Live data from Hacker News

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

theatlantic.com

31–40 of 132 posts

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

#31

Here are some (IMO) silly/potentially interesting tech projects in the Toki Pona world: --- ilo nanpa - a calculator using the Toki Pona number system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgWCLg4H_4U --- 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 automatical…

> 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

It most likely utilizes ligatures—like when you write ‘ff’ or ‘fi’, the letters are joined into a custom glyph (in proper software and context), so this font does the same for custom longer sequences. This is popular lately with programming fonts and such.

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

#32

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…

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?

sure!

Talking about daily life works pretty well (general chit chat - asking people how they’re feeling, what they’ve been doing, assuming you know something about their lives already there won’t be many ambiguities). online, I often share pictures as I go (they give points of reference). So I can say “mi pali e pan suwi” (i made sweet bread) and show a picture of a cake; my friend could say “ni li pona ala pona?” (is it good or not?) and I could reply appropriately. I could say if I plan to make it again, maybe talk about the ingredient composition slightly.

Commonly also, sharing toki pona memes/making jokes, finding deliberately silly ways to refer to things. (A running game I have with a friend is referring to lots of places as “tomo awen” (waiting house). Hospital? “tomo awen”, because most of your time there is waiting. Waiting in line at a supermarket? “tomo awen”. And right now, our homes are also “tomo awen”, because we can’t go out...).

One thing I’m looking forward to doing when it gets warm/we’re not quarantined anymore, is going to the zoo, walking around, and deciding how to describe all the different animals “soweli pi lawa sewi” (animal with a high head) for giraffe for instance. Going to a gallery or the like would also probably work pretty well - you can point at things, talk about how you feel about them. (It would be more about immediate experience than prior knowledge I guess). Any activity/situation with a lot of ready-to-hand context is likely to work.

Doing activities where you have a fixed frame of reference a language with limited vocabulary can work quite well. I played 2-player local coop of Wilmot’s Warehouse ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAcyPIJYOx4 ), where the sould of the game is categorising packages with various random/abstract designs and deciding where to put them in a warehouse. That would probably be a good exercise for any language, but it worked in toki pona.

I met up with someone I didn’t otherwise know and we talked about our professions, where we grew up, etc. (One cheat is that in Toki Pona’s 120 word count, borrowed words aren’t included - but there are conventions for transliterating words from other languages if you want to talk about English (Inli) or America (Mewika)).

You can go shopping and cook with someone - trying to describe what ingredients you’re looking for is I guess a game, and once you have them at home you can probably issue instructions with enough accuracy using Toki Pona’s vocabulary.

What’s difficult to talk about? Time and scheduling, especially under time pressure. Trying to clear up a scheduling confusion via txt messages with a friend was absolutely zero fun, especially when misunderstandings start creeping in that can’t be quickly rectified. Scheduling discussions have been the ones where I’ve hated Toki Pona the most.

Talking about technical matters doesn’t work - I can’t talk meaningful about maths in toki pona beyond the absolute vaguest of euphemisms - and while people have tried to state theorems/etc., it basically doesn’t work in my experience.

Talking without a concrete frame of reference can be hard. If I can’t see you, can’t share pictures with you, can’t use emoji, etc., the range of what I can communicate is severely limited. I can say I worked, I can say I’m feeling good, I can say what country I live in. I can talk about eating flat round bread with red paste on top (pizza), and that my girldfriend didn’t like it or whatever...which is still manageable chitchit I guess, but much more limited. (There are toki pona songs that work well at this level of speech though - e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjlwov4JiD0 ).

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

#33
This concept is used heavily in ASL (American sign language).

Simple signs can be grouped to make other concepts.

There are conjugations or tenses -- explicit number and time are their own signs -- and articles and prepositions are usually dispensed with, much like headlines.

Example "teacher" is TEACH PERSON. Plural would be TEACH PEOPLE. Student is LEARN PERSON, etc. There are the equivalent of modifiers indicated by motion, facial expression, etc.

This sounds wordy but in practice the bit rate is about the same as spoken because some signs stand in for multiple things, plus the omissions and modifiers as above are meaning multipliers.

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

#34
post #4

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?

Yes, those units are called 'semantic primes/primitives': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes

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

#35

Check out this tokenizer for it as well: https://github.com/Xe/x/blob/master/web/tokiponatokens/toki_...

I used this for recompiling a subset of toki pona to a subset of prolog: https://github.com/Xe/x/tree/master/cmd/la-baujmi. This is something I wish I had more time/effort to develop out more.

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

#36
What about an English version of Toki Pona? (maybe Eng-Toki Pona?)

Why? Because English is very common already, and it seems an easy way to not only have usable words in two languages (English and Eng-Toki Pona) but also it would be useful to actually learn. (foreigners could _actually_ use this for real)

This is the biggest hurdle I have with made up languages, they have very little actual utility value.

As an afterthought, a simple charades like game where you have the limited vocabulary on a board, card or print out where people have to describe an event,book/story, object, movie, etc... using Eng-Toki Pona. Everyone could do it right now (even kids), and learn a new language at the same time. (one of the easiest ways to learn something is by making it fun and a game)

Edit: A reverse of this - Japanese-Toki Pona, all the same words, but in Japanese. Same with every other language (Russian, German, French, etc...). Then, after you learn one Toki derivative, you can easily pick up others. I figure it's possible you could learn the choppy/odd sentence building technique in your native language, and then add other languages later. Could also be fun as a group game once the English version gets easy. And all of these would be useful everywhere... not just speaking with other Toki Pona speakers.

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

#38

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.

Sed esperanto estas la lingvo kiu inspiris Ingsoc de Newspeak. Esperanto ne havas vorton por "bad"; esperanto havas malbona, aux "ungood". Simile maljuna por "old" ("not-young") kaj malgranda por "small" ("not-big").

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

#39

What about an English version of Toki Pona? (maybe Eng-Toki Pona?) Why? Because English is very common already, and it seems an easy way to not only have usable words in two languages (English and Eng-Toki Pona) but also it would be useful to actually learn. (foreigners could _actually_ use this for real) This is the biggest hurdle I have with made up languages, they have very little actual utility value. As an after…

Most of Toki Pona sounds like English anyway:

wan: one

tu: two

meli: female, from Tok Pisin mewi, from "Mary" (as in, the Virgin)

lukin: looking

ale: all

en: and

ike: icky

jaki: yucky

insa: inside

jelo: yellow

kalama: clamor

kama: come

ken: can

kule: color

lape: sleepy

lawa: law

linja: line

lili: little

lupa: loop

mani: money

mu: moo

musi: amusing/music

nanpa: number

nimi: name

open: open

pilin: feeling

sama: same

selo: shell

sike: circle

suno: sun

mun: moon

toki: talking

wile: will

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

#40
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sed esperanto estas la lingvo kiu inspiris Ingsoc de Newspeak. Esperanto ne havas vorton por "bad"; esperanto havas malbona, aux "ungood". Simile maljuna por "old" ("not-young") kaj malgranda por "small" ("not-big").

Sure; the Ranto [0] explains why this is a poor way to build a language.

[0] http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html

Post reply on HN