How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language (2015) | Hacker News Reader

How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language (2015)

theatlantic.com

149 pointsdbrgn102 comments

> “What is a car?” Lang mused recently via phone from her home in Toronto. “You might say that a car is a space that's used for movement,” she proposed. “That would be tomo tawa. If you’re struck by a car though, it might be a hard object that’s hitting me. That’s kiwen utala.”

So then how would you tell other people that you were struck by a car? Would you say you were hit by a "kiwen utala"? "I was hit by a hard object". Okay, does that mean a book fell on your head? Or someone bumped into you?

And if "towo tawa" is a "space used for movement", then how would you distinguish it between any of the other spaces used for movement, like a bus, train, airplane, elevator, shipping container, bobsled...

One of the values of a word like "car" is it can be used to refer to something independently of how it's being used, which is helpful when things can be used in more than 1 way, and you want people to understand you're talking about the same object in each case.

> So then how would you

You don't.

Then why did she use it as an example?

I think Sonja thinks that the ambiguity of toki pona is a feature. (Another way to see it is as a challenge, like a puzzle or a form of constrained writing.)

Underspecification is an inherent feature of language. Specificity is an (unrealistic) ideal.

> bus,

Maybe "tomo tawa kulupu" 'group travel space'

> train,

Maybe "tomo tawa linja" 'long stringy travel space' (or alternately "tomo tawa pi kiwen linja tu" 'travel space of two stringy solids')

> airplane,

I've previously used "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space'

> elevator,

Maybe "tomo tawa anpa" 'downward travel space'

> shipping container,

Maybe "tomo tawa esun" 'commercial travel space'

> bobsled...

Maybe "tomo tawa pi telo lete kiwen" 'hard cold water's travel space'

I'll also add that there's been some debate between "tomo tawa" 'travel building, travel space' and "ilo tawa" 'travel tool' for vehicles. I would certainly regard a bicycle as an ilo tawa because you don't enter inside of it. (A problem with "tomo tawa" is that "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space' is arguably ambiguous between an airport and an airplane!)

Although toki pona is super-bad for any kind of precision, you can often figure out how to express more than you might first think. :-)

> A problem with "tomo tawa" is that "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space' is arguably ambiguous between an airport and an airplane!

That's the problem with all of these—they're all ambiguous. Which is fine if the person you're talking to knows which you mean, but when you're talking about something new, you have no way of actually making clear what you mean. It seems like the best you can do is reinvent agglutinative languages, badly.

> agglutinative

Do you really mean that?

All languages have compound lexemes. And all languages can use description to disambiguate.

The balance in toki pona is at a dramatically different point to English, which has a relatively large functional vocabulary. But it isn't a difference in kind. And most conlangs, in my experience, rely more on compounds than English.

The "Badly" at the end seems to drop your comment from curious bafflement to prejudice. Why would it be bad?

> Why would it be bad?

Because agglutinative languages have much more sophisticated systems and morphemes for expressing complicated ideas. This reads more like Mark Twain's satire about German (https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html).

Those languages also have more than 123 words. Sophistication implies complexity, and Toki Pona was designed to be simple, even to a fault.

In Chinese, an airport is a "airplane field" and a airplane is a compound of the word for "wood" and "table.

What? An airplane is 飞机，where 飞 = flying and 机 = machine

I think the confusion is because of simplified vs. traditional characters. 机 is made from 木 (wood) and 几 (table) radicals, and in Japanese it really does mean desk/table. But in Chinese it's the simplified form of 機 (machine). The 几 is just a substitute for some more complicated strokes, and 木 is just for the sound.

Even then the character by itself doesn't mean "airplane", you need to pair it with 飞.

Maybe airport could be written as "tomo pi tawa kon"?

My toddler says "bye bye" when he can't find a toy, runs out of water or food, when the movie is over, etc. Unless rushed, it is kind of fun to learn to communicate better with him with each passing day. His creativity in using his very small vocabulary to describe new concepts or desires is fascinating.

Just don't think I can get as excited about adults wearing diapers for fun.

