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Toki Pona: a human language with 120 words

122 points by tomkwok 11y ago

suprfnk 11y ago
Very interesting, although I can't really imagine the amount of ambiguity, especially when discussing sensitive topics, would be a good thing.
- chillingeffect 11y ago
  Yeah. Faxinating, but sounds like a feelgood Newspeak. The apathy and digs at technology and numbers are hilariously perverse. I think I would try to learn some for fun though. The contrast with the other language made me lol hard...
x5n1 11y ago
http://tokipona.net/tp/ClassicWordList.aspx http://tokipona.net/tp/ClassicWordList.aspx
dan_blanchard 11y ago
The title of the article should really say "Toki Pona: An artificial human language with 120 words." Something like this would be way too inefficient to actually be used by people.
- jordigh 11y ago
  > Something like this would be way too inefficient to actually be used by people. The same is true of most conlangs. Remember that kid who absolutely refused to use Klingon after he was old enough? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language#Speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language#Speakers http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.08/mustread.html?pg=8 http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.08/mustread.html?pg...
  - Nadya 11y ago
    To be fair, this is common of many bilinguals when the other language is not in common use in their lives. I personally know at least 8 bilinguals ranging from Chinese to Zulu that can understand the language, once-upon-a-time spoke it well, are spoken to in the language, but respond in English. It happens frequently when the only time they ever use the language is with their parents/family and their parents can understand English just fine.
- panglott 11y ago
  Used for what purpose? You can probably meet a stranger and exchange some pleasantries on a hike together. You won't write a physics textbook. But languages can be used in different functional domains, and that's fine.
  - ArekDymalski 11y ago
    >physics textbook Well, at least some people are trying : http://tenhundredwordsofscience.tumblr.com/ http://tenhundredwordsofscience.tumblr.com/
    - im3w1l 11y ago
      That is not a textbook. That is people explaining to children what the field is about. Try translating this, from an actual textbook, to toki pona: "This section shows how depth-first search can be used to perform a topological sort of a directed acyclic graph, or a 'dag' as it is sometimes called. A topological sort of a dag G = (V,E) is a linear ordering of all its vertices such that if G contains an edge (u,v), then u appears before v in the ordering. (If the graph is not acyclic, then no linear ordering is possible.)" This one is a little insidious, because presumably you are not allowed to introduce new words into Toki Pona.
      - schoen 11y ago
        Sonja might say that toki pona was designed to make texts like this difficult to express, but an extra challenge is that there are so few words that could be repurposed as technical terms. For example, the existing term wawa means 'force, power, strength, energy' (which are of course all different technical terms in physics, so if we wanted to say "change in energy is the integral of power with respect to time" or "change in energy is the integral of force with respect to distance", we're already kind of out of luck, even ignoring how toki pona doesn't clearly have a way to refer to integration or multiplication). We might try to describe the dag in this way. mi mute li lukin e ijo mute e linja mute. linja ale li kama tan ijo wan li tawa ijo ante. sike ala li lon. ('we see many objects and lines. all lines come from one object and go to another object. no round thing is present.') However, it is still ambiguous whether "wan" refers to an arbitrary node or a specific node (because toki pona has no term for "each" vs. "any"). We could try to get around this with a process-oriented approach ("choose an object"), but I've never found a clear way to say "choose". And of course a reader might interpret "sike ala li lon" as saying that the nodes aren't circular or that the edges aren't curved, as opposed to that no cycles are present in the graph structure.
- fataliss 11y ago
  If you managed to spread it so almost anyone knew those 120 words then it would make a very useful and accessible international language. To handle the little things while abroad without having to learn another "starter pack" of words/sentences everywhere your business takes you, that would be great imho.
  - im3w1l 11y ago
    It would be much better if everyone learned English - an actually useful language, and that is what is happening right now.
    - pizzeys 11y ago
      If by 'everyone' you mean 'around 25%'...
    - fataliss 11y ago
      While it would be indeed the best scenario that the whole humanity learned a common fully developed language, let's face it, it's highly unrealistic. The good thing about a stripped down, simple language like Toki Pona is that it would make it easier/less expensive to learn and therefore easier to spread. Plus as it is not tied to any country it avoids the classic chauvinism of some people who simply refuse to learn something coming from a "competing" nation.
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    She lost me when she got into finding adjectives to describe the experience of interacting with a car. If you're relying on abstractions and adjectives to replace nouns, then it's a dead-end. We already have a universal primitive language in the form of facial expressions and gestures that (almost) everyone has access to, with which we can bootstrap communication quite easily.
  - Retra 11y ago
    One of the problems with doing things that way is that you'll still develop locale-specific conventions. You might go somewhere and say "electric brain," but they call it a "fast counting beans." And then you'll be speaking different languages anyway.
solve 11y ago
I've got to wonder to what degree this approach is really hiding the "real" language in a higher-level encoding. E.g. you can write english in morse code, but the combination of those dots and dashes is where the "real" language is, instead of the dots and dashes themselves...
- paol 11y ago
  > hiding the "real" language in a higher-level encoding Exactly. In the middle of the article they discuss coming up with an expression to mean "car". Of the many word combinations one might choose (they go with "tomo tawa"), one of them would have to emerge as the standard way to say "car", otherwise effective communication would not really be possible. But at that point you've just created a new word. "Tomo tawa" no longer means anything that combination of words might possibly mean - it means car. I'd suggest there's a certain irreducible vocabulary, and its size is going to be the same no matter how many base words are used to compose it.
  - pluma 11y ago
