
How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language (2015) - dbrgn
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/toki-pona-smallest-language/398363/?single_page=true
======
mcphage
> “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.”

So then how would you tell other people that you were struck by a car? Would
you say you were hit by a "kiwen utala"? "I was hit by a hard object". Okay,
does that mean a book fell on your head? Or someone bumped into you?

And if "towo tawa" is a "space used for movement", then how would you
distinguish it between any of the other spaces used for movement, like a bus,
train, airplane, elevator, shipping container, bobsled...

One of the values of a word like "car" is it can be used to refer to something
independently of how it's being used, which is helpful when things can be used
in more than 1 way, and you want people to understand you're talking about the
same object in each case.

~~~
schoen
> bus,

Maybe "tomo tawa kulupu" 'group travel space'

> train,

Maybe "tomo tawa linja" 'long stringy travel space' (or alternately "tomo tawa
pi kiwen linja tu" 'travel space of two stringy solids')

> airplane,

I've previously used "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space'

> elevator,

Maybe "tomo tawa anpa" 'downward travel space'

> shipping container,

Maybe "tomo tawa esun" 'commercial travel space'

> bobsled...

Maybe "tomo tawa pi telo lete kiwen" 'hard cold water's travel space'

I'll also add that there's been some debate between "tomo tawa" 'travel
building, travel space' and "ilo tawa" 'travel tool' for vehicles. I would
certainly regard a bicycle as an ilo tawa because you don't enter inside of
it. (A problem with "tomo tawa" is that "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space' is
arguably ambiguous between an airport and an airplane!)

Although toki pona is super-bad for any kind of precision, you can often
figure out how to express more than you might first think. :-)

~~~
mcphage
> A problem with "tomo tawa" is that "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space' is
> arguably ambiguous between an airport and an airplane!

That's the problem with all of these—they're all ambiguous. Which is fine if
the person you're talking to knows which you mean, but when you're talking
about something new, you have no way of actually making clear what you mean.
It seems like the best you can do is reinvent agglutinative languages, badly.

~~~
sago
> agglutinative

?!

Do you really mean that?

All languages have compound lexemes. And all languages can use description to
disambiguate.

The balance in toki pona is at a dramatically different point to English,
which has a relatively large functional vocabulary. But it isn't a difference
in kind. And most conlangs, in my experience, rely more on compounds than
English.

The "Badly" at the end seems to drop your comment from curious bafflement to
prejudice. Why would it be bad?

~~~
mcphage
> Why would it be bad?

Because agglutinative languages have much more sophisticated systems and
morphemes for expressing complicated ideas. This reads more like Mark Twain's
satire about German
([https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html](https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html)).

~~~
khedoros1
Those languages also have more than 123 words. Sophistication implies
complexity, and Toki Pona was designed to be simple, even to a fault.

------
phorese
> In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-
> watcher.

I find this somehow very poignant :) What exactly does the author think
"microscope" means? From Wikipedia:

> microscope (from the Ancient Greek: μικρός, mikrós, "small" and σκοπεῖν,
> skopeîn, "to look" or "see")

~~~
donquichotte
These descriptive names also exist in German:

\- turtle: Schildkröte (shield toad)

\- sloth: Faultier (lazy animal)

\- glove: handschuh (hand shoe)

\- squirrel: Eichhörnchen (oak horn. Admittedly that does not make much
sense.)

\- slug: Nacktschnecke (naked snail)

\- headlight: Scheinwerfer (shine thrower)

\- gum: Zahnfleisch (tooth meat)

\- vacuum cleaner: Staubsauger (dust sucker)

\- squid: Tintenfisch (ink fish)

\- plane: Flugzeug (fly thing)

\- vehicle: Fahrzeug (drive thing)

~~~
adimitrov
Your etymology to Eichhörnchen is a folk etymology. It's a diminuitive of the
Old High German "eihhorno", which in turn derives from Proto-Germanic " *
aikwernô". The root of "Hörnchen" is thus _not_ "Horn", but Proto-Indo-
European " * wer-", which just means "squirrel." Its other meaning is "to
heed, to notice." I guess people thought squirrels to be excessively observant
creatures. Latin "viverra" (ferret) is also related, and Czech "veverka"
(squirrel.)

Also, "Eich" has nothing to do with "Oak." Instead, it derives from PIE " *
aig-" which means "to move quickly."

EDIT: HN's pseudo-markdown formatting is a plague unto mankind. The hoops I
had to jump through to prefix an asterisk to a word…

EDIT2: If you click around on the Wiktionary page for Eichhörnchen, you can
find lots of fun details to its etymology.
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Eichh%C3%B6rnchen](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Eichh%C3%B6rnchen)

~~~
posterboy
It's rather obvious that the archaic meaning has been largely lost and
therefore that _folk etymology_ informed the morpheme's convergence to "oak".
The GP is still silly though, because e.g. the "fly thing" is an inappropriate
loan translation - "flight gear" would be more appropriate (cp.
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Zeug](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Zeug)),
whereas a "plane (sheet) of air" isn't any more meaningful.

~~~
picturesal
Not "plane"=sheet, but "plane" from the Greek "planos"=wandering. (Same root
as planet=wandering star).

An aeroplane is a wanderer through the air.