It depends what you were trying to communicate.

toki pona has a reduced vocabulary. It builds more complex concepts that other languages have lexemes for as compounds, and these are somewhat standard, though more flexible than in other languages ('tomo tawa' is almost always the way to say 'car'). All languages do this, of course, e.g. a firefly / lightning bug, but toki pona does it more.

Most people would understand 'tomo tawa li utala e mi' to mean a car hit me, unless the context indicated otherwise (e.g. we're discussing trains). If it really mattered that it was a private passenger vehicle and not a bus, or some other kind of vehicle, you'd have to say more. But if I said 'I was hit by a vehicle', you wouldn't necessarily need to know exactly what kind. You would probably infer that I didn't mean an aircraft.

Part of the zen of toki pona is realising how little you need to specify.

And again, this happens to a lesser extent in other languages. You typically don't specify pronouns with Japanese verbs, relying on the context, with the occasional explicit pronoun as a topic marker (which Japanese language learners from, say, English, use much more often than native speakers).

The value of Toki Pona is in making fewer distinctions rather than more. You really couldn't have the conversation we're having right now in Toki Pona, but that's not what it's made for. Criticizing it in these terms is a bit like criticizing Perl because it's hard to read over the phone.

Right. Let's translate this whole thread into Toki Pona !

What's funny about that is, it would turn the thread into "I like Good Talk," "I think this: Good Talk is yucky!" which exposes as much as it conceals. :)

I see it more like praising Toki Pona because of its simplicity is a bit like praising Brainfuck for its simplicity. Sure, it is easy to learn its handful of commands, but it cannot be used for anything practical.

If your imagination is limited to the practical, this isn't the hobby for you.

I'm not looking for a hobby, but thank you for the hint.

I was just pointing out that your analogy with Perl was not a very fortunate one. What was being criticized about the language is that it is so simple that it needs too much composition to express ideas (which in my opinion should be the main goal of a language).

In your analogy, you make it look like if the problem was that this (hackernews? an internet forum? written language?) is not the right medium to communicate using Toki Pona, as a phone is not the right medium for Perl programs. My question is: what would the right medium be?

See, you're overcomplicated things so much with your precision, you're really missing the point. You can communicate by giving flowers, but you won't be able to convey this conversation with them. Nevertheless, on the occasions when you might use flowers to say something to someone, if you instead try to use a lengthy thread on Hacker News, your precision level will be very high but you will completely miss the point.

You should consider taking up Toki Pona as a hobby. You should try and take meeting notes in Toki Pona at work. You'll be surprised at what you find yourself thinking—even though you won't be able to use the notes in the way you would your normal notes.

When we use this language, coming from English, Spanish or Dutch or whatever, we have that as reference. If you would use this language truely, I guess it would mean that you start to think differently about the objects. Maybe the difference between train and car is not that important anymore.

Indeed, we speak of the cars of a train, while a highway truck with several cars attached is likewise called a train. A railway train is literally a train of railway cars. Then there's the cable car, which is not a train although it runs on tracks, but then again, a track car is a race car for race tracks, which a driver might do training with. And all of them could car-ry car-go.

An aside, regarding transportation: In Brazilian Portuguese - specifically used by those from the state of Minas Gerais - the word trem (train) has taken on extra meanings. The story goes that when trains came to the region, people from the countryside started calling the objects being transported trains too. Thus trem became 'thing'.

In Brazil, even the formal word for 'thing' (coisa) became a verb (coisar), informally. Meaning you can 'coisar a coisa' (thing the thing). There's even an informal masculine version of 'thing' (coiso), which serves no purpose but to say 'coisa'.

Furthermore, regarding 'thing', one can also use 'troço' (which also means a useless person), 'treco', 'negócio' (business), and 'parada' (stop).

> In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-watcher.