    Basically, exactly what happens with compounds like <black> + <bird> => <blackbird> -- blackbirds are a specific sub-category of "black birds", not just any bird with black feathers. Compound words are words too.
  - tgb 11y ago
    And it's completely analogous to every other language where we come up with words by combining "auto" and "mobile". It would be challenging to determine what an automobile was from just the word and it would be almost impossible to recreate the word had you just been given the object and asked to come up with one. Might as well say that English is a language with 26 words. Though I imagine this makes spelling and pronunciation easier to remember.
- _lce0 11y ago
  Are you saying that using this approach could lead us the minimum brain wiring to make language work? if so, I like your idea :)
- 11y ago
err4nt 11y ago
I can tell you right now you're going to have some trouble with those colours. They reduced the colours to five: > Toki Pona has a five-color palette: loje (red), laso (blue), jelo (yellow), pimeja (black), and walo (white). Like a painter, the speaker can combine them to achieve any hue on the spectrum. Loje walo for pink. Laso jelo for green. So, what's Toki Pona for cyan, which two colours would you combine to create that colour? (Blue = cyan + magenta) Or how would you describe 'magenta' in Toki Pona? (Red = magenta + cyan) See the problem with using Red, Yellow, Blue + Black, White is that Red and Blue are pre-mixed! You're cutting out two of the true primary colours (magenta, cyan) which means you're significantly reducing the amount of colours you can accurately describe. On the other hand, still using just five words: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, and White CAN describe nearly all of the colours we would need to communicate with language. I wonder if the rest of the language is as well thought out as the colours...
- dazmax 11y ago
  You're talking about light mixing. The red/blue/yellow color wheel is based on pigment mixing: green + blue = cyan, red + blue = magenta
  - pluma 11y ago
    And blue + yellow = green. So cyan = blue + blue + yellow?
    - err4nt 11y ago
      If (cyan + magenta) + yellow = green, how would (cyan + magenta) + (cyan + magenta) + yellow = just cyan? To get cyan you simply remove the magenta from blue!
      - pluma 11y ago
        But there isn't a word for cyan and magenta, hence the need to define cyan in terms of RYB. cyan = blue + green green = blue + yellow cyan = blue + (blue + yellow) Well, technically: 2 parts cyan = 1 part blue + 1 part green 2 parts green = 1 part blue + 1 part yellow 2 parts cyan = 1 part blue + 1 part (1 part blue + 1 part yellow) i.e. 2 parts cyan = 1 part blue + 1/2 part blue + 1/2 part yellow i.e. 4 parts cyan = 3 parts blue + 1 part yellow But I think the real lesson here is that colour names based on additive colour mixing are silly.
liveoneggs 11y ago
this seems like a good fit for something like the quicktalker or other assistive technology
- mcguire 11y ago
  Too much ambiguity: "'What is a car?' Lang mused recently via phone from her home in Toronto. "'You might say that a car is a space that's used for movement,' she proposed. “That would be tomo tawa. If you’re struck by a car though, it might be a hard object that’s hitting me. That’s kiwen utala.'"
7erb 11y ago
I'm working on a conlang called 7erb (pronounced Verb). It's a language of only seven (7) words in its entire vocabulary. More information (although not that much more) is here: http://7erb.com http://7erb.com
- tgb 11y ago
  This strikes me as a more interesting project than the one in the article. If you're going to put some silly restriction on yourself and then try to work around it, you might as well go all the way! Knowing that this is a work in progress, do you have a dictionary? I'd be interested in it.
  - 7erb 11y ago
    The vocabulary is still being finalized. Hopefully soon I can release something.
edw519 11y ago
the language’s minimalist approach is also designed to change how its speakers think Corollary: the language’s minimalist approach is also designed to change how its programmers think When I was young and stupid, I felt disadvantaged that I only knew 10% of a programming language's syntax. Now the same thing makes me feel empowered.
- deckiedan 11y ago
  Am I misunderstanding you, somehow? But to only understand 10% of a programming language's syntax seems a very limited understanding. To only know 10% of the standard library or whatever is one thing... but 10% of syntax? Either you don't know the language well at all, or else it must have a very complex syntax, with a lot of edge cases. That's one of the nice things about (say) scheme, or lua, say. There's very little syntax to learn. Go, JS, Ruby and Python, more... but still, not that much syntax, really. Even Ruby doesn't really have that much syntax to learn. Ruby, Python and Go all have pretty huge std libs, but not that much syntax.
  - iopq 11y ago
    Really? Do you really need to know what the comma operator does in C? Do you really need to know the difference between `void foobar(void)` and `void foobar()`? There are a lot of things in a language even as simple as C that's useless syntactic trivia. I imagine someone could think of really evil things in C++
    - deckiedan 11y ago
      Hm. Maybe I made myself unclear - I was meaning to be specifically in response to the parent post, who said that only knowing 10% made him feel empowered. I was meaning, in a sense, that it's better to have a language which doesn't have such a complex history, undefined behaviour, and weird syntactic trivia. The simpler the language, the less unexpectedness occurs, and the more you can concentrate on the actual logic and meaning. For instance, in English, "homosexual" = attracted sexually to those who are the same ("homo") gender as yourself. But "homophobic" does not mean hating/fearing those the same gender as yourself. The rules are complex, with history, weirdness, and are confusing. The same with programming languages, I feel. Take JS, for instance. >>> (0 == []) true >>> typeof (0 + 0) "number" >>> typeof ([] + []) "string" There is no reason on earth I want to know that stuff or operator precedence rules. I can never remember those if I need to do a `x * y + 2 z --` and so always write in brackets explicitly. But the language can accept such things, and make an order from them. Going back to C (sorry for jumping around), yes, it's simple compared to C++, or many other languages, but it does have a lot of history, undefined behaviour, and stuff you simply need to be aware of. And it's that stuff that makes life complex for C beginners (and allows bugs for C of all experience levels). There's a reason I didn't list C as a simple language. :-) If our languages didn't have such quirks, and we didn't have to cope with working around them, a lot less mistakes would be made. http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/to-table.html http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/to-... for instance, in English. English - the Javascript of the human languages.
shangaslammi 11y ago
The creator of toki pona seems to be a fan of the Finnish language. Several of the words are loaned directly (although without umlauts) and keep their original Finnish meaning. At a glance: älä, kala, -kin, nenä, nimi, sama, sinä are exact Finnish words and "pimeja" is a slight alteration of "pimeä". Kiwen, lipu, linja and walo are probably Finnish inspired as well. Another common trend seems to be using a simplified and shortened forms of the phonetic spelling of English words such as "ale" (all), "en" (and), "insa" (inside), "jaki" (yucky), "jelo" (yellow), "kama" (come), "ken" (can), "kule" (color), "lukin" (looking), "mani" (money), "mi" (me), "mun" (moon), "nanpa" (number), "pata" (brother), "suwi" (sweet), "tawa" (towards), "toki" (talking), "tu" (two), "wan" (one) and "wile" (will). Slightly distorted, but still close: "anpa" (under), "kulupu" (sounds like a Japanese transliteration of group, グループ), "pilin" (feeling), "sewi" (ceiling) and "sike" (circle). This actually helps a lot in memorizing the vocabulary. :)
- jordigh 11y ago
  She's a fan of a bunch of languages, not just Finnish. Breakdown of roots: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toki_Pona_etymologies.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toki_Pona_etymologie... She deliberately picked a broad sample of roots across human languages so people would find it easy to learn. It's pretty easy to say basic things in Toki Pona, which is all that is possible to say in this language? Sina pona?
- panglott 11y ago
  I think she speaks English, French, and Esperanto. IIRC, many of the English words came through Tok Pisin, and English-based creole of New Guinea.
- mladenkovacevic 11y ago
  Some of these words are Serbian although some are made to sound as if you're talking to a baby by dropping some hard Rs and a few other consonants. English - TP - Serbian hand - luka - ruka leg - noka - noga eye - oko - oko A few are also phonetic English-isms "Money" turns into "Mani"
- schoen 11y ago
jordigh 11y ago
Mi pona! :-) Sina pona?
- leke 11y ago
  Jes, mi fartas bone. Ĉu vi fartas bone?
  - chillacy 11y ago
    ĉu vi vidis ke la vorto 'ilo' en 'Toki Pona' estas ankaŭ en esperanta? Mi pensas tiu estas amuza :)
    - leke 11y ago
      Jes, ĝi estas :)
mcguire 11y ago
Basic English uses approximately 850 words, and produced this communication between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt: Churchill (so much for automatic text recognition): "When I was with you in the United States last August you expressed to me your interest in Basic English. The Cabinet Committee which I appointed here to consider the possibilities of Basic and means of promoting its wider use have reported and we have adopted the recommendations they have rode. I thought it might be of interest to you to see the Report and am sending you copi [...] "If the United States authorities feel able to give their powerful support to the promotion of Basic English as a means of international intercourse, I feel sure that that would ensure its successful development. My conviction is that Basic English will then prove to be a great boon to mankind in the future and a powerful support to the influence of the Anglo-Saxon peoples in world affairs." FDR: "...Incidentally, I wonder what the course of history would have been if in May 1940 you had been able to offer the British people only "blood, work, eye water and face water", which I understand is the best that Basic English can do with five famous words...." http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box37/t335k01.html http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box37/t335k01.html
- panglott 11y ago
  Of course Basic English cheats by including all the phrasal verbs, without considering that they are usually separate lexical items. "pick on" or "pass for" aren't easily decipherable based purely on their components.
  - mcguire 11y ago
    Any language with a small number of "words" will have to do the same thing. At the other end of the spectrum are agglutinative languages, like Turkish and German (?).
    - murbard2 11y ago
      Yes, but the combinations in English are somewhat arbitrary. It's obvious in context what flyingmetaltube might refer to. It's not obvious that "pony up" means to settle an account, rather than something about hovering horses.
umeshunni 11y ago
> In Icelandic, [..] a microscope a small-watcher. So, just like English, then?
- Semiapies 11y ago
  Well, scientific latin.
  - astrobe_ 11y ago
    It's Greek. Television is latin (tele=far, videre/visus=to see), microscope is Greek (micro=small, skopein=to see).
    - innguest 11y ago
      'tele' is Greek (telos is 'extremity' roughly, from which the adverbial sense "far off" for 'tele-'). Television is of mixed etymology.
    - Semiapies 11y ago
      You're right, of course. I should have said "scientific ancient".
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
avodonosov 11y ago
Ку
veddox 11y ago
Sounds very interesting - signed up for the Memrise Toki Pona course straight away ;-)
- schoen 11y ago
  o musi!
- cyanfrog 11y ago
  same here! this language is actually very interesting
  - veddox 11y ago
    kama sona nimi pi toki pona ala mute tenpo, taso kute en sitelen ala pona.
camdez 11y ago
Very cool. The grammatical basics seem a lot like Chinese, with similar word order, and a couple Japanese-esque particles thrown in (li ≈ が, e ≈ を). Lacking tense, conjugation / declension, subject / verb agreement, grammatical gender, etc., I've always felt the basics of Chinese make a pretty good foundation for a simple language. I'm curious about the decision to include the grammatical particles, and why it seemed necessary...anyone have a full enough understanding of the grammar to know why the decision was made to allow dropping the "li" particle with "mi" and "sina", but not getting rid of it in general? Chinese similarly lacks a 'to be' copula, and gets by quite well without a subject marker. c.f. EN: I (am) good TP: mi pona ZH: 我好 EN: Water is good TP: telo >li< pona ZH: 水好 Japanese explicitly demarcates the subject / topic, but seems to allow a bit more variety at the beginning of the sentence + uses that demarcation to add a connotation of emphasis or contrast with a previous topic + isn't a conlang. Anyone have a feeling for what it adds here?
- leke 11y ago
  I think it's to distinguish between adjectives. Perhaps telo pona means good water so "telo pona li lete" is clear that "good water is cold". I don't know I'm totally guessing here :D Anyway, if you like these simple kind of languages, checkout http://angoslanguage.wikispaces.com/ http://angoslanguage.wikispaces.com/
  - schoen 11y ago
    Your interpretation is right. There's an example somewhere in one of the official tutorials that shows how moving the li can change the meaning for this reason (although "pi", which means something like "of", was also added for a similar reason: I think Sonja's example was distinguishing two ways of grouping "tomo telo nasa", where "(tomo telo) nasa" would mean "crazy bathroom" and "tomo (telo nasa)" would mean "bar, liquor store" -- so Sonja said the second case would be expressed by "tomo pi telo nasa").
  - camdez 11y ago
    Ah, that's a good point. I suppose the limited vocabulary swells the number of compounds, making for more opportunities for confusion in parsing them. Thanks!
ColinWright 11y ago
It's a classic test of a computer programming language to see if it can self-host - that is, to write a compiler or interpreter for the language, in the language. I'd love to see this article translated into Toki Pona to get a sense of the expressiveness of the language. How much is being left to the listener to figure out what must have been meant ... edited for typos
- schoen 11y ago
  I tried translating a couple of paragraphs and found that the article was mostly too abstract and specific to make it practical. I thought one of the most impressive complete translations is the entire script of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (completed by jan Pije back in 2004). You can read it line-by-line with the English and toki pona texts alternating. I've read most of it and thought the quality of the translation was uniformly excellent. https://web.archive.org/web/20041116173522/http://www.geocities.com/tokipona/text/mphg.html https://web.archive.org/web/20041116173522/http://www.geocit...
mortenlarsen 11y ago
Up Goer Five: https://xkcd.com/1133/ https://xkcd.com/1133/
- Skunkleton 11y ago
  > If it starts pointing toward space, you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today.
protonfish 11y ago
I have been wondering about ways to allow communication in internet communities (games and other social spaces) that are safe (not allowing personally identifiable information) and cross-lingual. I'd love to see an online game attempt to adopt a symbolic language such as this. The lexicon is small enough that you might not even have to type - just select the word you want from a nested menu.
- schoen 11y ago
  Some people have started cross-linguistic communication with the huge sets of emoji that are now out there in Unicode (including telling stories!). There are really no communication systems that are "safe" in the way you mean if their users can adopt codes that give new meanings to old symbols. For example, 🍨 💄🍨🌋🌎 🍨📰 🐑🚑📰 🍟🐓🚑📰🐱🍨🐑🐱🐙 (Hint: vpr pernz, yvcfgvpx, vpr pernz, ibypnab, rnegu, vpr pernz, arjfcncre, furrc, nzohynapr, arjfcncre, serapu sevrf, ebbfgre, nzohynapr, arjfcncre, png, vpr pernz, furrc, png, bpgbchf.)
  - protonfish 11y ago
    Very cool. I will learn more. I know I can't keep people from inventing their own compound terms for "loser noob", I just want to make it extremely difficult to for predators to get personal information.
njharman 11y ago
Reducing communication to 120 words, double plus good!
- trebor 11y ago
  At least it'll compress really well, right? ;)
pvorb 11y ago
This reminds me of Guy Steele's 1998 talk "Growing a Language" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0). It's really worth watching.
anigbrowl 11y ago
In Chinese, the word computer translates directly as electric brain. In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-watcher. In Lakota, horse is literally dog of wonder. These neologisms demonstrate the cumulative quality of language, in which we use the known to describe the unknown. I think most people would be better served by learning to use the etymology information in a good dictionary than by using the oral equivalent of Brainfuck. “What is a car?” Lang mused recently via phone from her home in Toronto. “You might say that a car is a space that's used for movement,” she proposed. “That would be tomo tawa. If you’re struck by a car though, it might be a hard object that’s hitting me. That’s kiwen utala.” A language that doesn't offer any sort of empirical consistency doesn't strike me as adaptive. Rather, this seems like an attempt to recapture the lost imaginative potential of early childhood by limiting oneself to the limited vocabulary of a toddler.
- rosser 11y ago
  It seems to me that much of the point of the language is to engender a change in the way the speaker thinks and engages with speaking. So a better analogy than Brainfuck might be functional programming in general. Many people learn a functional language not for purposes of using it in the course of day-to-day software development, but because knowing — really grokking — functional programming makes you a better programmer.
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    I realize that, but why not just learn another established language? OK, it will take longer because you'll have to master a more complex grammar, vocabulary, and idiom, but on the plus side you'll be able to communicate with millions of people, in many cases. The notion that speaking more than one language improves your overall cognitive ability is already widely accepted.
    - rosser 11y ago
      Because the simplicity of Toki Puna is the very point of it. Even Einstein said, "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself." Using such an (admittedly, over-) simplified language would probably go a long way towards helping you approach your speech in such a way that you could explain things with that kind of simplicity of expression.
JulianMorrison 11y ago
No working language has that few words. All that happens if you try, is you get a whole lot of "words" that have spaces in them (or if you're German, no spaces).
- gutnor 11y ago
  If you push it to the extreme, a language only needs 2 words: 0 and 1. It seems to me that there is a lot more than 120 distinct concepts you need to handle the modern world, even basically - so if you are using only 120 word, you must must have to combine some in a specific fixed fashion that will always represent that concept. At that point, shouldn´t that be considered a word ? Well, actually I should probably read the article and see what people with degree on the subject have to say.
  - schoen 11y ago
    There are some sequences of toki pona words that have a fixed or conventional meaning that you might not be able to be confident of just by knowing the meaning of the component parts, like telo nasa 'alcoholic drink' (lit. 'crazy water'), jan pona 'friend' (lit. 'good person'), jan lawa 'ruler, government official' (lit. 'head person'), nasin sewi 'religion' (lit. 'noble path'), meli olin 'girlfriend, wife' (lit. 'love woman'). You can see some official glossaries of these phrases as of 2010 at https://web.archive.org/web/20100702170542/http://en.tokipona.org/wiki/Category:Vocabulary_topics https://web.archive.org/web/20100702170542/http://en.tokipon... I've definitely heard the claim that these ought to be considered words because speakers need to learn them separately.
dvh 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit

122 points by tomkwok 11y ago

Very interesting, although I can't really imagine the amount of ambiguity, especially when discussing sensitive topics, would be a good thing.

chillingeffect 11y ago
Yeah. Faxinating, but sounds like a feelgood Newspeak. The apathy and digs at technology and numbers are hilariously perverse. I think I would try to learn some for fun though. The contrast with the other language made me lol hard...

x5n1 11y ago

http://tokipona.net/tp/ClassicWordList.aspx http://tokipona.net/tp/ClassicWordList.aspx

dan_blanchard 11y ago

The title of the article should really say "Toki Pona: An artificial human language with 120 words." Something like this would be way too inefficient to actually be used by people.

jordigh 11y ago
> Something like this would be way too inefficient to actually be used by people. The same is true of most conlangs. Remember that kid who absolutely refused to use Klingon after he was old enough? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language#Speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language#Speakers http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.08/mustread.html?pg=8 http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.08/mustread.html?pg...
- Nadya 11y ago
  To be fair, this is common of many bilinguals when the other language is not in common use in their lives. I personally know at least 8 bilinguals ranging from Chinese to Zulu that can understand the language, once-upon-a-time spoke it well, are spoken to in the language, but respond in English. It happens frequently when the only time they ever use the language is with their parents/family and their parents can understand English just fine.
panglott 11y ago
Used for what purpose? You can probably meet a stranger and exchange some pleasantries on a hike together. You won't write a physics textbook. But languages can be used in different functional domains, and that's fine.
- ArekDymalski 11y ago
  >physics textbook Well, at least some people are trying : http://tenhundredwordsofscience.tumblr.com/ http://tenhundredwordsofscience.tumblr.com/
  - im3w1l 11y ago
    That is not a textbook. That is people explaining to children what the field is about. Try translating this, from an actual textbook, to toki pona: "This section shows how depth-first search can be used to perform a topological sort of a directed acyclic graph, or a 'dag' as it is sometimes called. A topological sort of a dag G = (V,E) is a linear ordering of all its vertices such that if G contains an edge (u,v), then u appears before v in the ordering. (If the graph is not acyclic, then no linear ordering is possible.)" This one is a little insidious, because presumably you are not allowed to introduce new words into Toki Pona.
    - schoen 11y ago
      Sonja might say that toki pona was designed to make texts like this difficult to express, but an extra challenge is that there are so few words that could be repurposed as technical terms. For example, the existing term wawa means 'force, power, strength, energy' (which are of course all different technical terms in physics, so if we wanted to say "change in energy is the integral of power with respect to time" or "change in energy is the integral of force with respect to distance", we're already kind of out of luck, even ignoring how toki pona doesn't clearly have a way to refer to integration or multiplication). We might try to describe the dag in this way. mi mute li lukin e ijo mute e linja mute. linja ale li kama tan ijo wan li tawa ijo ante. sike ala li lon. ('we see many objects and lines. all lines come from one object and go to another object. no round thing is present.') However, it is still ambiguous whether "wan" refers to an arbitrary node or a specific node (because toki pona has no term for "each" vs. "any"). We could try to get around this with a process-oriented approach ("choose an object"), but I've never found a clear way to say "choose". And of course a reader might interpret "sike ala li lon" as saying that the nodes aren't circular or that the edges aren't curved, as opposed to that no cycles are present in the graph structure.
fataliss 11y ago
If you managed to spread it so almost anyone knew those 120 words then it would make a very useful and accessible international language. To handle the little things while abroad without having to learn another "starter pack" of words/sentences everywhere your business takes you, that would be great imho.
- im3w1l 11y ago
  It would be much better if everyone learned English - an actually useful language, and that is what is happening right now.
  - pizzeys 11y ago
    If by 'everyone' you mean 'around 25%'...
  - fataliss 11y ago
    While it would be indeed the best scenario that the whole humanity learned a common fully developed language, let's face it, it's highly unrealistic. The good thing about a stripped down, simple language like Toki Pona is that it would make it easier/less expensive to learn and therefore easier to spread. Plus as it is not tied to any country it avoids the classic chauvinism of some people who simply refuse to learn something coming from a "competing" nation.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  She lost me when she got into finding adjectives to describe the experience of interacting with a car. If you're relying on abstractions and adjectives to replace nouns, then it's a dead-end. We already have a universal primitive language in the form of facial expressions and gestures that (almost) everyone has access to, with which we can bootstrap communication quite easily.
- Retra 11y ago
  One of the problems with doing things that way is that you'll still develop locale-specific conventions. You might go somewhere and say "electric brain," but they call it a "fast counting beans." And then you'll be speaking different languages anyway.

solve 11y ago

I've got to wonder to what degree this approach is really hiding the "real" language in a higher-level encoding. E.g. you can write english in morse code, but the combination of those dots and dashes is where the "real" language is, instead of the dots and dashes themselves...

paol 11y ago
> hiding the "real" language in a higher-level encoding Exactly. In the middle of the article they discuss coming up with an expression to mean "car". Of the many word combinations one might choose (they go with "tomo tawa"), one of them would have to emerge as the standard way to say "car", otherwise effective communication would not really be possible. But at that point you've just created a new word. "Tomo tawa" no longer means anything that combination of words might possibly mean - it means car. I'd suggest there's a certain irreducible vocabulary, and its size is going to be the same no matter how many base words are used to compose it.
- pluma 11y ago
  Basically, exactly what happens with compounds like <black> + <bird> => <blackbird> -- blackbirds are a specific sub-category of "black birds", not just any bird with black feathers. Compound words are words too.
- tgb 11y ago
  And it's completely analogous to every other language where we come up with words by combining "auto" and "mobile". It would be challenging to determine what an automobile was from just the word and it would be almost impossible to recreate the word had you just been given the object and asked to come up with one. Might as well say that English is a language with 26 words. Though I imagine this makes spelling and pronunciation easier to remember.
_lce0 11y ago
Are you saying that using this approach could lead us the minimum brain wiring to make language work? if so, I like your idea :)
11y ago

