Whenever I start telling someone about toki pona, they ask at least some of these questions. So I compile the questions and my answers here.
Toki pona is a constructed language notable for having under 200 words. The strange writing that probably prompted you to ask me about it is sitelen pona.
How do you say anything with so few words?
You refer to most things with multi-word phrases, where some words act as adjectives or adverbs.
| Toki pona | Idiomatic English | Literal English |
|---|---|---|
| ilo toki | phone | speech tool |
| mi mute | we/us | many I/me |
| nimi mama | surname | ancestral name |
| nasa sewi | miracle | divine oddity |
| sona nanpa | maths | number knowledge |
Once you know all the words of toki pona, you can combine them to express anything, tho an accurate phrasing can get long.
Did you make it up?
Sonja Lang made it up in 2001.
Is it just a rearrangement of English?
Toki pona has a grammar of its own, which is similar to English, but also about as similar to Mandarin Chinese. Individual words in toki pona are vague compared to English, precluding trivial translation.
Does anyone actually use it?
Obviously I do, and enthusiastically so. Some ten thousand other people do, too, but they are spread around the world, and gather on the internet, rather than in any particular country.
That’s so stupid.
Sure, but it works!
Why do you use it?
Mostly sith it makes for a very efficient shorthand. The minimal vocabulary also makes it opportune as an amusing mental exercise, and as a source of examples whenever I need a foreign language — it’s my first fluent L2 language.
How does that writing system work?
Under sitelen pona, you write each word (in the order they’d be spoken) with a single logogram, and add punctuation like in English as you see fit. There are two main exceptions. You write the word “pi” with two strokes, joined like an L, surrounding the words it groups from the bottom left. You write proper adjectives (which toki pona uses instead of proper nouns) with logograms used phonemically in a box, or (in my idiolect) in their source language’s script, marked with a vinculum above.
If you refer to most things with multi-word phrases, what exactly does it mean to say that the language has few words, since each “multi-word phrase” functions like a word? Would it be correct to claim that English is a language that uses 26 one-letter “words”, where most ideas are expressed using multi-word phrases?
Individual letters aren’t semantically meaningful, whereas (as far as I can tell) the meaning of a Toki Pona multi-word phrase is always at least partially determined by the meanings of its constituent words. So knowing the basic words would allow you to have some understanding of any text, which isn’t true of English letters.
Well, sometimes individual letters are semantically meaningful, like the “s” at the end of a plural. But “partially determined” is the wrong criterion. The phrase for “phone” may mean “speech tool”, but to understand it, you have to memorize the meaning of “speech tool” separately from memorizing the meanings of “speech” and “tool”. The fact that it isn’t written as a single word that amounts to “speechtool”, is an irrelevant matter of syntax that doesn’t fundamentally change how the language works.
In English, if we wrote “telephone” as “tele phone”, and “microphone” as “micro phone”, etc., that would by your standard reduce the word count. But the change in word count would mean basically nothing.
If you call a multi-word phrase a word, we can more appositely claim that the formation of words and their associations to meanings, in toki pona, is very systematic and predictable. However many words it truly has, toki pona remains very easy to learn. The definition of “word” is flexible/arbitrary, but that final observation is most obviously consistent with the few-words view.
What exactly does “predictable” mean here? If the phrase for “phone” means “speech tool”, how do I tell between phone and loudspeaker or cough drop?
If I want to say “apricot” do I need to say “small soft orange when ripe nonfuzzy stone deciduous tree fruit”? Or do I just say something shorter like ‘orange fruit’ and hope the other guy guesses which kind of orange fruit I mean?
How would I say “feldspar”? “Rock type #309″? How would I say “acetaminophen”?
You can infer the toki pona word (phrase) to match a meaning by joining words (standard base concepts) according to meaning-clusters of the base words and rules for adjective order. That is, making a toki pona word-phrase, you only need to understand the intended meaning of the whole phrase and the small set of base words.
Likewise, understanding a word-phrase to a good approximation depends only on the words in it and their arrangement. Understanding it exactly depends on context and conventions that build up around common terms.
You can add more adjectives (“phone” could be “tool of distant speech” and “loudspeaker”, “tool of strong speech”), or cope via context.
The latter is exactly what you do. If context leaves ambiguity, you add as many adjectives as needed, changing “fruit” to “orange fruit” to “small soft orange stone tree fruit”.
Toki pona is less opportune when you need great precision like that. I see three solutions
mash together lots of adjectives (feldspar = silicon-oxygen crystal + other details = square rock of bodily air and of moderate power movement …)
use numbers and symbols according to reductionism and the topic in question (acetaminophen = one-circly two-armed “C8H9NO2”)
bring in a loanword/proper adjective (“misikeke Asitaminopen”)
Can you give more concrete examples of where you used it?
For writing, there’s also jan misali’s ASCII toki pona syllabary.