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> Invented languages are overwhelmingly boring in their likeness to English, Spanish and other Western languages. Toki Pona is not like English, Spanish, or ot

> Invented languages are overwhelmingly boring in their likeness to English, Spanish and other Western languages. Toki Pona is not like English, Spanish, or other Western languages. It has no singular/plural distinction. It has no past/present/future tense. Its pronouns have no gender. All of its phonemes are present in almost all languages (this is on purpose). The way it forms questions is not like Enlgish (I don't know of any language that it's similar to). Its word order is subject-verb-object, like most languages. [EDIT: not most, only 42%] The only thing its taken from English, as far as I've seen, is a bunch of vocabulary. Though honestly its sounds are so limited that sometimes you can't recognize which English word a Toki Pona word came from. > What if we tried to create, say, a language with a logographic written system that is pure WYSIWYM (as opposed to “what you see is how you pronounce”) and synthetic to boot? I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but I'll just leave this link here... https://omniglot.com/conscripts/conlangs.htm https://omniglot.com/conscripts/conlangs.htm > Instead of borrowing around, use a random seed in generating a minimum set of unique basic “native” words according to language rules and build on top of that Lojban does this.

asimjalis 6y ago
> Its word order is subject-verb-object, like most languages. Most languages use subject-object-verb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject–verb–object https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject–verb–object
strogonoff 6y ago
> I'm not sure exactly what you mean One way of classifying languages is as “analytic” (where unit’s role in a sentence, its relationship to other units, is denoted by auxiliary units/particles or unit order) or “synthetic” (where unit inflects, its form changes to reflect its role). Most languages are somewhere in between, but languages with logographic written systems tend to be more on analytic side. What could a pure attempt at a synthetic grammar that also has semantics-focused writing system (one that tries to maximize difference in visual representation appropriately to distance in meaning) look like?
schoen 6y ago
> The way it forms questions is not like Enlgish (I don't know of any language that it's similar to). The "x ala x" pattern is directly modeled on the Chinese "x不x" (and "有没有") pattern, including the answer ("x" / "x ala" in toki pona, "x" / "不x" in Chinese). I think Sonja has mentioned this explicitly somewhere. For example, in Chinese I think you can ask "你可不可" 'you can not can?' with the possible answers "可" 'can' and "不可" 'cannot'. This corresponds directly to toki pona's "sina ken ala ken?" 'you can not can?' with the answers "ken" 'can' and "ken ala" 'cannot'. There's also the "anu seme?" pattern which is similar to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_question phenomenon in a number of languages; the one that I find it most similar to is German, with the "oder?" tags. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oder#Particle https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oder#Particle I understand the "oder?" to have a connotation of 'or what?' (like "are you coming or what?"), in which case "kommst du, oder?" should correspond literally to toki pona's "sina kama anu seme?" 'you come or what?'.
schoen 6y ago
I agree with you that toki pona doesn't feel very similar to English overall. Other similarities to English: use of prepositions, something like an accusative case (though marked differently from English). Frequently being willing to use the same word as both a verb and a noun (without any morphological changes). Other differences: adjectives follow the nouns they modify (like in Romance): jan lili, soweli suli, tenpo seli, tenpo pimeja, telo kasi. English would say small person, large animal, warm time, dark time, herbal beverage. No participles, no relative clauses, no general word for "and", no comparatives. Particles are super-weird from an English point of view, especially li and la.

asimjalis 6y ago

> Its word order is subject-verb-object, like most languages. Most languages use subject-object-verb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject–verb–object https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject–verb–object

strogonoff 6y ago

> I'm not sure exactly what you mean One way of classifying languages is as “analytic” (where unit’s role in a sentence, its relationship to other units, is denoted by auxiliary units/particles or unit order) or “synthetic” (where unit inflects, its form changes to reflect its role). Most languages are somewhere in between, but languages with logographic written systems tend to be more on analytic side. What could a pure attempt at a synthetic grammar that also has semantics-focused writing system (one that tries to maximize difference in visual representation appropriately to distance in meaning) look like?

schoen 6y ago

> The way it forms questions is not like Enlgish (I don't know of any language that it's similar to). The "x ala x" pattern is directly modeled on the Chinese "x不x" (and "有没有") pattern, including the answer ("x" / "x ala" in toki pona, "x" / "不x" in Chinese). I think Sonja has mentioned this explicitly somewhere. For example, in Chinese I think you can ask "你可不可" 'you can not can?' with the possible answers "可" 'can' and "不可" 'cannot'. This corresponds directly to toki pona's "sina ken ala ken?" 'you can not can?' with the answers "ken" 'can' and "ken ala" 'cannot'. There's also the "anu seme?" pattern which is similar to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_question phenomenon in a number of languages; the one that I find it most similar to is German, with the "oder?" tags. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oder#Particle https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oder#Particle I understand the "oder?" to have a connotation of 'or what?' (like "are you coming or what?"), in which case "kommst du, oder?" should correspond literally to toki pona's "sina kama anu seme?" 'you come or what?'.

schoen 6y ago

I agree with you that toki pona doesn't feel very similar to English overall. Other similarities to English: use of prepositions, something like an accusative case (though marked differently from English). Frequently being willing to use the same word as both a verb and a noun (without any morphological changes). Other differences: adjectives follow the nouns they modify (like in Romance): jan lili, soweli suli, tenpo seli, tenpo pimeja, telo kasi. English would say small person, large animal, warm time, dark time, herbal beverage. No participles, no relative clauses, no general word for "and", no comparatives. Particles are super-weird from an English point of view, especially li and la.