err4nt 11y ago

I can tell you right now you're going to have some trouble with those colours. They reduced the colours to five: > Toki Pona has a five-color palette: loje (red), laso (blue), jelo (yellow), pimeja (black), and walo (white). Like a painter, the speaker can combine them to achieve any hue on the spectrum. Loje walo for pink. Laso jelo for green. So, what's Toki Pona for cyan, which two colours would you combine to create that colour? (Blue = cyan + magenta) Or how would you describe 'magenta' in Toki Pona? (Red = magenta + cyan) See the problem with using Red, Yellow, Blue + Black, White is that Red and Blue are pre-mixed! You're cutting out two of the true primary colours (magenta, cyan) which means you're significantly reducing the amount of colours you can accurately describe. On the other hand, still using just five words: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, and White CAN describe nearly all of the colours we would need to communicate with language. I wonder if the rest of the language is as well thought out as the colours...

dazmax 11y ago
You're talking about light mixing. The red/blue/yellow color wheel is based on pigment mixing: green + blue = cyan, red + blue = magenta
- pluma 11y ago
  And blue + yellow = green. So cyan = blue + blue + yellow?
  - err4nt 11y ago
    If (cyan + magenta) + yellow = green, how would (cyan + magenta) + (cyan + magenta) + yellow = just cyan? To get cyan you simply remove the magenta from blue!
    - pluma 11y ago
      But there isn't a word for cyan and magenta, hence the need to define cyan in terms of RYB. cyan = blue + green green = blue + yellow cyan = blue + (blue + yellow) Well, technically: 2 parts cyan = 1 part blue + 1 part green 2 parts green = 1 part blue + 1 part yellow 2 parts cyan = 1 part blue + 1 part (1 part blue + 1 part yellow) i.e. 2 parts cyan = 1 part blue + 1/2 part blue + 1/2 part yellow i.e. 4 parts cyan = 3 parts blue + 1 part yellow But I think the real lesson here is that colour names based on additive colour mixing are silly.

liveoneggs 11y ago

this seems like a good fit for something like the quicktalker or other assistive technology

mcguire 11y ago
Too much ambiguity: "'What is a car?' Lang mused recently via phone from her home in Toronto. "'You might say that a car is a space that's used for movement,' she proposed. “That would be tomo tawa. If you’re struck by a car though, it might be a hard object that’s hitting me. That’s kiwen utala.'"

7erb 11y ago

I'm working on a conlang called 7erb (pronounced Verb). It's a language of only seven (7) words in its entire vocabulary. More information (although not that much more) is here: http://7erb.com http://7erb.com

tgb 11y ago
This strikes me as a more interesting project than the one in the article. If you're going to put some silly restriction on yourself and then try to work around it, you might as well go all the way! Knowing that this is a work in progress, do you have a dictionary? I'd be interested in it.
- 7erb 11y ago
  The vocabulary is still being finalized. Hopefully soon I can release something.

edw519 11y ago

the language’s minimalist approach is also designed to change how its speakers think Corollary: the language’s minimalist approach is also designed to change how its programmers think When I was young and stupid, I felt disadvantaged that I only knew 10% of a programming language's syntax. Now the same thing makes me feel empowered.

deckiedan 11y ago
Am I misunderstanding you, somehow? But to only understand 10% of a programming language's syntax seems a very limited understanding. To only know 10% of the standard library or whatever is one thing... but 10% of syntax? Either you don't know the language well at all, or else it must have a very complex syntax, with a lot of edge cases. That's one of the nice things about (say) scheme, or lua, say. There's very little syntax to learn. Go, JS, Ruby and Python, more... but still, not that much syntax, really. Even Ruby doesn't really have that much syntax to learn. Ruby, Python and Go all have pretty huge std libs, but not that much syntax.
- iopq 11y ago
  Really? Do you really need to know what the comma operator does in C? Do you really need to know the difference between `void foobar(void)` and `void foobar()`? There are a lot of things in a language even as simple as C that's useless syntactic trivia. I imagine someone could think of really evil things in C++
  - deckiedan 11y ago
    Hm. Maybe I made myself unclear - I was meaning to be specifically in response to the parent post, who said that only knowing 10% made him feel empowered. I was meaning, in a sense, that it's better to have a language which doesn't have such a complex history, undefined behaviour, and weird syntactic trivia. The simpler the language, the less unexpectedness occurs, and the more you can concentrate on the actual logic and meaning. For instance, in English, "homosexual" = attracted sexually to those who are the same ("homo") gender as yourself. But "homophobic" does not mean hating/fearing those the same gender as yourself. The rules are complex, with history, weirdness, and are confusing. The same with programming languages, I feel. Take JS, for instance. >>> (0 == []) true >>> typeof (0 + 0) "number" >>> typeof ([] + []) "string" There is no reason on earth I want to know that stuff or operator precedence rules. I can never remember those if I need to do a `x * y + 2 z --` and so always write in brackets explicitly. But the language can accept such things, and make an order from them. Going back to C (sorry for jumping around), yes, it's simple compared to C++, or many other languages, but it does have a lot of history, undefined behaviour, and stuff you simply need to be aware of. And it's that stuff that makes life complex for C beginners (and allows bugs for C of all experience levels). There's a reason I didn't list C as a simple language. :-) If our languages didn't have such quirks, and we didn't have to cope with working around them, a lot less mistakes would be made. http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/to-table.html http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/to-... for instance, in English. English - the Javascript of the human languages.

shangaslammi 11y ago

The creator of toki pona seems to be a fan of the Finnish language. Several of the words are loaned directly (although without umlauts) and keep their original Finnish meaning. At a glance: älä, kala, -kin, nenä, nimi, sama, sinä are exact Finnish words and "pimeja" is a slight alteration of "pimeä". Kiwen, lipu, linja and walo are probably Finnish inspired as well. Another common trend seems to be using a simplified and shortened forms of the phonetic spelling of English words such as "ale" (all), "en" (and), "insa" (inside), "jaki" (yucky), "jelo" (yellow), "kama" (come), "ken" (can), "kule" (color), "lukin" (looking), "mani" (money), "mi" (me), "mun" (moon), "nanpa" (number), "pata" (brother), "suwi" (sweet), "tawa" (towards), "toki" (talking), "tu" (two), "wan" (one) and "wile" (will). Slightly distorted, but still close: "anpa" (under), "kulupu" (sounds like a Japanese transliteration of group, グループ), "pilin" (feeling), "sewi" (ceiling) and "sike" (circle). This actually helps a lot in memorizing the vocabulary. :)

jordigh 11y ago
She's a fan of a bunch of languages, not just Finnish. Breakdown of roots: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toki_Pona_etymologies.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toki_Pona_etymologie... She deliberately picked a broad sample of roots across human languages so people would find it easy to learn. It's pretty easy to say basic things in Toki Pona, which is all that is possible to say in this language? Sina pona?
panglott 11y ago
I think she speaks English, French, and Esperanto. IIRC, many of the English words came through Tok Pisin, and English-based creole of New Guinea.
mladenkovacevic 11y ago
Some of these words are Serbian although some are made to sound as if you're talking to a baby by dropping some hard Rs and a few other consonants. English - TP - Serbian hand - luka - ruka leg - noka - noga eye - oko - oko A few are also phonetic English-isms "Money" turns into "Mani"
schoen 11y ago

jordigh 11y ago

Mi pona! :-) Sina pona?

leke 11y ago
Jes, mi fartas bone. Ĉu vi fartas bone?
- chillacy 11y ago
  ĉu vi vidis ke la vorto 'ilo' en 'Toki Pona' estas ankaŭ en esperanta? Mi pensas tiu estas amuza :)
  - leke 11y ago
    Jes, ĝi estas :)

mcguire 11y ago

Basic English uses approximately 850 words, and produced this communication between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt: Churchill (so much for automatic text recognition): "When I was with you in the United States last August you expressed to me your interest in Basic English. The Cabinet Committee which I appointed here to consider the possibilities of Basic and means of promoting its wider use have reported and we have adopted the recommendations they have rode. I thought it might be of interest to you to see the Report and am sending you copi [...] "If the United States authorities feel able to give their powerful support to the promotion of Basic English as a means of international intercourse, I feel sure that that would ensure its successful development. My conviction is that Basic English will then prove to be a great boon to mankind in the future and a powerful support to the influence of the Anglo-Saxon peoples in world affairs." FDR: "...Incidentally, I wonder what the course of history would have been if in May 1940 you had been able to offer the British people only "blood, work, eye water and face water", which I understand is the best that Basic English can do with five famous words...." http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box37/t335k01.html http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box37/t335k01.html

panglott 11y ago
Of course Basic English cheats by including all the phrasal verbs, without considering that they are usually separate lexical items. "pick on" or "pass for" aren't easily decipherable based purely on their components.
- mcguire 11y ago
  Any language with a small number of "words" will have to do the same thing. At the other end of the spectrum are agglutinative languages, like Turkish and German (?).
  - murbard2 11y ago
    Yes, but the combinations in English are somewhat arbitrary. It's obvious in context what flyingmetaltube might refer to. It's not obvious that "pony up" means to settle an account, rather than something about hovering horses.

umeshunni 11y ago

> In Icelandic, [..] a microscope a small-watcher. So, just like English, then?

Semiapies 11y ago
Well, scientific latin.
- astrobe_ 11y ago
  It's Greek. Television is latin (tele=far, videre/visus=to see), microscope is Greek (micro=small, skopein=to see).
  - innguest 11y ago
    'tele' is Greek (telos is 'extremity' roughly, from which the adverbial sense "far off" for 'tele-'). Television is of mixed etymology.
  - Semiapies 11y ago
    You're right, of course. I should have said "scientific ancient".
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

avodonosov 11y ago

Ку

veddox 11y ago

Sounds very interesting - signed up for the Memrise Toki Pona course straight away ;-)

schoen 11y ago
o musi!
cyanfrog 11y ago
same here! this language is actually very interesting
- veddox 11y ago
  kama sona nimi pi toki pona ala mute tenpo, taso kute en sitelen ala pona.

camdez 11y ago

Very cool. The grammatical basics seem a lot like Chinese, with similar word order, and a couple Japanese-esque particles thrown in (li ≈ が, e ≈ を). Lacking tense, conjugation / declension, subject / verb agreement, grammatical gender, etc., I've always felt the basics of Chinese make a pretty good foundation for a simple language. I'm curious about the decision to include the grammatical particles, and why it seemed necessary...anyone have a full enough understanding of the grammar to know why the decision was made to allow dropping the "li" particle with "mi" and "sina", but not getting rid of it in general? Chinese similarly lacks a 'to be' copula, and gets by quite well without a subject marker. c.f. EN: I (am) good TP: mi pona ZH: 我好 EN: Water is good TP: telo >li< pona ZH: 水好 Japanese explicitly demarcates the subject / topic, but seems to allow a bit more variety at the beginning of the sentence + uses that demarcation to add a connotation of emphasis or contrast with a previous topic + isn't a conlang. Anyone have a feeling for what it adds here?

leke 11y ago
I think it's to distinguish between adjectives. Perhaps telo pona means good water so "telo pona li lete" is clear that "good water is cold". I don't know I'm totally guessing here :D Anyway, if you like these simple kind of languages, checkout http://angoslanguage.wikispaces.com/ http://angoslanguage.wikispaces.com/
- schoen 11y ago
  Your interpretation is right. There's an example somewhere in one of the official tutorials that shows how moving the li can change the meaning for this reason (although "pi", which means something like "of", was also added for a similar reason: I think Sonja's example was distinguishing two ways of grouping "tomo telo nasa", where "(tomo telo) nasa" would mean "crazy bathroom" and "tomo (telo nasa)" would mean "bar, liquor store" -- so Sonja said the second case would be expressed by "tomo pi telo nasa").
- camdez 11y ago
  Ah, that's a good point. I suppose the limited vocabulary swells the number of compounds, making for more opportunities for confusion in parsing them. Thanks!

