
Toki Pona - ColinWright
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
======
anonymfus
Conlang Critic is a fan of this language:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLn6LC1RpAo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLn6LC1RpAo)

I highly recommend watching all episodes of their show if you like an idea of
short text based video essays about constructed languages:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQqnfSceITm...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQqnfSceITmv6T_drx1hN84)

~~~
lifthrasiir
I second this. If you are new to the series, the recent Lingwa de Planeta
episode [1] contains a good introduction to conlangs and especially
international auxiliary languages in general.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi1-ZWiqjD8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi1-ZWiqjD8)

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schoen
Maybe dang or some other public-spirited person could find some of the earlier
toki pona threads from HN so people could see some of the earlier discussions?

I know I've participated in quite a few of them because I know toki pona well
and had various random things to comment on each time it was brought up here.
:-)

Edit: I guess the majority of these threads can be found with
[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=toki+pona](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=toki+pona)
(including the recent one on a custom homemade computer with a native toki
pona input and display, a project which was then described by its inventor
exclusively in toki pona).

~~~
6510
thanks

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bovermyer
The really interesting thing about Toki Pona is that it's meant to force you
to think about the meaning of your words in a positive light.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
Claiming that language limits what you can imagine is the strong version of
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it's been pretty thoroughly debunked:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)

~~~
quotemstr
Not everyone agrees that it's been "debunked". There's a lot of motivated
reasoning in linguistics.

~~~
canjobear
You can read about the experiments yourself. Strong Sapir-Whorf (the idea that
language determines thought) is DOA. Weak Sapir-Whorf (language has some
influence on thought) has ok evidence.

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stanislavb
An idea: If one learns to express himself in Toki Pona, would it be possible
to communicate "freely" with natives by simply learning the equivalent
vocabulary (120 words) of any other language?

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codezero
Learning the vocabulary is easy, but because the vocabulary is so small, it
does become quite difficult to construct meaningful sentences following rules
that are very local to a few words, which ultimately spans many words. Most
often, it seems, like any language, a ton of the context becomes implied, so
it’s super tricky.

It’s still a fun weekend or multi weekend exercise in exploring languages
though.

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senorsmile
A couple of years ago Memrise had a 48 hour challenge to learn it with a bunch
of other people, and to try to speak at the end. I did quite terribly (as
usual). Nevertheless, it was a fun challenge.

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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22689959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22689959)

See also
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Toki%20Pona%20comments%3E3&sort=byDate&type=story)

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strogonoff
Invented languages are overwhelmingly boring in their likeness to English,
Spanish and other Western languages.

What if we tried to create, say, a language with a logographic written system
that is pure WYSIWYM (as opposed to “what you see is how you pronounce”) _and_
synthetic to boot?

Make it use vocal cords differently.

Instead of borrowing around, use a random seed in generating a minimum set of
unique basic “native” words according to language rules and build on top of
that (borrowing for meanings outside of that set).

This could be so much more fun!

~~~
justinpombrio
> Invented languages are overwhelmingly boring in their likeness to English,
> Spanish and other Western languages.

Toki Pona is not like English, Spanish, or other Western languages.

It has no singular/plural distinction. It has no past/present/future tense.
Its pronouns have no gender. All of its phonemes are present in almost all
languages (this is on purpose). The way it forms questions is not like Enlgish
(I don't know of any language that it's similar to). Its word order is
subject-verb-object, like most languages. [EDIT: not most, only 42%]

The only thing its taken from English, as far as I've seen, is a bunch of
vocabulary. Though honestly its sounds are so limited that sometimes you can't
recognize which English word a Toki Pona word came from.

> What if we tried to create, say, a language with a logographic written
> system that is pure WYSIWYM (as opposed to “what you see is how you
> pronounce”) and synthetic to boot?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but I'll just leave this link here...

[https://omniglot.com/conscripts/conlangs.htm](https://omniglot.com/conscripts/conlangs.htm)

> Instead of borrowing around, use a random seed in generating a minimum set
> of unique basic “native” words according to language rules and build on top
> of that

Lojban does this.

~~~
schoen
> The way it forms questions is not like Enlgish (I don't know of any language
> that it's similar to).

The "x ala x" pattern is directly modeled on the Chinese "x不x" (and "有没有")
pattern, including the answer ("x" / "x ala" in toki pona, "x" / "不x" in
Chinese). I think Sonja has mentioned this explicitly somewhere.

For example, in Chinese I think you can ask "你可不可" 'you can not can?' with the
possible answers "可" 'can' and "不可" 'cannot'. This corresponds directly to
toki pona's "sina ken ala ken?" 'you can not can?' with the answers "ken"
'can' and "ken ala" 'cannot'.

There's also the "anu seme?" pattern which is similar to the
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_question](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_question)
phenomenon in a number of languages; the one that I find it most similar to is
German, with the "oder?" tags.

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oder#Particle](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oder#Particle)

I understand the "oder?" to have a connotation of 'or _what_?' (like "are you
coming or what?"), in which case "kommst du, oder?" should correspond
literally to toki pona's "sina kama anu seme?" 'you come or what?'.

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stewbrew
Does the title comply with HN rules?

BTW to use an artificial language to understand real life is like asking a
Catholic priest for marriage advice.

~~~
ColinWright
The original title was carefully chosen, extracted from the pages themselves,
to ensure that HN readers would have an idea of what it was supposed to be
about, and not just a pair of random words. As such, I thought it did comply,
and was helpful.

Clearly the mods disagreed.

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HeavenBanned
I really love how body parts are consolidated so smartly. "noka" meaning
thigh, shin and foot is just brilliant.

~~~
gliese1337
You might like Russian, then.

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therein
Care to elaborate? Genuinely curious.

~~~
gliese1337
Russian also has a single word for the entire lower limb, leg and foot
included: "noga". Also a single word for the combined arm and hand: "ruka".

