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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)

#51

Post by thaumasiotes »

kazinator wrote: post #12

> In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-watcher. In Latin, microscope is also "small-watcher", namely, microscopium .

That's Greek. (Well, the -um ending isn't, but the rest is.)

Latin for small is parvus, and Latin for watcher is visor[1], but Latin doesn't tend to form compounds the way the Greek does.

[1] Visor is literally "watcher", an agent noun formed from the verb videre "look at". Microscopium just uses an ordinary noun ending, not an agentive construction. I don't know what happens in Icelandic.

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

#52

Post by firethief »

DapperZoom wrote: post #23

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.

Let's make that into a complete language:

ka := the S combinator

ku := the K combinator

Done. Now kakuku is as expressive as any other Turing-complete language.

( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus )

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

#53

Post by thaumasiotes »

Nzen wrote: post #27
failrate wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/113…

> We could refer to the Apollo lander as a spacecar[0]

This seems to be reaching for exoticism for the sake of exoticism, given that the standard term is the metaphorically identical "spaceship".

It can't even be justified by the restriction to "the 3000 most common words", since ship is #1208 in COCA.

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

#54

Post by yiyus »

I like the idea of a very small language and I think it may be very useful for science and technology, but Toki Pona does not fit the requirements. Eg: it lacks words to express numbers.

Lojban looks interesting for this purpose, but it's way too complicated.

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

#55

Post by jhbadger »

_abattoir wrote: post #39
RobertRoberts wrote: post #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 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 se…

Indeed. In the book detailing the language, the author says that the language was inspired by the various pidgins that have formed around the world where English words are modified to meet native phonology and combined with a simplified grammar.

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

#57

Post by jhbadger »

kazinator wrote: post #12

> In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-watcher. In Latin, microscope is also "small-watcher", namely, microscopium .

When I studied German I was initially amused that the German word for television was "Fernseher" (far seer). How quaint! Until I stopped and thought for a moment what "television" literally means -- tele from Greek meaning "far", plus Latin "vision".

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

#58

Post by Complexicate »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #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 after…

Ogden's Basic English [1] with 850 words [2] and a simplified grammar was an attempt at making an international auxiliary language from English.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Basic_English_word_l...

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

#59

Post by canjobear »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #50
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…

> imagine explaining the word "the" to someone whose native language doesn't have an article Much like "turn out", there are many different ways in which "the" might be used. But as contrasted with "a" ("explain it to someone who doesn't have articles"), it's not that bad -- "the" is used to mark noun phrases that are already present in the conversational context, and "a" is used to introduce new noun phrases into th…

> "the" is used to mark noun phrases that are already present in the conversational context, and "a" is used to introduce new noun phrases into the conversational context.

> (Compare "there's some guy outside scaring customers away" with "there are some guys outside scaring customers away", then consider that a would only be permissible in the first one.)

This rule is OK but it fails for the following case: A man you've never seen before runs into your office and says "The President is outside!" Now, the President wasn't part of your conversational context, in fact there was no conversational context, nor any context with the speaker. But "a President is outside!" is clearly wrong.

More generally, any attempt to give simple rules for this part of English grammar will fail, and will not generalize to other languages with articles. The rules of natural languages are extraordinarily complex, although we have the illusion that we can understand them explicitly. That's why rule-based NLP systems have always seemed attractive, and have always failed.

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

#60

Post by DonaldFisk »

gweinberg wrote: post #56

I'm not sure how well this works in practice. Unless you already know a horse is a wonder dog and a hippopotamus is a water horse, when someone says "river wonder dog" will you know what he means?

Like many languages, you'd have to learn more than the base vocabulary. If you were learning Chinese, could you guess what an electric brain (diànnǎo, 电脑), a vertical rise machine (zhíshēngjī, 直升机) or a cat head eagle (māotóuyīng, 猫头鹰) was? Maybe not, which is why you'd learn the Chinese for computer, helicopter, and owl.
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