ColinWright 11y ago

It's a classic test of a computer programming language to see if it can self-host - that is, to write a compiler or interpreter for the language, in the language. I'd love to see this article translated into Toki Pona to get a sense of the expressiveness of the language. How much is being left to the listener to figure out what must have been meant ... edited for typos

schoen 11y ago
I tried translating a couple of paragraphs and found that the article was mostly too abstract and specific to make it practical. I thought one of the most impressive complete translations is the entire script of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (completed by jan Pije back in 2004). You can read it line-by-line with the English and toki pona texts alternating. I've read most of it and thought the quality of the translation was uniformly excellent. https://web.archive.org/web/20041116173522/http://www.geocities.com/tokipona/text/mphg.html https://web.archive.org/web/20041116173522/http://www.geocit...

mortenlarsen 11y ago

Up Goer Five: https://xkcd.com/1133/ https://xkcd.com/1133/

Skunkleton 11y ago
> If it starts pointing toward space, you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today.

protonfish 11y ago

I have been wondering about ways to allow communication in internet communities (games and other social spaces) that are safe (not allowing personally identifiable information) and cross-lingual. I'd love to see an online game attempt to adopt a symbolic language such as this. The lexicon is small enough that you might not even have to type - just select the word you want from a nested menu.

schoen 11y ago
Some people have started cross-linguistic communication with the huge sets of emoji that are now out there in Unicode (including telling stories!). There are really no communication systems that are "safe" in the way you mean if their users can adopt codes that give new meanings to old symbols. For example, 🍨 💄🍨🌋🌎 🍨📰 🐑🚑📰 🍟🐓🚑📰🐱🍨🐑🐱🐙 (Hint: vpr pernz, yvcfgvpx, vpr pernz, ibypnab, rnegu, vpr pernz, arjfcncre, furrc, nzohynapr, arjfcncre, serapu sevrf, ebbfgre, nzohynapr, arjfcncre, png, vpr pernz, furrc, png, bpgbchf.)
- protonfish 11y ago
  Very cool. I will learn more. I know I can't keep people from inventing their own compound terms for "loser noob", I just want to make it extremely difficult to for predators to get personal information.

njharman 11y ago

Reducing communication to 120 words, double plus good!

trebor 11y ago
At least it'll compress really well, right? ;)

pvorb 11y ago

This reminds me of Guy Steele's 1998 talk "Growing a Language" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0). It's really worth watching.

anigbrowl 11y ago

In Chinese, the word computer translates directly as electric brain. In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-watcher. In Lakota, horse is literally dog of wonder. These neologisms demonstrate the cumulative quality of language, in which we use the known to describe the unknown. I think most people would be better served by learning to use the etymology information in a good dictionary than by using the oral equivalent of Brainfuck. “What is a car?” Lang mused recently via phone from her home in Toronto. “You might say that a car is a space that's used for movement,” she proposed. “That would be tomo tawa. If you’re struck by a car though, it might be a hard object that’s hitting me. That’s kiwen utala.” A language that doesn't offer any sort of empirical consistency doesn't strike me as adaptive. Rather, this seems like an attempt to recapture the lost imaginative potential of early childhood by limiting oneself to the limited vocabulary of a toddler.

rosser 11y ago
It seems to me that much of the point of the language is to engender a change in the way the speaker thinks and engages with speaking. So a better analogy than Brainfuck might be functional programming in general. Many people learn a functional language not for purposes of using it in the course of day-to-day software development, but because knowing — really grokking — functional programming makes you a better programmer.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  I realize that, but why not just learn another established language? OK, it will take longer because you'll have to master a more complex grammar, vocabulary, and idiom, but on the plus side you'll be able to communicate with millions of people, in many cases. The notion that speaking more than one language improves your overall cognitive ability is already widely accepted.
  - rosser 11y ago
    Because the simplicity of Toki Puna is the very point of it. Even Einstein said, "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself." Using such an (admittedly, over-) simplified language would probably go a long way towards helping you approach your speech in such a way that you could explain things with that kind of simplicity of expression.

JulianMorrison 11y ago

No working language has that few words. All that happens if you try, is you get a whole lot of "words" that have spaces in them (or if you're German, no spaces).

gutnor 11y ago
If you push it to the extreme, a language only needs 2 words: 0 and 1. It seems to me that there is a lot more than 120 distinct concepts you need to handle the modern world, even basically - so if you are using only 120 word, you must must have to combine some in a specific fixed fashion that will always represent that concept. At that point, shouldn´t that be considered a word ? Well, actually I should probably read the article and see what people with degree on the subject have to say.
- schoen 11y ago
  There are some sequences of toki pona words that have a fixed or conventional meaning that you might not be able to be confident of just by knowing the meaning of the component parts, like telo nasa 'alcoholic drink' (lit. 'crazy water'), jan pona 'friend' (lit. 'good person'), jan lawa 'ruler, government official' (lit. 'head person'), nasin sewi 'religion' (lit. 'noble path'), meli olin 'girlfriend, wife' (lit. 'love woman'). You can see some official glossaries of these phrases as of 2010 at https://web.archive.org/web/20100702170542/http://en.tokipona.org/wiki/Category:Vocabulary_topics https://web.archive.org/web/20100702170542/http://en.tokipon... I've definitely heard the claim that these ought to be considered words because speakers need to learn them separately.

dvh 11y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit