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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)

#61

Post by canjobear »

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…

It's probably true that in real natural languages, the 100 most frequent words are also the most ambiguous. Languages have evolved this way because (native) speakers can easily disambiguate, so there's no need to be precise all the time. But Toki Pona is a constructed language, so it might not have this property.

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

#62

Post by godelski »

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 .

In English "microscope" is "micro-scope", namely small-view.

I find it funny that many don't understand that this is how languages work, until they learn other languages. Especially with English, which is a bastardization of a lot of other languages. For example, if you learn French basically anything that is fancy in English is just the normal term in French (e.g. "house" -> "mansion" or "famous person" -> "celebrity")

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

#63

Post by RobertRoberts »

Complexicate wrote: post #58
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...

That's interesting. This seems like actual work to learn though.. (850 words AND grammar rules vs Toki Pona's 100 words and grammar free-for-all)

The reason I made my suggestion is because it would be based on Toki Pona itself, a subset of all languages as it's core philosophy, which seems like a universally good idea.

But to increase adoption of this idea, I feel it needs to have broader appeal and real world value (ie, actually be able to use it somewhere). Otherwise it feels a bit like trivia or a toy.

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

#64

Post by jan_Inkepa »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #60
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.

This is how many languages works, but the spirit of Toki Pona is genuinely different (though many learners come in with the impression). Learning compound phrases won't really help you much.

One could say that the idea is to, if you have to refer to something in a given context, you try to cobble together a description, just enough to differentiate it from other things. "sike tu" (two circles) will be useful to differentiate a bicycle from a car, but if you want to differentiate them from a pair glasses you'll probably need to use a different term - "sike tawa" (moving circles) maybe! What you have to learn, instead of set compound phrases, is the ability to improvise names/descriptions for things on the fly :)

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

#65

Post by godelski »

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?

This is actually really common in languages. Like the other commenter noted in Chinese. I'll give another example. Bear(熊) + cat(猫) = panda(熊猫). There's tons of these that don't make sense unless you already know. There are also plenty that you might be able to put together with context (electric + brain = computer). But we can go into any language and find things like this. The article mentions "microscope" which is already a compound word in English[0]. German has "sick wagon" for "ambulance" and "finger shoes" for "gloves". French has "animal companion" as "pet".

I'll also mention that German and Mandarin have a significant amount of compound words. There's even a joke about German, that if you want to make a new word you just smash two words together. Animal that lives in my house? House-animal. Haustier (pet).

[0] English is a "bastardization" of a bunch of languages. There's plenty of words in it that are compound words from other languages.

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

#66

Post by schoen »

canjobear wrote: post #59
thaumasiotes wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Now, the President wasn't part of your conversational context, in fact there was no conversational context, nor any context with the speaker.

That's an awesome example! My proposed patch would be: singular instantiated concrete nouns in English always need a determiner, and we should use the most specific determiner that pragmatics will give a plausible meaning to. (So also "our mother lives in Boston" is preferable to ?"the mother lives in Boston" but the second option is possible in some contexts.)

> 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.

Yeah, that's a great point. For example, Portuguese commonly requires articles with abstract nouns, where English would forbid them.

"O amor é um dos maiores prazeres da vida."

'(the) love is one of the greatest pleasures of (the) life'

Someone learning one language from the other might first think "oh, great, this language has definite and indefinite articles, just like my native language -- it's no problem, I already understand this". But that understanding will fall down when confronted with situations like abstract nouns.

Ancient Greek has definite articles but no indefinite articles, and I was taught that definite articles are mandatory with people's proper names (ὁ Πλάτων, '(the) Plato'). But it's apparently more complicated than that, because for example in

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

sometimes he's called ὁ Πλάτων and sometimes Πλάτων (for reasons that I don't grasp). And similarly in Portuguese, it's common to refer to people in the third person by a proper name plus definite article (o João, a Maria) but neither obligatory nor universal. My intuition is that it's a very mild honorific and that it's only done when we think the listener is already familiar with the person referred to, but I'm not a native speaker and I bet that intuition isn't quite right either.

So yeah! These rules feel super-simple, and they're really not.

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

#67

Post by lidHanteyk »

xena wrote: post #46
lidHanteyk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure; the Ranto [0] explains why this is a poor way to build a language. [0] http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html

Sed facila. Nenio malhelpas vin uzi vortoj sxati "vieila" (de la ina formo de la franca por maljuna) por "maljuna", sed multoj parolantoj de esperanto eble komprenos. Lojbano probable havas sistemo por vortoj tiel. Vortoj havas multojn lokojn en la "loko strukturo" de la vorto. La vorto por iri estas {klama}, difinita kiel: {x1 venas/iras al celita loko x2 el deirpunkto x3 tra vojo x4 per rimedo/veturilo x5} {lo klam…

u'i coi nintadni .i xu jbobau

lo jbobau ku bridi bangu .i lo ka klama ku selbri .i pe'i drata lo glibau .a lo sperybau lo ka bangu

ku'icu'i zo'oi "good" jbobau se smuni fi mi lo ka xamgu ku .a lo ka vrudi ku .a lo ka zabna ku .a lo ka to'e xlali ku ...i xu ma drani smuni?

u'i di'ai

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

#68

Post by iaabtpbtpnn »

Complexicate wrote: post #58
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...

I have long wondered whether it would be possible to identify the most basic, core words of English, and construct a dictionary such that all definitions eventually reduce to those words. That way, a speaker of a foreign language could learn the meanings of the core words by translation into their native language, and then the process of learning a new word would be: look it up in the dictionary, and if there are any words in the definition that you don't already know, look those up, and so on until everything is reduced to the basic words you already know. The question then is, how many basic words must there be, and which ones are they? I realize nobody actually learns a language like this, but it's still conceptually interesting, analogous to the idealized process of reducing a mathematical proof all the way to the axioms (which, of course, mathematicians don't actually do, but in principle they could).

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

#69

Post by thaumasiotes »

canjobear wrote: post #59
thaumasiotes wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

As I noted, there are many ways to use "the". You're correct that the rule I gave doesn't cover most of them. You're mostly wrong in the details:

> Now, the President wasn't part of your conversational context, in fact there was no conversational context, nor any context with the speaker.

This is very wrong; the President, like all proper nouns, is part of the conversational context. You may validly assume that your listener knows the identity of "the President" in the same way you assume that they know the meaning of the word "outside". For this reason, all proper nouns, arthrous [= marked with "the"] or not, are always definite.

Some English proper nouns are arthrous and some aren't; there is no rule governing this.

> But "a President is outside!" is clearly wrong.

It's not ill-formed in any way[1], though it raises some questions about how you know there's a president out there without also knowing which president it is. But more importantly, I restricted my comment to cases where "the" contrasts with "a", and this is not such a case. "The President" and "a president" are not parallel formations.

[1] If you insist on capitalizing President [referring to a specific known individual], then it is indeed ill-formed. Proper nouns are definite and "a" is indefinite.

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

#70

Post by chrisshroba »

jan_Inkepa wrote: post #32
chrisshroba wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?” (i…

Thank you very much for this write-up! This sounds like a lot of fun, maybe I'll spend some of my quarantine time looking into it. Any recommended resources for learning?
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