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Toki Pona: an attempted universal language with only ~120 words
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lathiat 3y agoAlso the subject of a recent “Half As Interesting”: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_d6bGAw5yt8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=_d6bGAw5yt8
- Aachen 3y agoDon't have youtube access atm, but isn't that the video where the comments pointed out a myriad of mistakes?
- fhars 3y agoA funny game I saw Toki Pona speakers play: make an appointment to meet somewhere in Toki Pona, and then the next time you meet for other reasons, compare notes when you were where, and for what reason, as a result of that appointment.
- anyfoo 3y agoI might be dumb, but I don’t get it? Can you elaborate?
- ajkjk 3y agoPresumably nobody managed to successfully communicate the time and place of the appointment so it becomes funny to figure out how everyone misunderstood it.
- albert_e 3y agoso ..the meetings never happened? /s
- pseudalopex 3y agoYes.
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoNumbers and locations are abstract in Toki Pona so it's difficult to communicate exact times and meeting locations. Only the numbers 1, 2, 5, and 100 are officially in the language. Though you can always chain "1" and "2" together and render a place name into Toki Pona-ish phonology and add "ma" ("place/location" in Toki Pona) to it to make it work.
- Animats 3y agoCan one of the LLM systems be trained to translate to or from this? Is that useful?
- int_19h 3y agoYou can see what happens when you ask an LLM (in this case I believe it's GPT-3.5) to use Toki Pona as the primary language while also providing English translations: https://chirper.ai/tokipona?tab=activity https://chirper.ai/tokipona?tab=activity Deciding on usefulness of this experiment is left as an exercise for the reader.
- andsoitis 3y agoI just tried say "hello what is your name" in toki pona in ChatGPT and the response was: In toki pona, "hello what is your name" can be expressed as "toki! nimi sina li seme?"
- Aachen 3y agoGPT3(?) is not that good, making quite basic mistakes, as in, I can pick them out and I'm an absolute noob at toki pona. GPT4 link that someone posted in a sibling comment gives 404 for me so I can't judge that, please include versions when saying that some LLM can do it :)
- cosmojg 3y agoHere's an excerpt from the linked ChatGPT conversation: > [User]: Please translate this Toki Pona into English: > [User]: o! mi sona e toki pona. mi lukin sona e toki mute... taso mi toki ike e toki ale. toki mute li jo e nimi mute. nimi mute li pona ala tawa mi. toki pona li pona e mi tan ni. toki pona li jo nimi lili. nimi lili li pona e me > [GPT-4]: Here's a translation of the provided Toki Pona text into English: > [GPT-4]: "Oh! I know Toki Pona. I have studied many languages... but I speak all languages poorly. Many languages have many words. Many words are not good for me. Toki Pona is good for me because of this. Toki Pona has few words. Few words are good for me." > [GPT-4]: Note: Toki Pona is a minimalistic constructed language with a small vocabulary. The translation may not capture all the nuances, but this is a close representation of the message in English.
- leipert 3y agoOh. Toki Pona is fun. I learned it a while back and the limited set of vocabulary really leads to two things: a) Local dialects, similar to sign-languages. e.g. "good fruit" might mean "mango" in one Toki Pona community or "apple" in another b) It felt kind of freeing, because a lot of words convey a very broad concept. It is actually really interesting to talk about certain emotions, because "a bad day" is "a bad day" and one doesn't really need to go into specifics into _what exact kind of bad_ in order to be consoled by the other person. This is not super helpful if you need a problem solved or need to describe what kind of pain you feel to a doctor, but just for the every-day venting it was kinda nice.
- IshKebab 3y ago"English is easy - only 26 letters!"
- geraldwhen 3y agoIf you’re reading, the capitals are different, so that’s 52 letters. In the real world you may encounter cursive, so that’s 52 more letters. So to read English, you’re looking at 104 distinct characters, and that’s before you discuss diphthongs and digraphs.
- stephendause 3y agoeh, I don't know. Cursive is pretty rare nowadays. You also in my opinion do not really need the capital letters, and many of them look like their lowercase counterparts, but I take your point. I definitely think English can be tricky to learn, though, and feel lucky to speak it natively given that it is the lingua franca in many (perhaps most) contexts.
- istjohn 3y agoHow many fonts are there? A couple hundred? Plus bold and italics.
- thih9 3y agoThere is some common base though. E.g.: If you’ve seen the letter “o” in one variant, you’ve seen it in other variants too.
- doublepg23 3y agoMy initial impressions of Toki Pona were that you’d struggle to communicate anything more than basic thoughts but people in the community have told me they’ve had robust philosophical conversations. Seems like a wonderful group of people in my interactions.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago> people in the community have told me they’ve had robust philosophical conversations. I wonder if they were both having the same conversation.
- dancemethis 3y agoIn a way, this is pretty amusing. Two people ending up having very different conversations... talking to each other.
- labster 3y agoReminds me of some ex girlfriends.
- kian 3y agoI wonder that about all conversations.
- shadowofneptune 3y agoThat's part of the idea. It's that you slow down, try to figure out what exactly the other person means by what they are saying. In a language with a fixed vocabulary, context becomes even more important than normal.
- grotorea 3y agoSounds like the opposite problem from lojban, where having highly precise conversation is possible (and like most of the point) but effortful to achieve.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- qawwads 3y ago[dead]
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoHow many words for snow?
- schoen 3y agoNone! But you could say "ko lete", "walo lete", "ijo lete", or "lete", I guess. Or "telo lete pi kiwen mute ala" which is kind of a nuisance. ("Not-very-hard cold water.") I think "telo lete walo" or "ko lete walo" would be widely understood.
- Jiro 3y agoThis is like writibg a new computer language which doesn't contain functions or any equivalent, and that in that language instead of using a function you can just inline the contents of the function instead.
- int_19h 3y agoNothing prevents you from defining a new word and then using it. The problem, rather, is that any such definition will be confined to that conversation, or at least that group of speakers - there are no "reusable libraries".
- jaza 3y agoAll ~120 of them.
- Kivutar 3y agoI've been reading, writing, and translating text in Toki Pona for a year. My main criticism of the language is that the word are so abstract that understanding spoken Toki Pona at real speed is practically impossible. Too many possible translations. Too many ways of combining these words, and no mechanism to identify which words form a compound.
- Zuiii 3y ago> Too many possible translations. In that sense, is it like deciphering Moby Dick in Emoji (Emoji Dick)[1] but with more consistency? 1: https://ia800305.us.archive.org/7/items/emojidick/emojidick.pdf https://ia800305.us.archive.org/7/items/emojidick/emojidick....
- passion__desire 3y agoTeach chatgpt toki pona ?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aziaziazi 3y agoIt already knows ;)
- aziaziazi 3y agoI didn’t understand English at real speed either during my first years of learning. There’s a moment you easily understand all words in a conversation but it still require a bit subconscious effort so you don’t have enough “cortex RAM” left to understand the whole conversation meaning at first read/ear.
- bowsamic 3y agoBut the whole point is that English and Toki Pona are totally different languages and Toki Pona has a property which makes it harder than English to understand at speed. You can't treat all languages the same. Just because you struggled with English doesn't mean that English is as hard to understand as speed as Toki Pona
- WaffleIronMaker 3y agoIf you're interested in Toki Pona, you may also enjoy jan Misali's "12 days of toki pona": https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjOmpMyMxd8T9lZjF36c4mn4YgwZ4ToT6 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjOmpMyMxd8T9lZjF36c4mn4Y...
- skybrian 3y agoIf this is too minimalist for you, another interesting conlang is 'Mini' which has 1000 words. I haven't tried it, but I've heard it's pretty easy to learn. https://minilanguage.com/ https://minilanguage.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36788783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36788783
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- revid 3y agoThis was recently on a textbin, glad I backed it up: A More Refined Minimal Language Inspired by Toki Pona & SpamTec & Ytcracker Basic Vocabulary: suno - sun, light, day moku - food, eat tomo - shelter, place, structure telo - drink, water, fluid jan - individual, person soweli - creature, animal kama - future, approach, event tawa - move, direction, towards ni - this, present mi - self, I sina - other, you ona - they, he, she, it Grammar: Basic Structure: Subject + Verb (or Predicate) mi moku. - I eat. sina suno. - You shine or You are sunny. Direct Objects are introduced with "e": mi moku e telo. - I consume water. (I drink water.) sina tawa e tomo. - You move towards the shelter. (You go to the house.) Questions: For yes/no questions, use "seme" after the verb. mi moku seme? - Do I eat? sina tawa seme? - Are you moving? For open-ended questions, place "seme" where the unknown is. seme li moku? - Who eats? sina tawa e seme? - Where are you going? Tense Indication: Past: Use pini before the verb. Future: Use kama before the verb. mi pini moku. - I previously ate. (I ate.) mi kama moku. - I will eat soon. (I will eat.) Negation: Use ala after the verb. mi moku ala. - I don't eat. Possession: Use pi between the possessor and the thing possessed. mi pi tomo. - My house. sina pi moku. - Your food. ------------ If anyone is interested in practicing with me, let me know!
- phreeza 3y agoWhat is spamtec & ytcracker ?
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoVery cool language! As something auxlang like it seems to have a lot of similar issues encountered when creating the vocabulary as other auxlangs but that's not usually a problem for me since I know a bunch of romance and South Asian languages. Thanks for sharing!
- kindawinda 3y agoI've been delving deep into the structure of toki pona and noticed some intriguing gaps: Abstract concepts - The language seems to skate over complex philosophical or scientific ideas. You won't find an easy way to express ideas like "justice" or "quantum". It's a testament to its minimalist design, but it also means some concepts are lost in translation. Specific flora/fauna - While you can use terms like "kili", "kala", or "soweli" to describe plants, fish, or mammals, respectively, don't expect to convey specific species such as "maple tree" or "cat". It's a broad brush approach that lacks granularity. Intensive modifiers - Toki pona leans hard on the word "mute" for intensifiers. This simplification might hinder nuanced expressions, as there's a big gap between "mute" and a neutral descriptor. Collective nouns - The language only really has "kulupu" to describe collectives. So, distinguishing between, say, a "flock" and a "crowd" might get tricky. Idiomatic phrases - A repertoire of idioms or set phrases for common topics would make conversations feel more culturally rich and engaging. It's one thing to communicate efficiently, but another to do so with character and flair. This isn't criticism but an observation of the trade-offs made for simplicity. Every language has its quirks, and understanding these nuances can make for a richer linguistic experience.
- revid 3y agothis was circulating on usenet in early 2000s for a while, id love to see it official: # Toki Pona: Snoufax II Advanced ## Basic Particles - *a* - particle - *e* - object marker - *en* - and - *la* - used for conditions and time - *li* - links subject and predicate - *o* - vocative particle - *pi* - of ## Tense and Aspect Modifiers - *sili* - Continuous or ongoing. "mi sili toki" – I am speaking. ## Moods and Modality - *kin* - Potentiality (can/might). "mi kin toki" – I might speak. ## Technical and Scientific Terms - *ilo sona* - Computer (knowledge tool). "mi kepeken ilo sona" – I use a computer. ## Abstract Concepts - *pona nasin* - Justice (right way/path). "pona nasin li tawa mi" – Justice is important to me. ## Idiomatic Expressions - *pakala luka* - Break a limb (good luck). "pakala luka tawa sina!" – Break a leg (Good luck)! ## Politeness Levels - *sewi* - To elevate the status of the person being spoken to. "sewi jan Lisa, mi toki tawa sina" – Honorable Lisa, I speak to you. ## Detailed Descriptors - *jelo pimeja* - Dark yellow (like mustard). "mi jo e tomo jelo pimeja" – I have a mustard-colored house. ## Complex Syntax - *seme* - Universally before a statement to make it interrogative. "seme sina toki?" – Are you speaking? ## Pronouns - *ono* - Neutral pronoun (they/them). "ono li toki tawa mi" – They are speaking to me. ## Numerical System - *ten* - Ten. "mi jo e ten tomo" – I have ten houses. ## Prefixes/Suffixes for Intensifiers - *suli-* - A prefix to mean "very/big". "suli-pona" – Very good. ## Passive Voice - *palisa* - Passive. "mi palisa toki" – I am spoken to. ## Directional Particles - *noka* - Toward. "mi tawa noka tomo" – I am going towards the house. - *monsi* - Away from. "mi tawa monsi tomo" – I am moving away from the house. ## Negation of Modality - *ala kin* - Cannot, impossible. "mi ala kin toki" – I can't speak. ## Temporal Phrases - *tenpo pini* - Previously, before. "tenpo pini la, mi toki" – I spoke before. - *tenpo kama* - Soon, later. "tenpo kama la, mi toki" – I will speak later. ## Comparison and Superlatives - *sama lili* - Less like, lesser. "mi sama lili jan Lisa" – I am less like Lisa. - *sama suli* - More like, greater. "mi sama suli jan Lisa" – I am more like Lisa. ## Conditional Statements - *sama... la* - If... then... "sama toki pona li pona tawa sina la, sina toki kepeken ona" – If you like Toki Pona, then you speak using it. ## Reflexive Actions - *sama mi* - Myself. "mi toki tawa sama mi" – I talk to myself. ## Possession - *pi mi* - Mine. "tomo ni li pi mi" – This house is mine. ## Emphasis Particle - *kin li* - Emphasizes the action or state. "mi kin li toki!" – I really am speaking! ## Uncertainty or Hesitation - *...anu...* - Either... or... "mi toki anu toki ala" – I either speak or don't. ## Verb Structures - *li... e* - Direct object indicator. "mi li toki e toki" – I speak the language. - *tan... tawa* - Cause and effect. "mi tan tomo tawa tomo sona" – I go from home to school. ## Adjectives and Adverbs - *sama sona* - Intelligently, knowledgeably. "ona li toki sama sona" – He speaks intelligently. - *pona mute* - Very well. "mi toki pona mute" – I speak very well.
- _hzw 3y agoA game idea: you wake up and find yourself in a mysterious land where people speak only Toki Pona. You don’t know why you are there and how to get out of there. In order to go home you have to learn the language and discover the secret of the land through interactions with NPCs.
- labster 3y agoA long time ago, a tribe of linguist PhDs settled on the island, because funding for the humanities dried up, and tenure track jobs vanished into myth. They were forced to settle on a remote island because it was the closest place with affordable housing.
- ComposedPattern 3y agoLinguistics is in the social sciences, not the humanities.
- Sharlin 3y agoThat's dependent on the country (and even the individual university?) In my experience linguistics are definitely under humanities.
- fudged71 3y agoYou could construct this game entirely through a ChatGPT prompt today
- _hzw 3y agoI am sure one can have fun with ChatGPT with this prompt. But making a good game out of it to help others learn Toki Pona would be a great challenge. What game engine? What type of game? How to make the story compelling? The game should progressively replace the main language with Toki Pona as the gamer acquires the language skills, at the end there will only Toki Pona, maybe even the game interface will be completely Toki Pona. It will be a fun project to work on :-)
- florianist 3y agoI love Toki Pona and have been using it for a little while. You can check my YouTube channel if you wish to see/hear it live in action: https://www.youtube.com/@janPolijan https://www.youtube.com/@janPolijan Toki Pona gives you the fun part of using a foreign language, but it skips the boring part of having to learn a ton a grammar and vocabulary. And the phonology is delightfully simple, so you won't have a bad accent. There's a growing and very active community around it and people write and share novels and songs. But it's also useful just as a personal language because it's really like a game for your mind. After a while, you reach proficiency and then fluency and it gets even better. It is absolutely possible to explain fairly complex things if you continue to push it. You obviously wouldn't want to do engineering in Toki Pona, but explaining quite complex topics is absolutely possible if you really desire (for example, someone has put a YouTube video explaining non-euclidean geometry in Toki Pona). One final thing: contrary to popular belief, Toki Pona is not designed to be as minimal as possible (the "tuki tiki" conlang with only 39 words modifies Toki Pona and pushes towards true minimalism). Toki Pona sure is tiny, but it's mostly designed to be fun and retain expressiveness.
- ghayes 3y agoI guess my question is: as you invent new phrases to describe more complex words, aren’t you effectively expanding the size of the language, even if this is “implicit”? Snowman in English is counted as a word, for instance. The advantage here of compound words is that you can easily get a gist without knowing exactly the meaning, similar to characters in Chinese that have a phonetic and meaning radical both present.
- chris_st 3y agoJust like in English: "Show up" is, ostensibly, two words, but it's a phrase with a different meaning that either "show" or "up". So yes, pretty much. But "Blue Sky" is two words indicating a single thing, but that thing is both "blue" and "sky", so no, you're not really expanding the language. That said, I don't speak Tiki Pona, so I don't know how the language is used by the various communities that actually speak it.
- iLoveOncall 3y agoThe Wikipedia pages says explicitly that "However, it was not created as an international auxiliary language. [...] The language is designed to help users concentrate on basic things and to promote positive thinking". So it seems like the HN title is wrong, and it explains the limitations pointed out in a few comments.
- fudged71 3y agoConsider if you could draft English longform content by using a chorded keyboard and a conlang like Toki Pona, by feeding it through an LLM. That would be sort of like stenography shorthand
- shrubble 3y agoIt would be interesting to see if the English output would be close to what was intended...
- jxdxbx 3y agoI am curious how this differs conceptually from "Basic English" which always struck me as quite linguistically naive. English is full of prepositional verbs like "shut up" that have a specific meaning that you have to just memorize. So when you're listing out the "vocabulary" of some reduced version of English, you have to count "shut" "up" and "shut up" as different words. Or "break up with" to mean to end a romantic relationship. It's a set phrase with a defined meaning, not just a phrase whose meaning is apparent from the words used. It needs its own entry in a dictionary. edit: Not to mention compound words in English, which any linguist would say are just one word ("hot dog") but because of spelling conventions, people tend to parse as two words. (In English, you can tell when something has become a compound noun by the stress pattern; John McWhorter calls this "backshift" and it's also the difference between the noun and verb forms of words like "record" and "rebel.")
- jamilton 3y agoIt's somewhat similar conceptually to Basic English, yes. A notable additional limitation is limited support for compound phrases.
- bfung 3y agoSo fun! Seems like it’d be way easier to parse/AST Tokki Pona than many natural languages we have. Is there some translation website built for it? (I see some chatgpt attempts at this in this thread) Very cool!
