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Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

theatlantic.com

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Re: Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

#13

Post by jan_Inkepa »

dk8086 wrote: post #6

It feels like taking a picture and converting it to the lowest image format. Even if you know what was there previously, it's impossible to convert it back to a meaningful piece of information.

Trying to interpret sentences out of context in Toki Pona is indeed tricky!

However, "sina wile ala wile moku e telo pimeja?" (Do you want to eat black water?) can be quite accurately reconstructed as "do you want a coffee?" if you know it was said outside of a cafe.

With a given context that you can refer to (in a cafe, walking in the park, cooking food), the expressive power/range of reference of 120 words is vastly greater than, say, in a letter to a stranger. This is probably one reason why the meme community in Toki Pona is reasonably lively ( https://www.reddit.com/r/mi_lon/ ).

I don't know how you extend that metaphor to image-decompression though! (I guess if you know you're decompressing a picture of a face you can train your decompresser on other picture of faces first :) ).

Re: Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

#14

Post by jan_Inkepa »

Here are some (IMO) silly/potentially interesting tech projects in the Toki Pona world:

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ilo nanpa - a calculator using the Toki Pona number system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgWCLg4H_4U

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linja pona - a font for the Sitelen Pona hieroglyphic system with fancy character combination logic (goes way beyond the limits of my rudimentary font knowledge) - the text is all entered in latin but the font automatically converts toe Sitelen Pona (if you try copy/paste some text from the second site linked somewhere else you'll see it).

https://github.com/davidar/linja-pona

https://davidar.github.io/tp/ a website made with it.

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I worked on a R-Pi based word processor computer thing with a custom keyboard/case/input system for the same writing system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2nYoi2dAk4

(I ad enough time with quarantine to get it finished this week, but it's not properly documented anywhere yet ).

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There's also been a long-standing effort to get the language an ISO code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona#History ).

"In 2008 an application for an ISO 639-3 code was rejected, with a statement that the language was too young.[22] Another request was rejected in 2018 as the language "does not appear to be used in a variety of domains nor for communication within a community which includes all ages".[23]"

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For anyone interested in learning but too cheap/broke to get the official book (http://tokipona.org), the next best thing (in my educated opinion) is the course of jan Pije: http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/okamasona.php .

Re: Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

#17

Post by yongjik »

I've said it before, but the problem with having only a hundred words is that they are the hardest one hundred words in any languages. To a foreign learner, easy words are hard, and hard words are easy.

To someone learning English as a foreign language, "banish" is easy to understand: it has just one meaning, so once you memorize it, you can recognize it whenever it's used.

"Turn out", on the other hand, has half a dozen meanings and you have to rely on context.

In the extreme case, imagine explaining the word "the" to someone whose native language doesn't have an article.

Re: Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

#19

Post by [deleted] »

elldoubleyew wrote: post #9

In high school I was the founder of our (small) Esperanto Club. I gave Esperanto lessons each week at our club meeting designed as a one year course, usually by the end of the year if someone attended each week and did moderate self study outside of class they could communicate in Esperanto really well. We even had one international student who really struggled with english that after a few months of attending our cl…

[deleted]

Re: Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

#20

Post by lidHanteyk »

miles-po wrote: post #16

doubleplus-good

Exactly. Is "kute pona" somebody who is good at listening, or somebody who is obedient? Like (Ingsoc) Newspeak, Toki Pona's poor vocabulary and overloaded semantics lead to a very simple and incurious language perfect for shrinking peoples' minds.
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