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 club could communicate with us in Esperanto more fluently than English!
We had one a freshman join during my senior year who was a huge advocate of Toki Pona as a conlang. We decided to devote a month of the club to Toki Pona instead of Esperanto and it was mind boggling how quickly everyone was able to get a grasp of it. Granted Toki Pona is much more "wordy" than Esperanto, you often have to use many words to convey an idea that you could express quickly in a language with a larger vocabulary. Regardless it was an absolute blast to learn and I'm surprised by how much I remember.
Once I got to college there seemed to be a severe lack of interest in Esperanto, or any conlang for that matter, amongst the student body. I could never really keep enough people interested the same way I could in high school so I gave up after my sophomore year. I really miss teaching people Esperanto. I believe the club at my high school still runs to this day, I'd love to be able to go back and visit one day.
I bloody wish there were good modern Esperanto courses. I've found a Michel Thomas method Esperanto course once but it was incomplete. I would really love to buy a complete one (even for a price higher than what other languages cost). Intuition suggests I'm not the only one interested although there probably are not too many. This means the demand, albeit humble, certainly is higher than the offer. You might consider running a croudsourcing campaign and making some good modern Esperanto resources if you really feel interested in teaching people Esperanto.
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.
> 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 the conversational context.
More generally, "the" and "a" are markers for what is known in linguistics as "definiteness", with "the" being an unspecialized definiteness marker and "a" being a more specialized indefiniteness marker. But there are many other determiners that require or mark definiteness -- possessives like my and their are definite; demonstratives like this and that are definite; some is a fully general indefiniteness marker...
(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.)
> To a foreign learner, easy words are hard, and hard words are easy.
Yep. I've pointed out before that most people have the instinct that when a foreigner doesn't know the language well, you should talk to them the same way you'd talk to a small child. But that's completely backwards. The typical small child only knows common words and can handle any native grammar at all. A foreigner will have trouble with common words, effortlessly comprehend rare words (after looking them up), and have extreme trouble with grammar beyond the basics.
I had a Chinese tutor once who was embarrassed when a rare word came up in some reading, and assured me that this was a "really fancy word" and it didn't matter if I didn't know it. The assurance was not needed -- at the time, my vocabulary was negligible; to me there was no difference between a really fancy word and its dirt-common equivalent. It's taken a lot of work to get to the point where I can be annoyed to encounter a fancy substitute for a word I feel I should have known.
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.
But maybe not the most common hundred concepts. "Turn out" is ambiguous but the notions of "expulsion" or "away" or "count" and "people" may not be.
It would be extremely useful to have a list of the most common core concepts shared by all cultures. Some maybe tricky like colors, but there must be a great many in common because it is possible to communicate after all.
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.
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.
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")
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".
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.
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.
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).
"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]"
> 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.
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.
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 are people online who I talk with regularly exclusively using Toki Pona.
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.
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.
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 :) ).
having played with it i will say that it was an interesting and valuable experience to try and distill something that's emotional to you down into the basic basic concepts required to try and express it, which is exactly the point of TP. It's not for trying to have real conversations in.
Everyone should spend at least some time learning about ancient languages, such as Latin and Greek. If you do, you'll understand that all languages were originally like that, with very few words. The profusion of vocabulary we have nowadays were formed from a small kernel that was enriched with numerous suffixes, prefixes, and the combination of two or more words. For example, as we are closer to Latin, it is useful to learn prefixes such as "ex", "ab", "co", "pre", etc., and how they are used to form thousands of new words from latin origin.
I've spent some time doing that, as well as learning Toki Pona, and it doesn't seem to me that they're very similar. Latin and Greek have attested vocabularies of thousands of words, many of which have a super-specific meaning and aren't analyzable as compounds. Just one example is that they both have words for specific plant and animal species, which Toki Pona doesn't.
I agree that learning ancient languages and prefixes produces amazing results for our understanding of modern languages that are related to them and is a great idea. :-)
I especially don't think that ancient language speakers felt that, just because they had productive prefixes like our re- or un-, they could always describe concepts with combinations of a few existing morphemes instead of inventing new ones or borrowing them from other languages. Also, even the ancient language speakers didn't understand the etymology or structure of their own languages very well; some borrowings and compounds were already opaque to them!
It's weird to see so many words that I already "know" from the Tokipona language just because I'm Finnish and lived a few years in Poland. The words in Tokipona have of course a "wider scope" in their meaning, but here's a few I spotted scrolling through a Tokipona dictionary [1]:
"Kala" is a fish both in Finnish and Tokipona, "nena" is a nose in Tokipona which is "nenä" in Finnish, "sina" (you) is "sinä" in Finnish, "nimi" (name) is the same in both languages, "noka" (leg) is "noga" in Polish, "ona" (she) is the same in Polish. There's more that I'm easily able to remember like "linja" (line in Finnish) which has a similar meaning in Tokipona, not to mention numbers like "wan" and "tu" and words like "mama" (mom) and "mani" (money) etc.
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?
Let's say Pat is an English speaker who has a strong understanding of its history and root words, but has never seen or heard of a hippopotamus until reading your comment. Without looking the word up, Pat can break down the word into the Greek roots híppos (horse) and potamós (river). From these roots, Pat can assume that a hippopotamus is a "river horse" -- a four-legged animal, probably a large mammal, that lives in or around rivers.
Let's say Jordan is a practiced speaker of Toki Pona who has never seen a hippopotamus, and has just now heard "river wonder dog" for the first time ever. Just like Pat, Jordan can infer that this refers to a four-legged animal, probably a mammal, definitely big or impressive, that spends lots of time in water. (The context of rivers is lost, so Jordan might assume that this creature lives on ocean shorelines, or even in open water.)
In either language, the creature's name uniquely identifies it to people who are already familiar with the animal, and gives a useful description to people who are unfamiliar with it.
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.
Others address that this is not uncommon in languages, nor is it unhelpful even if you don't know.
But for a different counterpoint, lets say we gave a specific name to everything. For example, in my new, totally not-fake language, a hippo is a klantomolarnal.
Unless you already know a hippopotamus is a klantomolarnal, when someone says klantomolarnal, will you know what he means?
So, if our options are:
1) colloquial compound words that are informative but inexact and may require context (most languages)
2) unique words for everything with no intrinsic meaning (no language)
3) compound words that uniquely describe a thing (ithkuil, lojban, basically nothing useable)
It seems clear that (1) is our only real option. Toki Pona just has a harder time because of the smaller shared vocabulary which makes things more ambiguous.
In my limited experience, context clears things up tremendously.
(incoming rusty toki pona)
o sina lukin e ni! // Look at that!
o sina lukin e telo suli soweli! // Look at that big, water mammal [hippopotamus]!
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.
For a humorous taste of a limited language, without venturing outside of English, Randall Munroe (the XKCD guy) has a book called, "Thing Explainer", that's a sort of encyclopedia written using only the 1,000 most common words in English.
AFAIK the first edition of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), which "uses 2000 common words in the definitions to make understanding easy", was published in 1978.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] elldoubleyew|6 years ago|reply
We had one a freshman join during my senior year who was a huge advocate of Toki Pona as a conlang. We decided to devote a month of the club to Toki Pona instead of Esperanto and it was mind boggling how quickly everyone was able to get a grasp of it. Granted Toki Pona is much more "wordy" than Esperanto, you often have to use many words to convey an idea that you could express quickly in a language with a larger vocabulary. Regardless it was an absolute blast to learn and I'm surprised by how much I remember.
Once I got to college there seemed to be a severe lack of interest in Esperanto, or any conlang for that matter, amongst the student body. I could never really keep enough people interested the same way I could in high school so I gave up after my sophomore year. I really miss teaching people Esperanto. I believe the club at my high school still runs to this day, I'd love to be able to go back and visit one day.
[+] [-] qwerty456127|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] yongjik|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|6 years ago|reply
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 the conversational context.
More generally, "the" and "a" are markers for what is known in linguistics as "definiteness", with "the" being an unspecialized definiteness marker and "a" being a more specialized indefiniteness marker. But there are many other determiners that require or mark definiteness -- possessives like my and their are definite; demonstratives like this and that are definite; some is a fully general indefiniteness marker...
(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.)
> To a foreign learner, easy words are hard, and hard words are easy.
Yep. I've pointed out before that most people have the instinct that when a foreigner doesn't know the language well, you should talk to them the same way you'd talk to a small child. But that's completely backwards. The typical small child only knows common words and can handle any native grammar at all. A foreigner will have trouble with common words, effortlessly comprehend rare words (after looking them up), and have extreme trouble with grammar beyond the basics.
I had a Chinese tutor once who was embarrassed when a rare word came up in some reading, and assured me that this was a "really fancy word" and it didn't matter if I didn't know it. The assurance was not needed -- at the time, my vocabulary was negligible; to me there was no difference between a really fancy word and its dirt-common equivalent. It's taken a lot of work to get to the point where I can be annoyed to encounter a fancy substitute for a word I feel I should have known.
[+] [-] canjobear|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bladedtoys|6 years ago|reply
But maybe not the most common hundred concepts. "Turn out" is ambiguous but the notions of "expulsion" or "away" or "count" and "people" may not be.
It would be extremely useful to have a list of the most common core concepts shared by all cultures. Some maybe tricky like colors, but there must be a great many in common because it is possible to communicate after all.
[+] [-] csa|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|6 years ago|reply
But what is "optimal"? You would expect languages, in their natural evolution, tend towards it all the time.
[+] [-] monadic2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|6 years ago|reply
In Latin, microscope is also "small-watcher", namely, microscopium.
[+] [-] godelski|6 years ago|reply
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")
[+] [-] jhbadger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RobertRoberts|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Complexicate|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English
[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Basic_English_word_l...
[+] [-] _abattoir|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] jan_Inkepa|6 years ago|reply
---
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 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.
---
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 ).
---
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]"
---
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 .
[+] [-] aasasd|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] katsura|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jan_Inkepa|6 years ago|reply
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 are people online who I talk with regularly exclusively using Toki Pona.
[+] [-] BelleOfTheBall|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richard_todd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imglorp|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] elliotec|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xena|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dk8086|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jan_Inkepa|6 years ago|reply
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 :) ).
[+] [-] masukomi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coliveira|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schoen|6 years ago|reply
I agree that learning ancient languages and prefixes produces amazing results for our understanding of modern languages that are related to them and is a great idea. :-)
I especially don't think that ancient language speakers felt that, just because they had productive prefixes like our re- or un-, they could always describe concepts with combinations of a few existing morphemes instead of inventing new ones or borrowing them from other languages. Also, even the ancient language speakers didn't understand the etymology or structure of their own languages very well; some borrowings and compounds were already opaque to them!
[+] [-] anselmio|6 years ago|reply
"Kala" is a fish both in Finnish and Tokipona, "nena" is a nose in Tokipona which is "nenä" in Finnish, "sina" (you) is "sinä" in Finnish, "nimi" (name) is the same in both languages, "noka" (leg) is "noga" in Polish, "ona" (she) is the same in Polish. There's more that I'm easily able to remember like "linja" (line in Finnish) which has a similar meaning in Tokipona, not to mention numbers like "wan" and "tu" and words like "mama" (mom) and "mani" (money) etc.
[1] http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/dictionary.php
[+] [-] jan_Inkepa|6 years ago|reply
http://ucteam.ru/toki-pona/
[+] [-] stevekemp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406
2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191186
(Links for the curious. Reposts are ok after a year: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
[+] [-] gweinberg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avhon1|6 years ago|reply
Let's say Jordan is a practiced speaker of Toki Pona who has never seen a hippopotamus, and has just now heard "river wonder dog" for the first time ever. Just like Pat, Jordan can infer that this refers to a four-legged animal, probably a mammal, definitely big or impressive, that spends lots of time in water. (The context of rivers is lost, so Jordan might assume that this creature lives on ocean shorelines, or even in open water.)
In either language, the creature's name uniquely identifies it to people who are already familiar with the animal, and gives a useful description to people who are unfamiliar with it.
[+] [-] godelski|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eximius|6 years ago|reply
But for a different counterpoint, lets say we gave a specific name to everything. For example, in my new, totally not-fake language, a hippo is a klantomolarnal.
Unless you already know a hippopotamus is a klantomolarnal, when someone says klantomolarnal, will you know what he means?
So, if our options are:
1) colloquial compound words that are informative but inexact and may require context (most languages) 2) unique words for everything with no intrinsic meaning (no language) 3) compound words that uniquely describe a thing (ithkuil, lojban, basically nothing useable)
It seems clear that (1) is our only real option. Toki Pona just has a harder time because of the smaller shared vocabulary which makes things more ambiguous.
In my limited experience, context clears things up tremendously.
(incoming rusty toki pona)
o sina lukin e ni! // Look at that!
o sina lukin e telo suli soweli! // Look at that big, water mammal [hippopotamus]!
[+] [-] DonaldFisk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CarlRJ|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natmaka|6 years ago|reply
https://www.ldoceonline.com/about.html
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Piskvorrr|6 years ago|reply
;)
In other words, it's a cute experiment.
[+] [-] bitwize|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yiyus|6 years ago|reply
Lojban looks interesting for this purpose, but it's way too complicated.
[+] [-] DapperZoom|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] firethief|6 years ago|reply
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 )
[+] [-] miles-po|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lidHanteyk|6 years ago|reply