I find this somehow very poignant :) What exactly does the author think "microscope" means? From Wikipedia:

> microscope (from the Ancient Greek: μικρός, mikrós, "small" and σκοπεῖν, skopeîn, "to look" or "see")

As someone who is only half a linguist, but who work closely with established researchers, this odd variant of "language exotism" is far too common, even in 2017. For others, it's far too English-centric (dismissals from well-established researchers such as "but it's simple to express this information-dense, single word in language X just by saying (insert long, not very representative English translation of language X word here)... etc)

These descriptive names also exist in German:

- turtle: Schildkröte (shield toad)

- sloth: Faultier (lazy animal)

- glove: handschuh (hand shoe)

- squirrel: Eichhörnchen (oak horn. Admittedly that does not make much sense.)

- slug: Nacktschnecke (naked snail)

- headlight: Scheinwerfer (shine thrower)

- gum: Zahnfleisch (tooth meat)

- vacuum cleaner: Staubsauger (dust sucker)

- squid: Tintenfisch (ink fish)

- plane: Flugzeug (fly thing)

- vehicle: Fahrzeug (drive thing)

I suppose you got your eichhornen from us Dutchies. The story goes that a Dutch trader went to the UK, saw a squirrel, and wondered what it was. He pointed at the squirrel, asking a local "what's that?", the local thought he was pointing at the acorn the squirrel was holding and replied "that's an acorn". And that's when the "eekhoorn" was born.

Despite your sibling comment being more convincing, I rather prefer this explanation :).

I've heard a similar tale about 'wisdom tooth'. The story goes that it's a translation of the Dutch 'verstandskies'. 'Kies' means tooth (molar?), and 'verstand' can mean 'far-standing', so referring to the position of the tooth.

However, because 'verstand' more commonly means 'mind', it was mistranslated.

Now, Germans also use the 'wisdom' version, and Belgians use 'wijsheidstand', where 'wijsheid' is another of wisdom, so probably this story is incorrect. Many of us Dutchies still choose to believe it, however, and so we just have to conclude that both the Germans and Belgians are just kind of silly for making the same mistake.

I'll just continue spoiling your Dutch fun :-)

It's from Greek σωφρονιστήρ /sophonister/ through Latin (dens sapientiae). It's been "Wisdom tooth" all along. The story goes that these teeth appear approximately at the age where one becomes "wise."

Ha. Few of the people whose wisdom teeth came and went (painfully) are wise already. Increased life spans and all that…

Then again, sophos does not just mean wise in Greek, but also just clever, cunning, or prudent. ;-)

Pish, what do the Greeks know!

Thanks for your comments though. I love this kind of stuff!

Your etymology to Eichhörnchen is a folk etymology. It's a diminuitive of the Old High German "eihhorno", which in turn derives from Proto-Germanic " * aikwernô". The root of "Hörnchen" is thus _not_ "Horn", but Proto-Indo-European " * wer-", which just means "squirrel." Its other meaning is "to heed, to notice." I guess people thought squirrels to be excessively observant creatures. Latin "viverra" (ferret) is also related, and Czech "veverka" (squirrel.)

Also, "Eich" has nothing to do with "Oak." Instead, it derives from PIE " * aig-" which means "to move quickly."

EDIT: HN's pseudo-markdown formatting is a plague unto mankind. The hoops I had to jump through to prefix an asterisk to a word…

EDIT2: If you click around on the Wiktionary page for Eichhörnchen, you can find lots of fun details to its etymology. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Eichh%C3%B6rnchen

It's rather obvious that the archaic meaning has been largely lost and therefore that folk etymology informed the morpheme's convergence to "oak". The GP is still silly though, because e.g. the "fly thing" is an inappropriate loan translation - "flight gear" would be more appropriate (cp. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Zeug), whereas a "plane (sheet) of air" isn't any more meaningful.

Absolutely. Folk etymology is actually a productive process; in the literature, you'll also read "reanalysis", as in, a word's components which are not understood are reanalysed as something familiar. Compare English "sparrowgrass" — asparagus, or bridegroom, where groom is originally "gome", meaning "man" in Old English, and not "groom" in the modern (i.e. Early-Modern-English) sense.

The translation of Zeug, and especially -zeug is contentious. Stuff, gear, tool, utility, means. There are many ways in which it is used in German: Flugzeug, something that flies (or that you use to fly with); but Schwimmzeug is not a boat. Instead it means the "stuff" you need to go swimming, like goggles and a swimsuit. