a pair glasses you'll probably need to use a different term - "sike tawa" (moving circles) maybe! What you have to learn, instead of set compound phrases, is the ability to improvise names/descriptions for things on the fly :)
- godelski 7y ago
  This is actually really common in languages. Like the other commenter noted in Chinese. I'll give another example. Bear(熊) + cat(猫) = panda(熊猫). There's tons of these that don't make sense unless you already know. There are also plenty that you might be able to put together with context (electric + brain = computer). But we can go into any language and find things like this. The article mentions "microscope" which is already a compound word in English[0]. German has "sick wagon" for "ambulance" and "finger shoes" for "gloves". French has "animal companion" as "pet". I'll also mention that German and Mandarin have a significant amount of compound words. There's even a joke about German, that if you want to make a new word you just smash two words together. Animal that lives in my house? House-animal. Haustier (pet). [0] English is a "bastardization" of a bunch of languages. There's plenty of words in it that are compound words from other languages.
deleted 7y ago
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coliveira 7y ago
Everyone should spend at least some time learning about ancient languages, such as Latin and Greek. If you do, you'll understand that all languages were originally like that, with very few words. The profusion of vocabulary we have nowadays were formed from a small kernel that was enriched with numerous suffixes, prefixes, and the combination of two or more words. For example, as we are closer to Latin, it is useful to learn prefixes such as "ex", "ab", "co", "pre", etc., and how they are used to form thousands of new words from latin origin.
- schoen 7y ago
  I've spent some time doing that, as well as learning Toki Pona, and it doesn't seem to me that they're very similar. Latin and Greek have attested vocabularies of thousands of words, many of which have a super-specific meaning and aren't analyzable as compounds. Just one example is that they both have words for specific plant and animal species, which Toki Pona doesn't. I agree that learning ancient languages and prefixes produces amazing results for our understanding of modern languages that are related to them and is a great idea. :-) I especially don't think that ancient language speakers felt that, just because they had productive prefixes like our re- or un-, they could always describe concepts with combinations of a few existing morphemes instead of inventing new ones or borrowing them from other languages. Also, even the ancient language speakers didn't understand the etymology or structure of their own languages very well; some borrowings and compounds were already opaque to them!

133 points by lelf 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

I learned it last year as a fun excercise, and found it pretty interesting that there are so many things you can express with so few words. However, in the end you'll end up wanting to express much more and the language is just not able to do that, you'll end up lost in the compounds, and things become unclear pretty quickly.

jan_Inkepa 7y ago
(long-time lurker here...) Yip, there are definitely topics I butt into where I hit a wall too -_- . But with time I got much better at navigating them and have had several-hour-long conversations IRL as well as online using just Toki Pona (without resorting to compounds really - I don't know if it's what you're referring to, but compound phrases with fixed meaning aren't really in the spirit of the language). There are people online who I talk with regularly exclusively using Toki Pona.
- failrate 7y ago
  It may not be a concisely expressive language, but I like that the small number of word units means it would be easier to use as an intermediary language than Esperanto. Another practical step could be to identify a specific minimal set of language units required for any given popular nonconstructed language. Is this already a thing?
  - jan_Inkepa 7y ago
    >Another practical step could be to identify a specific minimal set of language units required for any given popular nonconstructed language. Is this already a thing? You mean something like this question? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19331307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19331307
  - Nzen 7y ago
    Presumably, that would depend on your conversatonal goal. We could refer to the Apollo lander as a spacecar[0] in a casual conversation but that could be tedious or misleading if a NASA representative were trying to pigdin with an ESA representative about the metal casing of a booster rocket ballooning past the expansion tolerance of the o-rings, using only the 3000 most common english words. [0] https://xkcd.com/1133/ https://xkcd.com/1133/
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      > We could refer to the Apollo lander as a spacecar[0] This seems to be reaching for exoticism for the sake of exoticism, given that the standard term is the metaphorically identical "spaceship". It can't even be justified by the restriction to "the 3000 most common words", since ship is #1208 in COCA.
  - urubu 7y ago
    Yes, those units are called 'semantic primes/primitives': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes
    - failrate 7y ago
      Thank you for the reference.
- chrisshroba 7y ago
  Could you give some examples of things you talk about and things that you think would be difficult to talk about given the language's limitations?
  - jan_Inkepa 7y ago
    sure! Talking about daily life works pretty well (general chit chat - asking people how they’re feeling, what they’ve been doing, assuming you know something about their lives already there won’t be many ambiguities). online, I often share pictures as I go (they give points of reference). So I can say “mi pali e pan suwi” (i made sweet bread) and show a picture of a cake; my friend could say “ni li pona ala pona?” (is it good or not?) and I could reply appropriately. I could say if I plan to make it again, maybe talk about the ingredient composition slightly. Commonly also, sharing toki pona memes/making jokes, finding deliberately silly ways to refer to things. (A running game I have with a friend is referring to lots of places as “tomo awen” (waiting house). Hospital? “tomo awen”, because most of your time there is waiting. Waiting in line at a supermarket? “tomo awen”. And right now, our homes are also “tomo awen”, because we can’t go out...). One thing I’m looking forward to doing when it gets warm/we’re not quarantined anymore, is going to the zoo, walking around, and deciding how to describe all the different animals “soweli pi lawa sewi” (animal with a high head) for giraffe for instance. Going to a gallery or the like would also probably work pretty well - you can point at things, talk about how you feel about them. (It would be more about immediate experience than prior knowledge I guess). Any activity/situation with a lot of ready-to-hand context is likely to work. Doing activities where you have a fixed frame of reference a language with limited vocabulary can work quite well. I played 2-player local coop of Wilmot’s Warehouse ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAcyPIJYOx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAcyPIJYOx4 ), where the sould of the game is categorising packages with various random/abstract designs and deciding where to put them in a warehouse. That would probably be a good exercise for any language, but it worked in toki pona. I met up with someone I didn’t otherwise know and we talked about our professions, where we grew up, etc. (One cheat is that in Toki Pona’s 120 word count, borrowed words aren’t included - but there are conventions for transliterating words from other languages if you want to talk about English (Inli) or America (Mewika)). You can go shopping and cook with someone - trying to describe what ingredients you’re looking for is I guess a game, and once you have them at home you can probably issue instructions with enough accuracy using Toki Pona’s vocabulary. What’s difficult to talk about? Time and scheduling, especially under time pressure. Trying to clear up a scheduling confusion via txt messages with a friend was absolutely zero fun, especially when misunderstandings start creeping in that can’t be quickly rectified. Scheduling discussions have been the ones where I’ve hated Toki Pona the most. Talking about technical matters doesn’t work - I can’t talk meaningful about maths in toki pona beyond the absolute vaguest of euphemisms - and while people have tried to state theorems/etc., it basically doesn’t work in my experience. Talking without a concrete frame of reference can be hard. If I can’t see you, can’t share pictures with you, can’t use emoji, etc., the range of what I can communicate is severely limited. I can say I worked, I can say I’m feeling good, I can say what country I live in. I can talk about eating flat round bread with red paste on top (pizza), and that my girldfriend didn’t like it or whatever...which is still manageable chitchit I guess, but much more limited. (There are toki pona songs that work well at this level of speech though - e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjlwov4JiD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjlwov4JiD0 ).
BelleOfTheBall 7y ago
Honestly, a language like this could be quite beneficial if it was widely used (maybe even taught in schools) as a fallback method for cases where you need to communicate with someone without having a language in common. Instead of trying to puzzle out what the other person is saying, you just switch to Toki Pona and use these very basic concepts to slowly figure things out.

dk8086 7y ago

It feels like taking a picture and converting it to the lowest image format. Even if you know what was there previously, it's impossible to convert it back to a meaningful piece of information.

masukomi 7y ago
having played with it i will say that it was an interesting and valuable experience to try and distill something that's emotional to you down into the basic basic concepts required to try and express it, which is exactly the point of TP. It's not for trying to have real conversations in.
jan_Inkepa 7y ago
Trying to interpret sentences out of context in Toki Pona is indeed tricky! However, "sina wile ala wile moku e telo pimeja?" (Do you want to eat black water?) can be quite accurately reconstructed as "do you want a coffee?" if you know it was said outside of a cafe. With a given context that you can refer to (in a cafe, walking in the park, cooking food), the expressive power/range of reference of 120 words is vastly greater than, say, in a letter to a stranger. This is probably one reason why the meme community in Toki Pona is reasonably lively ( https://www.reddit.com/r/mi_lon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mi_lon/ ). I don't know how you extend that metaphor to image-decompression though! (I guess if you know you're decompressing a picture of a face you can train your decompresser on other picture of faces first :) ).
- aasasd 7y ago
  > To view posts in r/mi_lon you must continue in Reddit app or log in. Ah, here's some new ugly stuff by Reddit.

toisanji 7y ago

semi related ( and work in progress): https://concepts.jtoy.net https://concepts.jtoy.net

elldoubleyew 7y ago

In high school I was the founder of our (small) Esperanto Club. I gave Esperanto lessons each week at our club meeting designed as a one year course, usually by the end of the year if someone attended each week and did moderate self study outside of class they could communicate in Esperanto really well. We even had one international student who really struggled with english that after a few months of attending our club could communicate with us in Esperanto more fluently than English! We had one a freshman join during my senior year who was a huge advocate of Toki Pona as a conlang. We decided to devote a month of the club to Toki Pona instead of Esperanto and it was mind boggling how quickly everyone was able to get a grasp of it. Granted Toki Pona is much more "wordy" than Esperanto, you often have to use many words to convey an idea that you could express quickly in a language with a larger vocabulary. Regardless it was an absolute blast to learn and I'm surprised by how much I remember. Once I got to college there seemed to be a severe lack of interest in Esperanto, or any conlang for that matter, amongst the student body. I could never really keep enough people interested the same way I could in high school so I gave up after my sophomore year. I really miss teaching people Esperanto. I believe the club at my high school still runs to this day, I'd love to be able to go back and visit one day.

deleted 7y ago
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qwerty456127 7y ago
I bloody wish there were good modern Esperanto courses. I've found a Michel Thomas method Esperanto course once but it was incomplete. I would really love to buy a complete one (even for a price higher than what other languages cost). Intuition suggests I'm not the only one interested although there probably are not too many. This means the demand, albeit humble, certainly is higher than the offer. You might consider running a croudsourcing campaign and making some good modern Esperanto resources if you really feel interested in teaching people Esperanto.
- D-Coder 7y ago
  Have you tried Duolingo (https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto)? If so, what did you think of it? It's free, with a subscription option for more features.

elliotec 7y ago

Check out this tokenizer for it as well: https://github.com/Xe/x/blob/master/web/tokiponatokens/toki_pona.go https://github.com/Xe/x/blob/master/web/tokiponatokens/toki_...

xena 7y ago
I used this for recompiling a subset of toki pona to a subset of prolog: https://github.com/Xe/x/tree/master/cmd/la-baujmi https://github.com/Xe/x/tree/master/cmd/la-baujmi. This is something I wish I had more time/effort to develop out more.
- elliotec 7y ago
  Your blog has been a really exciting corner of the internet for me the past couple months. Thank you, big fan, keep doin what you're doin.
  - xena 7y ago
    Thanks! I'm working on a blogpost analyzing the speed gains I got by porting my webassembly environment to Rust. So far it's about 50x as fast on average, but most of the gain is from using an ahead-of-time compiler instead of an interpreter.

Piskvorrr 7y ago

Good. Ten times ten speak English also good? ;) In other words, it's a cute experiment.

bitwize 7y ago
"If this end of the ship is pointed toward space, you have a huge problem and will not go to space today."

kazinator 7y ago

> In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-watcher. In Latin, microscope is also "small-watcher", namely, microscopium.

thaumasiotes 7y ago
That's Greek. (Well, the -um ending isn't, but the rest is.) Latin for small is parvus, and Latin for watcher is visor[1], but Latin doesn't tend to form compounds the way the Greek does. [1] Visor is literally "watcher", an agent noun formed from the verb videre "look at". Microscopium just uses an ordinary noun ending, not an agentive construction. I don't know what happens in Icelandic.
jhbadger 7y ago
When I studied German I was initially amused that the German word for television was "Fernseher" (far seer). How quaint! Until I stopped and thought for a moment what "television" literally means -- tele from Greek meaning "far", plus Latin "vision".
- anamexis 7y ago
  Ditto the Polish word for car, samochód, which translates literally to “self go,” and then.. automobile
  - kazinator 7y ago
    Thanks for that ó, which I can copy and paste to make "jidósha": 自動車: self-move-vehicle.
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      By contrast, in Chinese a self-going-vehicle 自行车 is a bicycle. A car is just 车 (vehicle) or 汽车 (gas vehicle).
godelski 7y ago
In English "microscope" is "micro-scope", namely small-view. I find it funny that many don't understand that this is how languages work, until they learn other languages. Especially with English, which is a bastardization of a lot of other languages. For example, if you learn French basically anything that is fancy in English is just the normal term in French (e.g. "house" -> "mansion" or "famous person" -> "celebrity")

jan_Inkepa 7y ago

Here are some (IMO) silly/potentially interesting tech projects in the Toki Pona world: --- ilo nanpa - a calculator using the Toki Pona number system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgWCLg4H_4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgWCLg4H_4U --- linja pona - a font for the Sitelen Pona hieroglyphic system with fancy character combination logic (goes way beyond the limits of my rudimentary font knowledge) - the text is all entered in latin but the font automatically converts toe Sitelen Pona (if you try copy/paste some text from the second site linked somewhere else you'll see it). https://github.com/davidar/linja-pona https://github.com/davidar/linja-pona https://davidar.github.io/tp/ https://davidar.github.io/tp/ a website made with it. --- I worked on a R-Pi based word processor computer thing with a custom keyboard/case/input system for the same writing system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2nYoi2dAk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2nYoi2dAk4 (I ad enough time with quarantine to get it finished this week, but it's not properly documented anywhere yet ). --- There's also been a long-standing effort to get the language an ISO code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona#History ). "In 2008 an application for an ISO 639-3 code was rejected, with a statement that the language was too young.[22] Another request was rejected in 2018 as the language "does not appear to be used in a variety of domains nor for communication within a community which includes all ages".[23]" --- For anyone interested in learning but too cheap/broke to get the official book (http://tokipona.org http://tokipona.org), the next best thing (in my educated opinion) is the course of jan Pije: http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/okamasona.php http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/okamasona.php .

aasasd 7y ago
> goes way beyond the limits of my rudimentary font knowledge - the text is all entered in latin but the font automatically converts toe Sitelen Pona It most likely utilizes ligatures—like when you write ‘ff’ or ‘fi’, the letters are joined into a custom glyph (in proper software and context), so this font does the same for custom longer sequences. This is popular lately with programming fonts and such.
- jan_Inkepa 7y ago
  Yip, it uses ligatures, but it also has a system where you can say put a box around text by using the underscore character w/ square braces ("[_mi_pilin]" has the "mi" and "pilin" characters with a cartouche around them, like on the second line of the linked page below), and also I think does dynamic compounding of characters (see the current complete character list here - https://davidar.github.io/linja-pona/nimi https://davidar.github.io/linja-pona/nimi - I haven’t asked the author how they did it, but my guess is that there’s something fun/dynamic going on).

miles-po 7y ago

doubleplus-good

lidHanteyk 7y ago
Exactly. Is "kute pona" somebody who is good at listening, or somebody who is obedient? Like (Ingsoc) Newspeak, Toki Pona's poor vocabulary and overloaded semantics lead to a very simple and incurious language perfect for shrinking peoples' minds.
- xena 7y ago
  Sed esperanto estas la lingvo kiu inspiris Ingsoc de Newspeak. Esperanto ne havas vorton por "bad"; esperanto havas malbona, aux "ungood". Simile maljuna por "old" ("not-young") kaj malgranda por "small" ("not-big").
  - lidHanteyk 7y ago
    Sure; the Ranto [0] explains why this is a poor way to build a language. [0] http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html
    - xena 7y ago
      Sed facila. Nenio malhelpas vin uzi vortoj sxati "vieila" (de la ina formo de la franca por maljuna) por "maljuna", sed multoj parolantoj de esperanto eble komprenos. Lojbano probable havas sistemo por vortoj tiel. Vortoj havas multojn lokojn en la "loko strukturo" de la vorto. La vorto por iri estas {klama}, difinita kiel: {x1 venas/iras al celita loko x2 el deirpunkto x3 tra vojo x4 per rimedo/veturilo x5} {lo klama} estas la viro de iri {lo se klama} estas la celita loko {lo te klama} estas la deirpunkto {lo ve klama} estas la vojo de vojagxi {lo xe klama} estas la ilo de iri aux la veturilo Multoj lokojn por substantivoj signifas tion {klama} estas kvin vortojn! Sed Lojbano havas la senvoĉan veluran frikativon (/x/ en la IPA aux "kh" en araba). Estas malfacila por anglalingvanoj.
      - 7y ago

yongjik 7y ago

I've said it before, but the problem with having only a hundred words is that they are the hardest one hundred words in any languages. To a foreign learner, easy words are hard, and hard words are easy. To someone learning English as a foreign language, "banish" is easy to understand: it has just one meaning, so once you memorize it, you can recognize it whenever it's used. "Turn out", on the other hand, has half a dozen meanings and you have to rely on context. In the extreme case, imagine explaining the word "the" to someone whose native language doesn't have an article.

Florin_Andrei 7y ago
Reading the article, I realized there must be some optimal sizes for vocabulary. I say sizes, plural, because there must be some layers there in terms of usage frequency. Toki Pona clearly goes to an extreme of simplicity in vocabulary space. But what is "optimal"? You would expect languages, in their natural evolution, tend towards it all the time.
- csa 7y ago
  Optimal for whom? Any system is fairly trivial for native speakers — they just learn it. For non-native learners, the optimum level is probably the closest to what their native language is. Simple examples, it’s easier for a native speaker of Japanese to learn Mandarin since their is substantial overlap in vocabulary via the significant Chinese influence in the Japanese language. That said, all other things being equal, the number is probably on the low side. As a simple example, Indonesian seems to be a relatively easy language for folks coming from any language to learn, even if their native language is linguistically distant. I believe this is due to the relatively small amount of functional vocabulary.
csa 7y ago
Totally agree, and I have data to support this buried in some drive somewhere. Interestingly, I had a famous SLA researcher/professor tell me that this was a non-issue. I assume it was because she dealt mostly with Dutch learners of English, but I found it to be fantastically short-sighted.
7y ago

dang 7y ago

2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191186 (Links for the curious. Reposts are ok after a year: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

DapperZoom 7y ago

As a student of Japanese, I often get confused when listening to Japanese because there are so few sounds and therefore many homonyms. This gave me the idea of a language with only two sounds, "ku" and "ka", being used to express everything. Sort of an analogue to the idea of encoding everything using the binary digits of zero and one. kakakukukakakukukukuka, as the great philosopher once said.

firethief 7y ago
Let's make that into a complete language: ka := the S combinator ku := the K combinator Done. Now kakuku is as expressive as any other Turing-complete language. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus )

CarlRJ 7y ago

For a humorous taste of a limited language, without venturing outside of English, Randall Munroe (the XKCD guy) has a book called, "Thing Explainer", that's a sort of encyclopedia written using only the 1,000 most common words in English.

natmaka 7y ago
AFAIK the first edition of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), which "uses 2000 common words in the definitions to make understanding easy", was published in 1978. https://www.ldoceonline.com/about.html https://www.ldoceonline.com/about.html

imglorp 7y ago

This concept is used heavily in ASL (American sign language). Simple signs can be grouped to make other concepts. There are conjugations or tenses -- explicit number and time are their own signs -- and articles and prepositions are usually dispensed with, much like headlines. Example "teacher" is TEACH PERSON. Plural would be TEACH PEOPLE. Student is LEARN PERSON, etc. There are the equivalent of modifiers indicated by motion, facial expression, etc. This sounds wordy but in practice the bit rate is about the same as spoken because some signs stand in for multiple things, plus the omissions and modifiers as above are meaning multipliers.

RobertRoberts 7y ago

What about an English version of Toki Pona? (maybe Eng-Toki Pona?) Why? Because English is very common already, and it seems an easy way to not only have usable words in two languages (English and Eng-Toki Pona) but also it would be useful to actually learn. (foreigners could _actually_ use this for real) This is the biggest hurdle I have with made up languages, they have very little actual utility value. As an afterthought, a simple charades like game where you have the limited vocabulary on a board, card or print out where people have to describe an event,book/story, object, movie, etc... using Eng-Toki Pona. Everyone could do it right now (even kids), and learn a new language at the same time. (one of the easiest ways to learn something is by making it fun and a game) Edit: A reverse of this - Japanese-Toki Pona, all the same words, but in Japanese. Same with every other language (Russian, German, French, etc...). Then, after you learn one Toki derivative, you can easily pick up others. I figure it's possible you could learn the choppy/odd sentence building technique in your native language, and then add other languages later. Could also be fun as a group game once the English version gets easy. And all of these would be useful everywhere... not just speaking with other Toki Pona speakers.

_abattoir 7y ago
Most of Toki Pona sounds like English anyway: wan: one tu: two meli: female, from Tok Pisin mewi, from "Mary" (as in, the Virgin) lukin: looking ale: all en: and ike: icky jaki: yucky insa: inside jelo: yellow kalama: clamor kama: come ken: can kule: color lape: sleepy lawa: law linja: line lili: little lupa: loop mani: money mu: moo musi: amusing/music nanpa: number nimi: name open: open pilin: feeling sama: same selo: shell sike: circle suno: sun mun: moon toki: talking wile: will
- RobertRoberts 7y ago
  I know, I've studied it. But I gave up because no one else cared to learn it with me.
  - _abattoir 7y ago
    There's a ton of active communities these days! https://www.reddit.com/r/tokipona/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tokipona/ https://t.me/tokiponaTelegram https://t.me/tokiponaTelegram https://discord.gg/uzCUNE https://discord.gg/uzCUNE https://discord.gg/VUd5Gt https://discord.gg/VUd5Gt https://tokipona.fandom.com/wiki/Where_is_Toki_Pona_used%3F https://tokipona.fandom.com/wiki/Where_is_Toki_Pona_used%3F

richard_todd 7y ago

It's funny that they only have 120 or so words, and one of them (pu) means "interacting with the official Toki Pona book."

anselmio 7y ago

It's weird to see so many words that I already "know" from the Tokipona language just because I'm Finnish and lived a few years in Poland. The words in Tokipona have of course a "wider scope" in their meaning, but here's a few I spotted scrolling through a Tokipona dictionary [1]: "Kala" is a fish both in Finnish and Tokipona, "nena" is a nose in Tokipona which is "nenä" in Finnish, "sina" (you) is "sinä" in Finnish, "nimi" (name) is the same in both languages, "noka" (leg) is "noga" in Polish, "ona" (she) is the same in Polish. There's more that I'm easily able to remember like "linja" (line in Finnish) which has a similar meaning in Tokipona, not to mention numbers like "wan" and "tu" and words like "mama" (mom) and "mani" (money) etc. [1] http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/dictionary.php http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/dictionary.php

jan_Inkepa 7y ago
There’s a compiled etymology list here, for those interested. http://ucteam.ru/toki-pona/ http://ucteam.ru/toki-pona/
stevekemp 7y ago
I'm currently wondering if learning a "toy" language would help me learn a real language, in my case Finnish.
- anselmio 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure the best way is just to jump straight into Finnish, no point of getting confused by other languages or even toy languages. If you don't speak any other language than English (your website says you're Scottish) there's some positives in that also as you will have a strong place in your brain for Finnish as that "other language" and you won't freeze so easily when you must speak it. What I'm trying to say is that I at least find myself very often "frozen" when having a conversation in a language in which my level is similar to another language. Polish and Spanish are both languages that I'm able to survive with but if I'm looking for the word e.g. for "Saturday" in Polish I might suddenly find myself stuck in the Spanish word for it. Add Swedish to the confusion and I might as well give up and hope to be understood in English, which is also not my first language, but at least I have a much more strong grasp of it than other languages (except Finnish) so that it isn't subject to the confusion most of the time. YMMV but I hope you get the point and maybe even find some encouragement in it to just start learning Finnish straight away. Also, since you are Scottish you might already be able to roll your R's and pronounce the letters "ä" and "ö" the "Finnish way" since at least some Scottish accents have those "sounds", which is not the case for e.g. Australian, North American or Southern English accents. Let me know if you want a Finn to talk to and I'll shoot you an email. ;)

yiyus 7y ago

I like the idea of a very small language and I think it may be very useful for science and technology, but Toki Pona does not fit the requirements. Eg: it lacks words to express numbers. Lojban looks interesting for this purpose, but it's way too complicated.

gweinberg 7y ago

I'm not sure how well this works in practice. Unless you already know a horse is a wonder dog and a hippopotamus is a water horse, when someone says "river wonder dog" will you know what he means?

DonaldFisk 7y ago
Like many languages, you'd have to learn more than the base vocabulary. If you were learning Chinese, could you guess what an electric brain (diànnǎo, 电脑), a vertical rise machine (zhíshēngjī, 直升机) or a cat head eagle (māotóuyīng, 猫头鹰) was? Maybe not, which is why you'd learn the Chinese for computer, helicopter, and owl.
- jan_Inkepa 7y ago
  This is how many languages works, but the spirit of Toki Pona is genuinely different (though many learners come in with the impression). Learning compound phrases won't really help you much. One could say that the idea is to, if you have to refer to something in a given context, you try to cobble together a description, just enough to differentiate it from other things. "sike tu" (two circles) will be useful to differentiate a bicycle from a car, but if you want to differentiate them from a pair glasses you'll probably need to use a different term - "sike tawa" (moving circles) maybe! What you have to learn, instead of set compound phrases, is the ability to improvise names/descriptions for things on the fly :)
godelski 7y ago
This is actually really common in languages. Like the other commenter noted in Chinese. I'll give another example. Bear(熊) + cat(猫) = panda(熊猫). There's tons of these that don't make sense unless you already know. There are also plenty that you might be able to put together with context (electric + brain = computer). But we can go into any language and find things like this. The article mentions "microscope" which is already a compound word in English[0]. German has "sick wagon" for "ambulance" and "finger shoes" for "gloves". French has "animal companion" as "pet". I'll also mention that German and Mandarin have a significant amount of compound words. There's even a joke about German, that if you want to make a new word you just smash two words together. Animal that lives in my house? House-animal. Haustier (pet). [0] English is a "bastardization" of a bunch of languages. There's plenty of words in it that are compound words from other languages.

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coliveira 7y ago

Everyone should spend at least some time learning about ancient languages, such as Latin and Greek. If you do, you'll understand that all languages were originally like that, with very few words. The profusion of vocabulary we have nowadays were formed from a small kernel that was enriched with numerous suffixes, prefixes, and the combination of two or more words. For example, as we are closer to Latin, it is useful to learn prefixes such as "ex", "ab", "co", "pre", etc., and how they are used to form thousands of new words from latin origin.

schoen 7y ago
I've spent some time doing that, as well as learning Toki Pona, and it doesn't seem to me that they're very similar. Latin and Greek have attested vocabularies of thousands of words, many of which have a super-specific meaning and aren't analyzable as compounds. Just one example is that they both have words for specific plant and animal species, which Toki Pona doesn't. I agree that learning ancient languages and prefixes produces amazing results for our understanding of modern languages that are related to them and is a great idea. :-) I especially don't think that ancient language speakers felt that, just because they had productive prefixes like our re- or un-, they could always describe concepts with combinations of a few existing morphemes instead of inventing new ones or borrowing them from other languages. Also, even the ancient language speakers didn't understand the etymology or structure of their own languages very well; some borrowings and compounds were already opaque to them!