
Ilo sitelen, a handmade computer for Toki Pona - tobr
https://toki.increpare.com/ilo-sitelen/
======
schoen
I made a manual translation of this text into English further down in this
thread, at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788461](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788461).

------
tannerbrockwell
There is an Anki Deck for the words / meaning / pictographs... [1] I am
fascinated that this is a 14 character alphabet. I imagine if a CS major or
mathematician made this they would have been strongly inclined to base 16 for
instance. This feels a lot like a language version of lisp...

[1]:
[https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1548566798](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1548566798)

~~~
savolai
I tried two anki apps. The first didnt have file import. Some sort of cloud
solution that didn't explain how it was supposed to work. On the second one,
import was broken. Recommendations?

~~~
yorwba
The official Anki apps are at
[https://apps.ankiweb.net/](https://apps.ankiweb.net/) Your description
doesn't make clear whether you tried to use two of those or some unofficial
apps instead.

~~~
savolai
I wasn’t aware of there being an official anki entity as the concept seems
relatively generic.

------
jan_Inkepa
Oh, hello! I made this. If you've any questions just shoot :)

~~~
lokl
If you share this on r/mechanicalkeyboards, you will be loved.

~~~
savolai
My favourite hn comment of all time. Finally, engineering and humanity meet at
a sweet spot. (Yes, I’m enjoying this a bit too much.)

------
tobr
Here’s some kind of automatic translation:
[http://inamidst.com/services/tokipana?uri=https%3A%2F%2Ftoki...](http://inamidst.com/services/tokipana?uri=https%3A%2F%2Ftoki.increpare.com%2Filo-
sitelen%2F)

~~~
dhosek
The machine translation is not completely comprehensible, but there's some
beautifully strange things that came out of it. I emotion she strongly!

~~~
schoen
I speak toki pona so I just made a manual translation, as follows:

== Writing machine ==

* What am I trying to do?

All computers are supposed to speak English. I dislike this. I wanted to make
a toki pona-only computer.

First I asked myself this: what do I want to do with my computer?

jan Sate made a calculator. That calculator can work with toki pona numbers.
It's a great tool, really fun!

I felt like I wanted to be able to write my language using my machine.

With this idea in mind I didn't say "computer" in the future. I said "writing
machine". I wanted to make a writing machine.

* Writing system

Next, I thought: what kind of keyboard will people use to write toki pona?

Toki pona has few words and few sounds. Its keys can likewise be few!

This made me happy. But I thought - I can make it smaller!

I had created a writing system called "multisound lines". With it, you can
write toki pona using six keys!

I could make this machine using only six [keys]! Awesome!

* The controller and the display

I bought a Raspberry Pi controller and this display.

The display is good - I can send images to it:

I attached the controller to the back of the display. Look at it:

I bought a small keyboard ⌨️ . Subsequently I would change it and improve it a
lot!

Now I had everything. I could begin work!

* First keyboard version

The keyboard had round keys. I didn't like that. I gave it other keys and I
put stickers on top of them:

This is decent! This way I could pause the task.

* sitelen pona

I felt that I wanted to write in the sitelen pona [writing system]. This way,
I could write all of the words of toki pona.

I put a tool for this writing method into the controller (you can see it on
GitHub).

This was really fun! (It was really fun, but it was a lot of work too ).

But, was the work over? Nope!

I wanted to improve it:

\- I wanted to give it a case. \- I wanted to improve the keyboard.

* The case

The writing machine was definitely good, but it didn't have a case:

I wanted to figure out what a case could do. So I made a case using a bunch of
boxes:

This helped me.

Mr. Luca had various measurement tools:

Using these I learned a lot about measurements!

I put these numbers into the Fusion 360 tool.

This tool is really powerful and really useful. It gave me two schematics:

Then, I bought some really strong boards.

I felt that I could make a good case using these.

But when I prototyped a case with them, a lot of mess-ups happened:

I sure learned about what the boards wanted to do, heh!

But, with the second attempt, everything was good.

Was the case done yet? Nope!

There was nothing in the bottom part of the screen. I wanted to put the
machine's name in this region. I bought a name label from the Schildermax
shop.

When it arrived at my home, I put it on the bottom of the screen.

This made me happy. The case was done. Awesome!

* The keyboard

I was unhappy with these keys:

I wanted to improve it. But how?

I bought these sticker sheets:

I could put these images onto the keys.

But this was terrible. I could remove the images with my hands.

I wanted to have good keys. But how?

My friend Tralamazza told me: "I have a machine for making stone. (This
machine can make stone out of liquid.) This machine can make keys! If you send
me the model for the keys, I'll make the keys."

I used another person's key models. Using them, I could make models for my own
keys.

I sent these models to my friend. He made them and sent them to me:

They looked great! I removed the supports from them and I put them onto my
machine:

But I felt like having them be composed of just one color was not that great.
I wanted to color them.

I colored them using a marker.

But how did this coloring work?

First, I put black all over the top of each key cap:

Then, I removed it using alcohol wipes. But the black remained inside the
openings:

But this black was way inside the grooves and it would stay. :) This looked
good to me. I blackened each key this way:

I put it on the keyboard and the work was done. The computer project was done!

* The writing machine is done!

I am really happy with this machine. I use it every day.

Now you know: making this machine was a lot of work. I don't want to make many
writing machines!

Big thanks to Tralamazza and Mr. Luca. They improved my project a lot and
taught me a lot. Thanks to them!

~~~
chongli
I think _machine for making stone_ is a 3D printer? I guess toki pona doesn’t
have a word for that.

~~~
schoen
Yes, the original text links "machine for making stone" to
[https://www.creality3dshop.de/collections/3d-printer/product...](https://www.creality3dshop.de/collections/3d-printer/products/creality3d-ld-002r-uv-
resin-lcd-3d-printer) and "this machine can make stone out of liquid" to
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_muoXfXlEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_muoXfXlEg),
but I didn't preserve any of the links or images in my translation here. There
are several other links in the original text to specific technical resources
or details. :-)

------
sneak
A conlang designed to be minimal and thus super easy to learn.

Why on _Earth_ would one then make a unique character/glyph set? Any conlang
that does not fit neatly into 8859-1 is a nonstarter for wide adoption.

The “you can write it in latin or in hieroglyphics” aspect of TP seems insane
and contradictory to me. That’s the opposite of minimalism.

~~~
c3534l
It's not a conlang in the sense that anyone expects it to be taken up as an
international auxiliary language. It's a conlang created for creative and
artistic purposes. It's not meant for "wide adoption." It's meant for fun.

~~~
sneak
The cost/benefit ratio of investing the time to learn a new language goes up
as the number of people with whom you can speak it increases. Even for fun.

~~~
aidenn0
nitpick, I think you mean the cost/benefit ratio goes down, as the cost
remains fixed and the benefit increases?

~~~
sneak
is 1:10 to 1:500 not an increase in ratio? do i have it backwards?

~~~
aidenn0
The former is 0.1 the latter is 0.002

~~~
sneak
My cursory research on the topic suggests that while the ratio itself is a
fraction, the "size" of the ratio refers to the inverse: the magnitude of
difference between numerator and denominator, with 1:1 being the lowest ratio.

This seems to be more of a linguistic thing than a math thing, which makes
this thread on-topic again. :D

~~~
aidenn0
If we are going to talk linguistics, then saying "the cost/benefit ratio
_improves_ " is probably more clear than saying it gets larger or smaller
then.

------
butz
Could someone explain, preferably in English, why keyboard is so strange? Is
this an art piece?

~~~
Palomides
the Toki Pona conlang uses only 14 letters, and has a philosophy of
simplicity/minimalism, so this is a tiny computer with a reduced keyboard
specifically for the language

it's more or less an art piece, yes

~~~
jan_Inkepa
The input system is a bit fancier/more obscure than that. Toki Pona uses 14
letters when written with the Latin alphabet (on screen, for those confused,
it's displayed as Sitelen Pona, a hieroglyphic writing system for Toki Pona -
[http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/hieroglyphs.php](http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/hieroglyphs.php)
). But because there are 120 words in total, you can merge letters without any
ambiguity arising (merging 'b' and 'p' in english lets you still distinguish
'bell' from 'potato'). Because there's a closed list of 120 words you can
bring this to an extreme of requiring only six input-buttons for the
characters (so, e.g. 't', 'o', and 'k' are all on the same button), and the
computer can disambiguate.

(This approach was inspired by Book Pahlavi -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlavi_scripts#Book_Pahlavi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlavi_scripts#Book_Pahlavi)
).

It's a bit of an art piece, but I also still use it daily for journalling :)

~~~
jzwinck
Thank you for sharing.

The example of B vs P is interesting, as modern Korean has the same. The
airport code for Busan (South Korea) is PUS because there is no practical
difference between B and P in Korean. Same with G/K, R/L, and D/T: each pair
is interchangeable and has been subject to changing fashion over the years in
Gorea.

~~~
int_19h
The sounds are different in this case. You can use a single letter to denote
both, because the sound is unambiguous from context.

------
dang
Not a duplicate, but related from 11 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22689959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22689959)

2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534)

2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406)

2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191186)

------
georgeoliver
Wonderful to see increpare making this. If you've never checked out his other
work I highly recommend it.

------
sdenton4
Some context:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona)

Tiki Pona is a constructed language with a vocabulary of about 125 root words,
and 14 phonemes (allowing a very economical keyboard, from the looks of it).

So presumably, we could read the page with a couple afternoons of practice?
I'm curious how long it takes to pick up the language, if anyone can chime in.
If it's something you can matter in less than a month it could be amazing...

~~~
yiyus
I think your assumptions are correct (I haven't learnt it but have read quite
a bit about this and other artificial languages). It's very cool! The people
who have learnt it talk wonders about it. However, I find it too limited to be
practical. For example, it does not have words for numbers, or for left and
right.

Does anyone knows of some kind of slightly extended version of Toki Pona?

~~~
jan_Inkepa
>For example, it does not have words for numbers

It has two official number systems (described in the official Toki Pona book -
[https://tokipona.org](https://tokipona.org) ). They're not practical for big
numbers, and they are a bit cumbersome, but they're there.

>left and right. I've never had it be necessary to use these words. Often "on
my/your side" if I'm walking with someone, or "beside/towards X" if there's a
feature there.

(it has deficiencies, and can be cumbersome, but these aren't them)

>Does anyone knows of some kind of slightly extended version of Toki Pona?

certain people add/coin words to do certain things, and some people use
obsolete/archaic ones, but nothing's caught on generally. More generally think
there's a world of minlangs (minimalistic languages), but I don't know much
about it, alas.

~~~
jean-
>> left and right.

> I've never had it be necessary to use these words. Often "on my/your side"
> if I'm walking with someone, or "beside/towards X" if there's a feature
> there.

> (it has deficiencies, and can be cumbersome, but these aren't them)

Surely the lack of words for left/right would make it pretty cumbersome to
describe, say, the vehicle code, or to give driving directions, no?

~~~
jan_Inkepa
Yeah.

Vehicle code is a good example. Having a limited vocabulary hits you hard when
it comes to technical/legal texts, and when you don't have context to refer to
(The text on the page linked to doesn't make sense when you can't see the
pictures). If a very specific word isn't in the language, and can't be easily
described using other words, it just gets very messy/unpleasant (even if you
can technically do it, nobody's going to want to read it).

You can often give directions in english pretty well in many places using
landmarks "go to the crossing, you'll see a church - go there, then...etc." .
But yes, not having left/right is a bit cumbersome for this application. If I
was giving directions in Toki Pona to someone, I'd probably just draw a map if
it was in any way complicated ... .

On the other had, as you can see by the translation someone made in the
comments here of my page, you can talk about some technical things just fine,
like building a computer! (if you have enough photos to refer to).

Edit: Oh, here's what the creator of the language had to say about it:

"Toki Pona has a rather narrow range of functions. Although it is very easy to
meditate and communicate honest thoughts and everyday activities in Toki Pona,
it is impossible to translate a chemical textbook or legal document in the
language without significant losses. Such texts are products of the complex,
modern civilization we live in and are not suited for a cute, little language
like Toki Pona.

As an artistic language with limited means of expression, Toki Pona does not
strive to convey every single facet and nuance of human communication.
Nevertheless, the results we can achieve with so few elements prove to be very
interesting, if not spiritually insightful."

~~~
sdenton4
It might be interesting to explore what a minimalistic language explicitly for
technical concepts might look like. It's easy to imagine falling into 'import
blocks' declaring what particular variable jargon placeholders will refer
to... But probably there's a more elegant way to deal with the problem of an
explosion of concepts as you get into the weeds of a technical area.

Or to go full Sapir-Whorf, one could ask what it would look like to design a
language where (say) linear algebra is intrinsic, and thus intuitive.

~~~
yiyus
This is something I would be very interested in.

I think that the combination of an array language (like APL or J, but smaller
like K) which intrinsically incorporated geometric algebra so that concepts
like complex and imaginary numbers or trigonometry are not essential, and a
minimalist artificial language like Toki Pona, would make an excellent tool
for communication of technical concepts.

------
knolax
More like an electronic typewriter. Seems like outside of that one
application, all the other software running on the Raspberry Pi is still the
standard Linux stack. According to the translation in the other comments, the
article likewise only calls it a "writing machine".

~~~
jan_Inkepa
Yeah. I had originally mocked up a command-prompt, scripting language etc.,
but in the end I realised the only thing I actually wanted to do with it was
write, so I focussed on that as my goal :)

~~~
knolax
The keycaps are beautiful. What switches did you use?

~~~
jan_Inkepa
Thanks!

The base keyboard is a commodity koolertron one-haded keyboard (
[https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B07WC4YBVY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_...](https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B07WC4YBVY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1)
), and the switches it uses according to the spec manual are OEM Outemu
switches (and according to the box red ones :) ).

------
thih9
Offtopic:

I stopped reading an introduction to Toki Pona when I learned that
„complicated” also means „bad” or „evil”.

How I see it, lots of things can be complicated. Calculus equations. Some
emotions. Some recipes. Etc.

It’s hard for me to call them bad at the same time.

How others are looking at this?

~~~
anorphirith
It's all about context, in this context the reader won't read something like
calculus as "bad" but rather as "complex" unless your phrase clearly goes
towards that direction

------
tduberne
Very nice. One question though: as far as I understand, it relies heavily on
the fixed-size vocabulary to reduce keyboard size. Is it still able to handle
names (of persons, countries...) which are not part of the vocabulary?

~~~
Doxin
Most languages deal with that problem by simply taking names as they are,
sometimes transliterating to fit the alphabet available. It doesn't matter if
I'm speaking dutch or english, my name is unchanged.

The only wide exception to this tends to be country names which mostly seem to
get a global and a local name. There's no real reason to do this when using
toki-pona.

you could go for constructs like "ma pi suno tewi sewi" which'd translate to
"land of the rising sun" or more literally "land of the sun going up" but I
fail to see the point. Any toki pona ''native'' would be able to read and
pronounce "japan" since all the letters are available in the toki pona
alphabet, the pronunciation even matches well enough. If someone doesn't know
japan they won't know what "land of the rising sun" refers to and you'd need
to reach for more descriptive language in any case.

Disclaimer: my grasp of toki pona grammar is tenuous at best, I'm sure there's
better translations for "land of the rising sun".

~~~
jan_Inkepa
The official Toki Pona book details a procedure for word-borrowing (and also
has a suggested list of translated country names). The online the only source
is a way more linguistically-flavoured article by the creator of the language,
that goes into way more detail than the official book itself:

[http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/tpize.php](http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/tpize.php)

------
rasengan0
look finish
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona)

~~~
jan_Inkepa
Toki Pona takes lots of words from Finnish! - [http://ucteam.ru/toki-
pona/](http://ucteam.ru/toki-pona/)