- kaoD 3y agoToki Pona is very ambiguous so it's actually harder to parse. All words can be used as any part of speech, so the parsing itself is often derived from context. E.g. "mi wile tawa wawa" could be parsed as: - "mi (wile) (tawa wawa)" ("I want, towards strength") - "mi (wile tawa (wawa))" ("I want to go powerfully/quick")
- poutinepapi 3y agoConlangs(Constructed languages) are fascinating! Apart from Toki Pona, I can recommend checking out Esperanto and Solresol, two other attempts at international languages. I wonder how fast a community could learn Toki Pona if that was the only way of communicating and nothing else was allowed? It'd be interesting to see who has less and more difficulty sectioned by age, culture, education level, etc... Also worth mentioning that Toki Pona was created by Sonja Lang(a fellow Canadian <3) during a period of depression. Here's her main website where you can see more of her work: https://www.lang.sg/ https://www.lang.sg/
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago[name redacted] created Toki Pona after some years of activity in the Esperanto movement, so the two languages have a shared history. This is also why people miss the point when they complain on these HN threads about Toki Pona apparently not being a full, usable language: there was already Esperanto for that, Toki Pona was intentionally created as an experiment, a sort of conlang Oulipo.
- ShannonLimiter 3y agoDon’t you mean Sonja Lang?
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoApparently the creator now goes by that name. I was writing out of my own memories of knowing the person under a previous name in the Esperanto and general conlang community over two decades ago.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jstarfish 3y agoAll of these are glorified Swadesh lists. The concept dates back to the 1950s. Semdom.org (and/or rapidwords.net) has some useful checklists if you're looking to create a comprehensive vocabulary or map concepts across existing ones.
- ta8903 3y ago>epiku (nimi ku suli) > > adjective: epic, awesome Not sure if this is meant to be a joke, but I like it.
- i8comments 3y agoAn universal language!... ...like the one we're using right now? With only 120 words... ...me could try talk like caveman.
- StimDeck 3y ago[dead]
- ben0x539 3y agoYeah, not falling for that, clearly an attempt to drastically lower the entropy of people's correct horse battery staple passphrases.
- ribit 3y agoThe “only 120 words” is an intriguing idea (and illustrates just how far one can come with periphrasis alone), but if this were an actually actively spoken language the lexicon would likely quickly expand, first to include conventionalized composita, which will probably soon grammaticalize as new roots. I’m also not sure whether most of the existing grammatical markers would survive long, in particular “li” seems redundant and would likely be optimized away in just a few generations. Similarly, the grammar would likely become more complex and gain complex clauses and some grammatical markers for event structure (e.g. time specification) - these are all important things which right now are not ergonomic to use. At any rate, very smart exercise in linguistic minimalism. I wonder whether even smaller languages are viable using data driven design (e.g. via mining large language corpora for particularly well connected lexical meanings to identify most useful concepts for periphrasis)
- nojs 3y agoI mean you can speak in binary with only two “words”, so the 120 word claim alone doesn’t mean much.
- ribit 3y agoIt’s a bit more complicated than this. Of course you can represent any information with any kind of coding schema but here the truck to find a schema that’s also reasonably efficient. As so often, this is about compression. In the context of human language, the problem is finding the smallest set of lexical concepts such that you can express a wide range of meanings with minimal combinations. A lexical principal component analysis if you want. But yes, quite a lot of things about languages have been subject to unhealthy sensationalism, like the story with “over 50 words for snow in Eskimo” or “Piranhas unable to count”. Linguistics is not that easy.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- _nalply 3y agoYou also could talk with only one word (unary system), but this misses the mark completely. I experimented to design a variant of Toki Pona with only two-syllable words, but then I realized that's why it's a linguist who designed Toki Pona. One of the points: the phonemes in a language are not evenly distributed, and even the combinations thereof are not. For example, /ne/ might be twice as frequent than /pa/. I as a programmer started with something like an uniform distribution, and immediately realized that it felt awkward. It's like the secret sauce: choose the right 120 words and their pronunciation wisely!
- Proven 3y ago[dead]
- pajop 3y agosee also: https://duostories.org/tok-en https://duostories.org/tok-en
- pavlov 3y agoRISC but for speech instead of computer programs. The thing missing from this analogy is compilation. RISC machine code isn't supposed to be manually written most of the time. I wonder if there's something similar that could be applied to human communication? As in, an intermediate simplified language that's rarely written or read on its own, but instead provides disambiguation between human languages?
- monkmonk 3y agoI wrote a little pop-up dictionary extension for learning Toki Pona a while ago, check it out! It's inspired by the zhongwen extension for Chinese: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toki/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toki/
- bullen 3y agoMade talk only four (cheated four is not actually in there) http://move.rupy.se/file/talk.txt http://move.rupy.se/file/talk.txt Emoticon chat is the future.
- c120 3y agoHeard about the language about 2 months ago and yes, it's fascinating. Also it's understood by ChatGPT (at least version 4). I asked it for "my hovercraft is full of eels" and got "tomo tawa mi li jo e kala mute" which a speaker of Toki Pona confirmed is a good translation. (Roughly: "My moving house has many fish") Asking ChatGPT to translate it back a month later got "My vehicle contains many fish." which is not bad for a language that relies on context a lot. Once Duolingo starts a Toki Pona course, I'm in.
- Paul_S 3y agoI found it curious that you can ask chat gpt to talk to you in toki pona. Explain in toki pona what is toki pona. ChatGPT: toki pona li toki pi toki lili. ona li pali e nimi mute lili tan toki mute. ona li jo e nimi luka wan e nimi tu. nimi luka li jo e nimi tu lon toki mute. nimi mute li ken toki e sitelen sin sama nimi luka. nimi lili mute li pona tawa toki pi toki pona. sina ken toki e ni: "toki pona li toki tawa pi toki lili." Can someone who speaks toki pona tell us if he's doing a good job?
- int_19h 3y agoYou can ask ChatGPT to talk to you in just about anything - Lojban, say, or Old Norse. And it will usually do so, but the quality will vary considerably depending on the language (e.g. it doesn't know Lojban nearly as well as it thinks it does).
- 317070 3y agoAsk ChatGPT, but in a new chat.
- fsiefken 3y agoThere is a way to write Toki Pona in Sitelen Emoji https://omniglot.com/conscripts/sitelenemoji.htm https://omniglot.com/conscripts/sitelenemoji.htm
- al_be_back 3y agointeresting project, for fun yes, but it seems it's based on an outdated assumption that 'thoughts are determined by language' [1] a sort of buy-one-get-one free. However, human languages haven't been widely adopted with much success when designed/created top-down. Even more advanced and well developed languages such as Esperanto, haven't take off, though more widely adopted. Personally I agree with Prof Steven Pinker, that Language is an Instinct, and that it evolves in communities, in stages, such as 'pidgin -> creole -> first/native language', most importantly developed & fortified by children. The human brain has capacity for storing, processing and remembering tens of thousands of words, example [2]: - 13K words for an average 3-year-old - 60K words on average by the time they graduate from high-school - a 3-year-old is likely to remember a new word casually mentioned in a conversation for up to 5 weeks you may save in storage at the expense of processing, orchestrating, learning, and rather crucially accessibility. Except for fun, it's kinda pointless otherwise. [1] Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism "that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made avail- able by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, stating that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers". [2] Language Instinct, Steven Pinker
- _ph_ 3y agoI am quite interested, but a bit sceptic. On the one side, it would be great to have a language which you can learn in a couple of weeks due to its simplicity and small vocabulary. On the other side, as a programmer I immediately get the notion, that a large vocabulary might just get replaced by more complex expressions. This is basically a mathematical necessity. And it is something which we can observe in real life anyway. Whenever you have a situation, where people try to say something in a language where they lack the vocabulary, but also when the language lacks the specific term for a new thing, one will use compund expressions. Some will stay, others will gradually be replaced by a specific term. Also, I find it highly interesting how groups of people will evolve branches of languages, in the large usually called dialects. But also in the small, like with any customs and styles, local variants are developed. Seems to be a very fundamental human trait. That can be an age-dependent variation - most age groups have their version of a language, and also culturally. Like certain groups of immigrants picking up their style of the local language. And on the big scale, look at English, which seems to be the closest to an universally spoken language so far. There are quite some flavors depending on which continent it is spoken on.
