
Toki Pona: a human language with 120 words - tomkwok
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/toki-pona-smallest-language/398363/?single_page=true
======
mcguire
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
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
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
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.

------
ColinWright
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
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.geocit...](https://web.archive.org/web/20041116173522/http://www.geocities.com/tokipona/text/mphg.html)

------
shangaslammi
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
She's a fan of a bunch of languages, not just Finnish. Breakdown of roots:

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toki_Pona_etymologie...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toki_Pona_etymologies.png)

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?

------
mortenlarsen
Up Goer Five: [https://xkcd.com/1133/](https://xkcd.com/1133/)

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

------
anigbrowl
_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
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
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
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
Einstein is also alleged to have said 'Everything should be made as simple as
possible, but not simpler.'

It's not that I don't think you could communicate in TP, but that I'm not sure
what advantage it has over competing approaches. As I mentioned elsewhere,
facial expressions and gesture already go a long way towards bridging language
gaps, even (or maybe especially) with small children.

------
dan_blanchard
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.

~~~
fataliss
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
It would be much better if everyone learned English - an actually useful
language, and that is what is happening right now.

~~~
fataliss
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.

------
x5n1
[http://tokipona.net/tp/ClassicWordList.aspx](http://tokipona.net/tp/ClassicWordList.aspx)

------
solve
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
> 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
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.

------
camdez
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
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
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").

------
err4nt
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
You're talking about light mixing. The red/blue/yellow color wheel is based on
pigment mixing: green + blue = cyan, red + blue = magenta

~~~
err4nt
Does your printer print with light? I'm able to print out a full rainbow from
my printer and it uses Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow, with Black for added punch
and printing text.

What's inside your printer?

~~~
icebraining
What does it matter what your printer uses?

~~~
rspeer
That's the only reason we're talking about CMYK, isn't it? The CMYK color
space isn't a law of the universe, it's a printing technology.

------
7erb
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
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
The vocabulary is still being finalized. Hopefully soon I can release
something.

------
umeshunni
> In Icelandic, [..] a microscope a small-watcher.

So, just like English, then?

~~~
Semiapies
Well, scientific latin.

~~~
astrobe_
It's Greek. Television is latin (tele=far, videre/visus=to see), microscope is
Greek (micro=small, skopein=to see).

~~~
Semiapies
You're right, of course. I should have said "scientific ancient".

------
JulianMorrison
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
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
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.tokipon...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100702170542/http://en.tokipona.org/wiki/Category:Vocabulary_topics)

I've definitely heard the claim that these ought to be considered words
because speakers need to learn them separately.

------
protonfish
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
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
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.

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

~~~
chillingeffect
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...

------
edw519
_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
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
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
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-...](http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/to-
table.html) for instance, in English.

English - the Javascript of the human languages.

------
pvorb
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.

------
dvh
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit)

------
njharman
Reducing communication to 120 words, double plus good!

~~~
trebor
At least it'll compress really well, right? ;)

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

~~~
mcguire
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.'_"

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

~~~
cyanfrog
same here! this language is actually very interesting

~~~
veddox
kama sona nimi pi toki pona ala mute tenpo, taso kute en sitelen ala pona.

------
jordigh
Mi pona! :-)

Sina pona?

~~~
leke
Jes, mi fartas bone.

Ĉu vi fartas bone?

~~~
chillacy
ĉu vi vidis ke la vorto 'ilo' en 'Toki Pona' estas ankaŭ en esperanta? Mi
pensas tiu estas amuza :)

~~~
leke
Jes, ĝi estas :)

------
avodonosov
Ку

