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You can think of most common languages as "lossless" (at least in comparison), whereas Toki Pona is "lossy". Once you translate English to Toki, it loses a lot

You can think of most common languages as "lossless" (at least in comparison), whereas Toki Pona is "lossy". Once you translate English to Toki, it loses a lot of granularity. For example... Translating English to Toki Pona: Talk -> Toki Translating Toki Pona to English: Toki -> To speak, Communicate, Use language, Think, Say "hello" Which means, it's now impossible to translate it back to English and know which one is referred to, without context. The language forces you to be less specific in your meaning, but also to focus on core human emotions instead of unnecessary complexity. Having a translator perfectly convert English to Toki Tona is gonna be a lot easier than the reverse, anyway, unless you have a lot of context to piece it together. Note: I tried learning this language many years ago and this is my personal opinion. It may not be shared by everyone.

Aachen 3y ago
> You can think of most common languages as "lossless" (at least in comparison), If only! For most words in most sentences, you can find direct translations, but between most language pairs, I'm pretty sure any given text (just one page or so, let alone books) will have at least one point where you have to interpret the text to translate it: choose what meaning the author intended or what saying/expression conveys the same meaning the closest without going into descriptive mode. I suppose that might be what you meant by "in comparison", but it seems misleading, at least to anyone not fluent/proficient enough in another language to know that lossless translations isn't how languages work But, yes, toki pona lifts this to a whole 'nother level. Does anyone happen to know how Esperanto compares? As far as I know, it should be quite similar to a "normal" (non-con)language in this regard (just simpler to learn, with bonus points if you speak a romance language afaik)
- shadowofneptune 3y ago
  Esperanto was intended as a sort of diplomatic language. It's got flaws, definitely. The sounds and spelling are very much from the creator's native Polish, a lot of important terms are rather obscure («Usono,» from "Usonia" is the word for the United States). That said, it is in the end relatively easy to learn, and it is easy to express the ideas of diplomacy, science, and civil society. China and Japan used to have a lot of Esperantists before WWII, for that reason. https://www.loc.gov/item/2021670575/ https://www.loc.gov/item/2021670575/ > After World War I, the League of Nations considered adopting Esperanto as a working language and recommending that it be taught in schools, but proposals along these lines were vetoed by France. It may be Eurocentric, but it's hell of a lot easier for diplomats to learn than English or French!
  - int_19h 3y ago
    Slight correction: Zamenhof's native languages (so far as we can tell), in a sense of what he spoke at home, were Yiddish and Russian, although he certainly learned Polish at a very young age due to place of residence. Not that it makes much difference in this case - the quirks of Esperanto phonology, such all those affricates and consonant clusters are familiar to speakers of pretty much any Slavic language. Esperanto orthography, on the other hand, appears to be inspired more by Czech than Polish - "v" rather than "w", diacritics over digraphs etc.
  - senloke 3y ago
    An actual Esperanto speaker here. I need to correct this. It was never intended to be a "diplomatic" language, as such a language only spoken by diplomats between their kind. So the language of a small elite, which does not want to deal with the average man on the street. That sounds like a story which was said about the predecessor of Esperanto: Volapük. Esperanto was at some point in time the "workers latin", because the less educated worker could learn it as a means to talk with people from other nations. That ended with pushing English or other "more practical languages" in schools to this day. Esperanto still is a working living language with a working worldwide community.
    - bmacho 3y ago
      Zamenhof stated multiple times that he wanted to create an universal second language, as opposed to an universal first language. I don't think this distinction makes much sense, had any effect on any design decision, but probably it was important for the marketing of the language. In this sense it was indeed intended to be a "diplomatic" language, so that diplomats can use a single language. (As well as international organizations, merchants, tourists etc.)
      - senloke 3y ago
        I think that view of you is wrong. The distinction is an important one. By saying you create a diplomatic language, you are marketing towards the elite, as I wrote in my post. By saying that everybody speaks it as a second language, which is indeed what Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, wanted is a different focus. The first is focusing on an elite, the latter focuses on the people. It's like the distinction between "computers for knowledge workers" and "personal computers", the first is only for a small elite, the latter is for everybody. Or the distinction between "politics for a couple of few" and "politics elected by everybody", the first is called a form of dictatorship, the latter democracy.
- robobro 3y ago
  I just started learning Esperanto on Duolingo and it's been a breeze. I've studied other European languages (Spanish, French, German, Latin) as a hobby before and Esperanto is kind of a streamlined hybrid of all those. Interligua may be "more useful" as an auxlang but the size and history of the Esperanto community appeals to me. I'm also studying Bahasa Indonesia right now; it also has a very regular and simple grammar. It's said to be the easiest non-European language for European language speakers to learn.
- neontomo 3y ago
  Thanks for the balanced reply! Yes you're right, I'm only using lossless and lossy as a metaphor here, because of course, any translation will lose information. Even speaking your native tongue with another fluent speaker will lose information because the meaning is interpreted. However, I'd say that well-developed languages (which for me means having many hyper-specific words and a diverse vocab available) allows interpretation to be more precise and functionally allow communication to happen. With Toki Pona I have the sense that a lot more is lost, and we end up interpreting broad strokes of the original meaning. This isn't bad, it's just different. Poetic if you like.
- senloke 3y ago
  > But, yes, toki pona lifts this to a whole 'nother level. Does anyone > happen to know how Esperanto compares? As far as I know, it should be > quite similar to a "normal" (non-con)language in this regard (just simpler > to learn, with bonus points if you speak a romance language afaik) As an Esperanto-speaker with a shallow understanding of Toki Pona I can say the following comparison: 1. Esperanto has way more vocabulary, which is useful for translating nuances from one source language to another language and back. This was added over the years and is still expanding, as any other living language does. 2. Esperanto words are way more specific than the one of Toki Pona. A sentence which I took from a Toki Pona cheatsheet "soweli li moku" can be translated as "a land animal is eating", "a cat is drinking", "a dog is ingesting", etc. so highly context depending. Esperanto would for the specific meaning of "a cat is eating" allow "kato estas manĝanta" or, if you don't care for the present progressive tense, which is normally how people speak it, "kato manĝas" (present tense). 3. Toki Pona glues words together by putting them each after the other, without glueing the roots together. "telo pimeja" was one example of trying to say "coffee". The Esperanto principle would be to say nigroakvo (a kind of water, which is black). Besides that Esperanto allows more nuanced distinctions like adjectives, so "nigra akvo" would mean "black water", the water, which is black. Also as I wrote earlier, the roots in Esperanto are way more specific. "akvo" is in Epseranto just water, not liquid, not fluid, not beverage as is the meaning of "telo" is in Toki Pona. Also "nigra" is in Esperanto "black", not dark, not unlit, as is the meaning of "pimeja" is in Toki Pona. Besides that was just an example based on the word coffee, which someone else in this topic used. The actual word of "coffee" in Esperanto is "kafo" and for tea is "teo", because words which are sufficiently internationally understood are put into the language by the speakers of it. 4. Esperanto is simpler to learn, it provides the same high rewarding learning curve as does Toki Pona, but it's steeper, because it's a bigger language. Depending on intelligence, learning style, being able to focus on things regularly, motivation, connections to other speakers, time I would say people can use the language after 3 months to one year. How good that is, that's another question. I learnt the language more intensively in the first year and then just maintained it, used it and improved upon it. 5. Esperanto uses an agglutination based way of building words, as I wrote in the example of point 3, based on my little understanding of linguistic terms, this could be called "synthesizing" words, but it also supports building phrases as does Toki Pona in an analytical way. "Ĉu mi povas uzi la lazertranĉilon?" (Can I use the lasercutter?) or "Ĉu mi povas uzi la ilo kiu tranĉas per lazero?" (Can I use the machine, which cuts with a lazer?). Toki Pona would be something like "mi li pali ala pali e suno ilo" (Can I use the sun-tool?). "ilo" by the way is a word taken from Esperanto, as the creator of Toki Pona also understood Esperanto, which means "tool". 6. Esperanto has 136 years of literature behind it, Toki Pona doesn't. Let's wait another 136 years and see which of all the current constructed languages are then still around and see how much is produced in them. 7. When you learn Esperanto you have acquired some shared vocabulary in romance languages, but also a little bit of other languages in the mix, like German. Which can be a little bit helpful when learning after Esperanto then those languages. Or trying to navigate on a trip through Italy, you won't understand 80% of what people are saying, but here and there you will encounter words, which sound familiar. Which shows the so called "eurocentricity" of Esperanto, which is then used by some to campaign against the language, as if that property makes it the ultimate evil in the world, if they would apply the same standard to speaking English, then they would stop writing in the internet at all. 8. Toki Pona is overhyped. Esperanto is not hyped anymore. Any long existing constructed language loses it's appeal at some point, because the times have changed, people don't understand the history of it, believe anything which at first sounds enough plausible, but is in fact bullshit. Worldwide auxiliary languages like Esperanto always have the problem to be not "perfect" enough, they all replace each other in an eternal asymptomatic drive towards "more perfection", without ever reaching that goal. Thus in the end the most working language in that category is still Esperanto and hopefully will be for the next 136 years. But that's only my personal pet opinion. Anyway, as I'm digressing into some general rant about planned languages, I end this comment, I can surely answer concrete questions about comparing these two languages later on, if wanted.

Aachen 3y ago

> You can think of most common languages as "lossless" (at least in comparison), If only! For most words in most sentences, you can find direct translations, but between most language pairs, I'm pretty sure any given text (just one page or so, let alone books) will have at least one point where you have to interpret the text to translate it: choose what meaning the author intended or what saying/expression conveys the same meaning the closest without going into descriptive mode. I suppose that might be what you meant by "in comparison", but it seems misleading, at least to anyone not fluent/proficient enough in another language to know that lossless translations isn't how languages work But, yes, toki pona lifts this to a whole 'nother level. Does anyone happen to know how Esperanto compares? As far as I know, it should be quite similar to a "normal" (non-con)language in this regard (just simpler to learn, with bonus points if you speak a romance language afaik)

shadowofneptune 3y ago
Esperanto was intended as a sort of diplomatic language. It's got flaws, definitely. The sounds and spelling are very much from the creator's native Polish, a lot of important terms are rather obscure («Usono,» from "Usonia" is the word for the United States). That said, it is in the end relatively easy to learn, and it is easy to express the ideas of diplomacy, science, and civil society. China and Japan used to have a lot of Esperantists before WWII, for that reason. https://www.loc.gov/item/2021670575/ https://www.loc.gov/item/2021670575/ > After World War I, the League of Nations considered adopting Esperanto as a working language and recommending that it be taught in schools, but proposals along these lines were vetoed by France. It may be Eurocentric, but it's hell of a lot easier for diplomats to learn than English or French!
- int_19h 3y ago
  Slight correction: Zamenhof's native languages (so far as we can tell), in a sense of what he spoke at home, were Yiddish and Russian, although he certainly learned Polish at a very young age due to place of residence. Not that it makes much difference in this case - the quirks of Esperanto phonology, such all those affricates and consonant clusters are familiar to speakers of pretty much any Slavic language. Esperanto orthography, on the other hand, appears to be inspired more by Czech than Polish - "v" rather than "w", diacritics over digraphs etc.
- senloke 3y ago
  An actual Esperanto speaker here. I need to correct this. It was never intended to be a "diplomatic" language, as such a language only spoken by diplomats between their kind. So the language of a small elite, which does not want to deal with the average man on the street. That sounds like a story which was said about the predecessor of Esperanto: Volapük. Esperanto was at some point in time the "workers latin", because the less educated worker could learn it as a means to talk with people from other nations. That ended with pushing English or other "more practical languages" in schools to this day. Esperanto still is a working living language with a working worldwide community.
  - bmacho 3y ago
    Zamenhof stated multiple times that he wanted to create an universal second language, as opposed to an universal first language. I don't think this distinction makes much sense, had any effect on any design decision, but probably it was important for the marketing of the language. In this sense it was indeed intended to be a "diplomatic" language, so that diplomats can use a single language. (As well as international organizations, merchants, tourists etc.)
    - senloke 3y ago
      I think that view of you is wrong. The distinction is an important one. By saying you create a diplomatic language, you are marketing towards the elite, as I wrote in my post. By saying that everybody speaks it as a second language, which is indeed what Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, wanted is a different focus. The first is focusing on an elite, the latter focuses on the people. It's like the distinction between "computers for knowledge workers" and "personal computers", the first is only for a small elite, the latter is for everybody. Or the distinction between "politics for a couple of few" and "politics elected by everybody", the first is called a form of dictatorship, the latter democracy.
robobro 3y ago
I just started learning Esperanto on Duolingo and it's been a breeze. I've studied other European languages (Spanish, French, German, Latin) as a hobby before and Esperanto is kind of a streamlined hybrid of all those. Interligua may be "more useful" as an auxlang but the size and history of the Esperanto community appeals to me. I'm also studying Bahasa Indonesia right now; it also has a very regular and simple grammar. It's said to be the easiest non-European language for European language speakers to learn.
neontomo 3y ago
Thanks for the balanced reply! Yes you're right, I'm only using lossless and lossy as a metaphor here, because of course, any translation will lose information. Even speaking your native tongue with another fluent speaker will lose information because the meaning is interpreted. However, I'd say that well-developed languages (which for me means having many hyper-specific words and a diverse vocab available) allows interpretation to be more precise and functionally allow communication to happen. With Toki Pona I have the sense that a lot more is lost, and we end up interpreting broad strokes of the original meaning. This isn't bad, it's just different. Poetic if you like.
senloke 3y ago
> But, yes, toki pona lifts this to a whole 'nother level. Does anyone > happen to know how Esperanto compares? As far as I know, it should be > quite similar to a "normal" (non-con)language in this regard (just simpler > to learn, with bonus points if you speak a romance language afaik) As an Esperanto-speaker with a shallow understanding of Toki Pona I can say the following comparison: 1. Esperanto has way more vocabulary, which is useful for translating nuances from one source language to another language and back. This was added over the years and is still expanding, as any other living language does. 2. Esperanto words are way more specific than the one of Toki Pona. A sentence which I took from a Toki Pona cheatsheet "soweli li moku" can be translated as "a land animal is eating", "a cat is drinking", "a dog is ingesting", etc. so highly context depending. Esperanto would for the specific meaning of "a cat is eating" allow "kato estas manĝanta" or, if you don't care for the present progressive tense, which is normally how people speak it, "kato manĝas" (present tense). 3. Toki Pona glues words together by putting them each after the other, without glueing the roots together. "telo pimeja" was one example of trying to say "coffee". The Esperanto principle would be to say nigroakvo (a kind of water, which is black). Besides that Esperanto allows more nuanced distinctions like adjectives, so "nigra akvo" would mean "black water", the water, which is black. Also as I wrote earlier, the roots in Esperanto are way more specific. "akvo" is in Epseranto just water, not liquid, not fluid, not beverage as is the meaning of "telo" is in Toki Pona. Also "nigra" is in Esperanto "black", not dark, not unlit, as is the meaning of "pimeja" is in Toki Pona. Besides that was just an example based on the word coffee, which someone else in this topic used. The actual word of "coffee" in Esperanto is "kafo" and for tea is "teo", because words which are sufficiently internationally understood are put into the language by the speakers of it. 4. Esperanto is simpler to learn, it provides the same high rewarding learning curve as does Toki Pona, but it's steeper, because it's a bigger language. Depending on intelligence, learning style, being able to focus on things regularly, motivation, connections to other speakers, time I would say people can use the language after 3 months to one year. How good that is, that's another question. I learnt the language more intensively in the first year and then just maintained it, used it and improved upon it. 5. Esperanto uses an agglutination based way of building words, as I wrote in the example of point 3, based on my little understanding of linguistic terms, this could be called "synthesizing" words, but it also supports building phrases as does Toki Pona in an analytical way. "Ĉu mi povas uzi la lazertranĉilon?" (Can I use the lasercutter?) or "Ĉu mi povas uzi la ilo kiu tranĉas per lazero?" (Can I use the machine, which cuts with a lazer?). Toki Pona would be something like "mi li pali ala pali e suno ilo" (Can I use the sun-tool?). "ilo" by the way is a word taken from Esperanto, as the creator of Toki Pona also understood Esperanto, which means "tool". 6. Esperanto has 136 years of literature behind it, Toki Pona doesn't. Let's wait another 136 years and see which of all the current constructed languages are then still around and see how much is produced in them. 7. When you learn Esperanto you have acquired some shared vocabulary in romance languages, but also a little bit of other languages in the mix, like German. Which can be a little bit helpful when learning after Esperanto then those languages. Or trying to navigate on a trip through Italy, you won't understand 80% of what people are saying, but here and there you will encounter words, which sound familiar. Which shows the so called "eurocentricity" of Esperanto, which is then used by some to campaign against the language, as if that property makes it the ultimate evil in the world, if they would apply the same standard to speaking English, then they would stop writing in the internet at all. 8. Toki Pona is overhyped. Esperanto is not hyped anymore. Any long existing constructed language loses it's appeal at some point, because the times have changed, people don't understand the history of it, believe anything which at first sounds enough plausible, but is in fact bullshit. Worldwide auxiliary languages like Esperanto always have the problem to be not "perfect" enough, they all replace each other in an eternal asymptomatic drive towards "more perfection", without ever reaching that goal. Thus in the end the most working language in that category is still Esperanto and hopefully will be for the next 136 years. But that's only my personal pet opinion. Anyway, as I'm digressing into some general rant about planned languages, I end this comment, I can surely answer concrete questions about comparing these two languages later on, if wanted.