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

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

#21

Post by BelleOfTheBall »

katsura wrote: post #2

I learned it last year as a fun excercise, and found it pretty interesting that there are so many things you can express with so few words. However, in the end you'll end up wanting to express much more and the language is just not able to do that, you'll end up lost in the compounds, and things become unclear pretty quickly.

Honestly, a language like this could be quite beneficial if it was widely used (maybe even taught in schools) as a fallback method for cases where you need to communicate with someone without having a language in common. Instead of trying to puzzle out what the other person is saying, you just switch to Toki Pona and use these very basic concepts to slowly figure things out.

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

#22

Post by chrisshroba »

jan_Inkepa wrote: post #3
katsura wrote: post #2

I learned it last year as a fun excercise, and found it pretty interesting that there are so many things you can express with so few words. However, in the end you'll end up wanting to express much more and the language is just not able to do that, you'll end up lost in the compounds, and things become unclear pretty quickly.

(long-time lurker here...) Yip, there are definitely topics I butt into where I hit a wall too -_- . But with time I got much better at navigating them and have had several-hour-long conversations IRL as well as online using just Toki Pona (without resorting to compounds really - I don't know if it's what you're referring to, but compound phrases with fixed meaning aren't really in the spirit of the language). There…

Could you give some examples of things you talk about and things that you think would be difficult to talk about given the language's limitations?

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

#23

Post by DapperZoom »

As a student of Japanese, I often get confused when listening to Japanese because there are so few sounds and therefore many homonyms.

This gave me the idea of a language with only two sounds, "ku" and "ka", being used to express everything. Sort of an analogue to the idea of encoding everything using the binary digits of zero and one.

kakakukukakakukukukuka, as the great philosopher once said.

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

#24

Post by Florin_Andrei »

yongjik wrote: post #17

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 d…

Reading the article, I realized there must be some optimal sizes for vocabulary. I say sizes, plural, because there must be some layers there in terms of usage frequency. Toki Pona clearly goes to an extreme of simplicity in vocabulary space.

But what is "optimal"? You would expect languages, in their natural evolution, tend towards it all the time.

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

#25

Post by csa »

yongjik wrote: post #17

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 d…

Totally agree, and I have data to support this buried in some drive somewhere.

Interestingly, I had a famous SLA researcher/professor tell me that this was a non-issue. I assume it was because she dealt mostly with Dutch learners of English, but I found it to be fantastically short-sighted.

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

#27

Post by Nzen »

failrate wrote: post #4
jan_Inkepa wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(long-time lurker here...) Yip, there are definitely topics I butt into where I hit a wall too -_- . But with time I got much better at navigating them and have had several-hour-long conversations IRL as well as online using just Toki Pona (without resorting to compounds really - I don't know if it's what you're referring to, but compound phrases with fixed meaning aren't really in the spirit of the language). There…

It may not be a concisely expressive language, but I like that the small number of word units means it would be easier to use as an intermediary language than Esperanto. Another practical step could be to identify a specific minimal set of language units required for any given popular nonconstructed language. Is this already a thing?

Presumably, that would depend on your conversatonal goal. We could refer to the Apollo lander as a spacecar[0] in a casual conversation but that could be tedious or misleading if a NASA representative were trying to pigdin with an ESA representative about the metal casing of a booster rocket ballooning past the expansion tolerance of the o-rings, using only the 3000 most common english words.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1133/

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

#28

Post by csa »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #24
yongjik wrote: post #17

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 d…

Reading the article, I realized there must be some optimal sizes for vocabulary. I say sizes, plural, because there must be some layers there in terms of usage frequency. Toki Pona clearly goes to an extreme of simplicity in vocabulary space. But what is "optimal"? You would expect languages, in their natural evolution, tend towards it all the time.

Optimal for whom?

Any system is fairly trivial for native speakers — they just learn it.

For non-native learners, the optimum level is probably the closest to what their native language is. Simple examples, it’s easier for a native speaker of Japanese to learn Mandarin since their is substantial overlap in vocabulary via the significant Chinese influence in the Japanese language.

That said, all other things being equal, the number is probably on the low side. As a simple example, Indonesian seems to be a relatively easy language for folks coming from any language to learn, even if their native language is linguistically distant. I believe this is due to the relatively small amount of functional vocabulary.

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

#29

Post by aasasd »

jan_Inkepa wrote: post #13
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 vastl…

> To view posts in r/mi_lon you must continue in Reddit app or log in.

Ah, here's some new ugly stuff by Reddit.

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

#30

Post by monadic2 »

yongjik wrote: post #17

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 d…

Sure but your “easy” words are useless in most sentences. Think of all the words not in this sentence!
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