4 ms·

Oh. 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

Oh. 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 ago
  If 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 ago
    eh, 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 ago
    How many fonts are there? A couple hundred? Plus bold and italics.
  - thih9 3y ago
    There 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.
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    I don't think letters being in cursive is semantically important. Letter case is, somewhat. I think Cyrillic doesn't even have letter-case, which I've often found interesting.
    - kwhitefoot 3y ago
      But it does. Most of the lower case letters are simply very similar to the larger upper case ones. Upper case, or majuscule, is used as the initial letter of a sentence and for proper nouns just as in English. At least that's what Wikipedia says. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets, https://learnrussianstepbystep.com/en/capitalization-in-russian/ https://learnrussianstepbystep.com/en/capitalization-in-russ..., etc.
stevage 3y ago
I was reading somewhere that most Americans have an extremely limited working vocabulary of emotions. For instance "I feel bad" can mean guilt, disappointment, abandonment, sickness etc etc. There are dozens and dozens of possible emotion words but very few actually used in practice, which supposedly limits people's ability to introspect and manage their emotions.

IshKebab 3y ago

"English is easy - only 26 letters!"

geraldwhen 3y ago
If 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 ago
  eh, 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 ago
  How many fonts are there? A couple hundred? Plus bold and italics.
- thih9 3y ago
  There 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.
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  I don't think letters being in cursive is semantically important. Letter case is, somewhat. I think Cyrillic doesn't even have letter-case, which I've often found interesting.
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    But it does. Most of the lower case letters are simply very similar to the larger upper case ones. Upper case, or majuscule, is used as the initial letter of a sentence and for proper nouns just as in English. At least that's what Wikipedia says. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets, https://learnrussianstepbystep.com/en/capitalization-in-russian/ https://learnrussianstepbystep.com/en/capitalization-in-russ..., etc.

stevage 3y ago

I was reading somewhere that most Americans have an extremely limited working vocabulary of emotions. For instance "I feel bad" can mean guilt, disappointment, abandonment, sickness etc etc. There are dozens and dozens of possible emotion words but very few actually used in practice, which supposedly limits people's ability to introspect and manage their emotions.