~~~
tullianus
Etymonline disagrees; -plane here is from French planer "to soar," ultimately
from Latin planus, "flat."
[http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=aeroplane](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=aeroplane)

------
yehi
This reminds me of a Rabbi who I forgot his name. There are Jewish communities
that like to speak in Yiddish and others where the members do not know
Yiddish. There was a Rabbi who wanted to appease to a greater audience by
giving his sermons in Yiddish. The only problem was that he didn't speak
Yiddish, nor did a lot of people who wanted to hear him. So, he made a list of
about 300 Yiddish words and small section about grammar. It was meant for
people who knew Hebrew and English (Yiddish is basically German + Hebrew +
Russian + Eastern European languages). He then learned how to use all of those
words.

The idea was that the Rabbi would only use the 300 words on the list (plus
Hebrew, English, and Aramaic for quotes) during his sermon. That way, it
wouldn't be to hard for a non-native Yiddish speaker to understand his
sermons.

~~~
fusiongyro
If you have more info about this, I'd love to see it!

~~~
yehi
I can't find that much online in English, but here is a picture of one page of
a list of words used during sermons.

[https://i.stack.imgur.com/itgeU.jpg](https://i.stack.imgur.com/itgeU.jpg)

------
schoen
Previous discussions of this article:

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

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

I learned toki pona in 2009 and I enjoy it a lot. Among other things, I used
in this MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle

[http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2012/puzzles/into_the_woodstock/s...](http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2012/puzzles/into_the_woodstock/sounds_good_to_me/)

Related, but with an extremely different ethos:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage)

------
zdean
The focus on simplifying language reminds me of "Albert Einstein's Theory of
Relativity In Words of Four Letters or Less"

[http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html](http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html)

~~~
kej
That, in turn, reminded me of Guy Steele's "Growing a Language" [1] speech on
programming language extensibility at the 1998 ACM OOPSLA conference.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0)

------
FrozenVoid
The idea isn't new, 1984 explores what such restricted language become: a tool
for restricting thought(Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) by limiting the conceptual
space of language speakers("Double-plus-ungood"). Toki Pona is a form of
Newspeak, not some mind-expanding tool. By replacing signified concepts with
primitive composition and generic fit-all 'thought-idea' it removes all
abstract meaning to what is essentially emotional picture of a concept(e.g.
"belly-feel" of 1984).

~~~
crawfordcomeaux
Are you afraid widespread usage of Toki Pona will lead to a more Orwellian
society because you don't trust people to use it in a balanced, nuanced way?

I'm learning it after reading this article for the sake of testing the theory
of if it promotes mindfulness. I'm also evaluating it in the context of
nonviolent communication to see if it can adequately communicate fundamental
human emotions & needs.

~~~
FrozenVoid
I'm not afraid of what Toki Pona is now, its the whole reductionist
attitude("one picture worth a thousand words") that strips semantic load from
communication, restricting the communication to "just fundamentals" as if we
meant to be a primitive culture that can't express complex ideas. You can see
this attitude with emojis and SMS-speech, which both reduce the intellectual
effort to level of pre-school chat, which feels less of a cognitive load than
full communication of adults. Its like a mind-virus that makes you less
inclined to form complex thoughts, or anything more expressive than a pair of
emojis. Toki Pona is essentially a set of about a hundred emojis in text form.
When there is semantic gap, Toki Pona users have to juggle around and combine
their emoji-words to get a generic feel of the idea, just like emoji-users
have to deal with limited conceptual space by composition.

~~~
crawfordcomeaux
Are you speaking from your experience of speaking Toki Pona or is this
conjecture?

------
yongjik
I had to laugh at this point:

> Numbers are also minimal. Lang initially only had words for one (wan), two
> (tu), and several (mute). Many Toki Pona speakers have expanded the word
> luka (hand or arm) to mean five, and mute to mean 10.

Being a barely-used conlang, it already starts to behave like a real language
and sprout random exceptions that non-native speakers will struggle to
understand. I can picture the dialogue:

"See, _luka_ is hand, or arm, but sometimes it's five. It makes perfect
sense!"

"Okay, but when I hear _luka_ how do I know if it is a hand or five?"

"Oh that's easy. Pick one that seems natural."

"Sure, yeah that's easy and natural to _you_ : you speak the language. I
don't!"

~~~
dbrgn
The entire language is (and is meant to be) ambiguous. Compared to other
examples, I find the use of "luka" as meaning five quite clear.

------
therealplato
Upvote this thread if you're interested in seeing Toki Pona added to Duolingo:
[https://www.duolingo.com/comment/7016286](https://www.duolingo.com/comment/7016286)

~~~
BoiledCabbage
That'd be cool. I already started looking through the first link I found
online for learning it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzWrG9iM9ac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzWrG9iM9ac)

~~~
InfiniteBeing
Here are some resources I used to learn a bit earlier this year before I gave
it up because there are other languages that I want to learn.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQIv3xnDxZq...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQIv3xnDxZqRaLfmxB2U5rJ)

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

[https://aiki.pbworks.com/f/tp+in+76+lessons+English.pdf](https://aiki.pbworks.com/f/tp+in+76+lessons+English.pdf)

[http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/toki-pona-
le...](http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/toki-pona-
lessons_en.pdf)

[http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-
pona/english/dictionary.p...](http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-
pona/english/dictionary.php)

There are also memrise lessons.

forums & facebook group

[http://forums.tokipona.org/](http://forums.tokipona.org/)

[https://www.facebook.com/groups/sitelen/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/sitelen/)

------
b0rsuk
Slightly off-topic, but one of Ryszard Kapuściński's African reportages had an
amusing story of traveling with a driver who only knew two (2) words in
English. The words were listed as:

Problem No problem

Armed militia ahead ? Problem. It looks like they're going to let us pass ? No
problem. Low on fuel ? Problem. Shelter found ? No problem. Storm is coming ?
Problem. The remaining communication was done by hand waving (a snake, etc),
watching his darkening or lightening facial expression, body language, various
gestures.

No, it wasn't expressive at all, but it got the job done. Ryszard traveled
where he wanted, the driver got paid.

~~~
jedimastert
Binary language. I can dig it

------
cortesoft
Hmm, it seems like you intentionally CAN'T say some things in Toka Pona. I
wonder if there is some minimum that is required to say EVERYTHING that can be
said in a language? Something in natural language akin to 'Turing
Completeness' for a programming language?

I am not sure... in practice, words are continually added to a language when
new things need to be described, although there was obviously a way to
describe the thing before the new word came along..

~~~
schoen
Answering this is a goal of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage project.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage)

One thing that's confused me about this project is how much they are relying
on people's prior human experience to understand the explications -- maybe a
question of how much they use extensional or intensional definitions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_de...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_definitions)

~~~
ZenPsycho
thanks for this link. I have been thinking a lot about what the language
"primes" are, and my approach was looking at chinese writing's "radicals", a
small list of symbols that it combines to form every written word.

i wonder also how well you could get language primes to align with the axes of
a word vector, as used in word2vec and other neural network based translation
engines. what would a pure vector based language look like, I wonder?

~~~
throwaway7645
APL is a real programming language used in specialized domains like finance
since the 70's I believe and can convey a lot of information in a single line
of code. It looks like Greek symbols because it was developed by a
mathematician. Pretty cool stuff. The primitive data type is the array so it
works well with parallel calculations...etc.

------
nicklaf
“Darmok! Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.”

~~~
throwaway7645
Shakash, when the walls fell

------
clock_tower
I'll admit, they had me fooled, and they weren't even trying to fool me; at
first I thought that this was an authentic Amazonian or South Pacific
language, until I started reading the article more carefully. The part about
only having words for 'one', 'two', and 'many' particularly reminds me of
Daniel Everett and the Pirahã...

------
blinry
I once translated the beautiful short story "The Egg" to Toki Pona:
[https://morr.cc/sike-mama/](https://morr.cc/sike-mama/) The original was
written by Andy Weir (of "The Martian" fame).

It features a side-by-side view and might be interesting if you want to look
at a longer Toki Pona text.

------
neogodless
I was surprised that [https://xkcd.com/thing-
explainer/](https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/) was not mentioned, but then
again, he uses _a thousand_ words in his book!

~~~
jerryszczerry
I think 1000 is a more realistic estimate of how much words you need in a
language, than 100.

Toki pona is nice in concept, but too restrictive in practice.

~~~
johan_larson
Voice of America, the international radio service, uses a restricted subset of
English with about 1500 words and manages to sound natural rather than baby-
talky.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_English)

------
Scaevolus
Toki Pona inspired a fantasy non-linear hieroglyphic system, reminiscent of
Mayan carvings: [http://www.jonathangabel.com/archive/2012/artworks_lipu-
lawa...](http://www.jonathangabel.com/archive/2012/artworks_lipu-lawa-pi-esun-
kama.html)

------
dbrgn
Some of my favorites in Toki Pona:

\- ike li kama (bad comes): shit happens

\- telo nasa (crazy liquid): alcohol

\- telo nasa pan pi wawa ala (crazy liquid bread without power): light beer

\- mije li lon sewi meli (male positioned high relative to female): missionary
position

\- pana e telo jelo (give away yellow liquid): urinate

------
Gaelan
Reminds me of of emoji almost. Ambiguous, short on vocabulary, but you can get
ideas across. An advantage over Toki Pona is that everyone already "speaks"
it, but I assume TP has more in terms of linguistic structure

~~~
unhammer

        There’s good reason to think that emoji are more like gesture than
        language. When you crunch the numbers (and I have), the face, hand,
        and heart emoji are by far the most popular — not the emoji that
        represent noun-like items. Furthermore, the vast majority of emoji are
        used beside words, not all by themselves in extended emoji-only
        stories. People aren’t using emojis as a substitute for language,
        they’re using it as an addition to it, just like you wouldn’t want to
        talk in person with your hands tied behind your back and a paper bag
        over your head. 
        […]
        Emoji are a universal language the same way that pointing at stuff and
        grunting is a universal language. Useful, under a certain set of
        circumstances! But what makes language really powerful is its ability
        to talk about stuff beyond the here and now, beyond the easily
        visualizable. In other words, abstraction.
        […]
        For example, look at the tremendous difficulty that scientists have
        had in communicating the fairly simple concept DANGER THERE IS NUCLEAR
        WASTE HERE STAY AWAY in a way that will continue to make sense to
        humans for the next 10,000 years. Circle with a slash? Nope, could be
        a sideways hamburger. Skull and crossbones? Nope, could refer to the
        Day of the Dead and/or pirates.
    
    

from [http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-
episo...](http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-
episode-1-speaking-a-single-language) (via
[http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-
episo...](http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-
episode-1-speaking-a-single-language) )

------
teddyknox
Sometimes I use a 26 word language and it sure seem capable of saying
everything...

~~~
schoen
Maybe that's a 26-character writing system?

~~~
pmiller2
Maybe it's finger spelling. :)

------
DaveSapien
How to say everything with a language with only two numbers...01

------
ensiferum
But does it have swear words??

~~~
dbrgn
From [http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-
pona/english/dictionary.p...](http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-
pona/english/dictionary.php):

\- pakala (noun): blunder, accident, mistake, destruction, damage, breaking

\- pakala (verb): mess up, destroy, accident

\- pakala! (interjection): damn! fuck!

or...

\- jaki (noun): dirty, nasty, trash

\- jaki (verb): to pollute, to dirty

\- jaki! (interjection): ew! yuck!

Could also be used to insult other people and their relatives:

\- o! mama meli sina li jaki!

------
smnscu
It's referenced in the article and I've never heard about it before: a
gorilla, named Koko, that talks using over 1,000 ASL signs.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNuZ4OE6vCk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNuZ4OE6vCk)

~~~
OskarS
Don't believe the hype. She does know an impressive number of signs to signal
things, but there's essentially no evidence that she has any kind of
"language" in the sense of being able to use grammatical structures, and
there's certainly no evidence of Chomsky-style linguistic recursion.

You can teach animals to signal different things for different mental states
(like teaching a drug-sniffing dog to sit down when he smells drugs) through
conditioning, and it's seems like Koko's abilities are a very advanced version
of that. She is absolutely an impressive animal, but she has no true language.
That, alas, is still the exclusive domain of humans.

~~~
smnscu
I've just heard about it and my mind was understandably blown, but thank you
for putting things in perspective.

------
LostCharacter
This reminds me of Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe (of xkcd). Granted, that
book uses 1,000 words instead of ~100, I think the concept is pretty much the
same.

[https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/](https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/)

------
vacri
It seems more useful as a pidgin language to help people communicate the
basics, rather than a language to be considered a prime candidate. "enough to
get by" rather than "reasonably complete communication".

------
jlebrech
If you go to a foreign speaking country you just need to buy two books, one
for you language and one for the other.

Why not just use emoji's for the toki pona and skip a step?