- leke 3y agoWell I guess toki pona is different things to different people, but for me it's about simplification of life using this language as a tool. Kind of like a monk language. I've read the coffee used in these comments, so I'll stick with that. If you think life is complicated when things like a double espresso pumpkin spiced ice caramel latte is a normal order in some coffee shop, you can just reject the notion of its existence. Is coffee even too specific? Perhaps. How about just needing a beverage? toki pona will have your back with that one. Even a "hot beverage". You might get a surprise, perhaps tea, Coco, or coffee, but this is all you really require. When monks need to eat, they take a food vessel (bowl) and ask people to fill it with food. If you can get through life with the simplest of communication, maybe you have simplified your life adequately.
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoThe reason we have more than 120 words is because you need more detail than that. I could say nuclear reactor, or I could say “hot danger room cook mix build make sun” or some other inane lengthy sentence mushed from smaller words. It’s inefficient and inprecise. This is like an assembly language. Simple but unusable because of the simplicity and ambiguity.
- dtgriscom 3y agoSo, we need compilers/decompilers for every human language? Something like Pandoc? https://pandoc.org/ https://pandoc.org/
- anthonypasq 3y agoi mean that essentially already happens. all languages share an underlying grammar and im pretty sure that is what allows NLP algorithms to work, but i could be wrong
- oslem 3y agoI agree and I really enjoy the simplicity of the concept. Though I don’t believe anyone is suggesting using it as a full-time replacement for any other language.
- dealuromanet 3y agoThere once was a tribe that had no idea that the sky is blue. People from afar who were more technologically and scientifically advanced tried to explain that the sky is blue, but the tribe members had no conception of this or capacity to really understand what it means for the sky to be blue. They had never considered what color the sky is. That is because in their language, they had no words to describe the concept of the sky having a color. So they didn't even comprehend or notice that the sky was blue. Be careful with any trend to publicize or normalize a smaller language that can be shared with everyone. It's a trap. It's a trap so that people lose sight and memory of things that exist. Who wants you to forget what exists, and why? Who wants to take away words and what words are those?
- int_19h 3y agoYou seem to want us to forget that Toki Pona isn't intended to be used as a primary language.
- charlieo88 3y agoIt's a trap? Double plus ungood.
- pj_N 3y agoTo me, toki pona and this Newspeak-like idea feel almost like opposites. They just happened to share the characteristics of a smaller or "simpler" vocabulary than English. To speak toki pona to me is to remove jargon and surface level speech, and to think more about the real meaning of what is coming out of your mouth, while Newspeak is more like jargon taking over the whole language until you only repeat Goodthink because that's the only words you have. toki pona makes you think about what you want to say, while Newspeak makes you think about what the party wants you to think. I personally think of toki pona as a tool of self reflection and understanding because of how you have to break things down to them speak the meaning out, but maybe others use the language differently. It is in no way a trap to lose touch with reality though. It's not removing words for reality, just expressing it in a different way.
- zserge 3y agoWould it be possible to train an LLM from scratch that would speak Toki Pona? 120 word dictionary over a reduced alphabet would mean a tiny number of possible tokens and theoretically a model could be smaller than the ones used in "tiny stories" experiment (where a simplified almost childish English has been used). Maybe even a local machine would be enough to train it. I wonder if there is a large enough dataset for Toki Pona or if there is a sensible way to synthesize one? I'm no expert in LLMs or Toki Pona, though.
- jan_asiku 3y agotoki pona is not an attempted universal language! it is a pidgin between a number of languages but neither its creator nor its community wants it to be a universal language.
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoI love this project but it's a hopeless effort. Witness: Iodine. Basil. Capybara. Torque. Homotopy. Fedora. Felony. Gasket. Sciatica. Cumulonimbus.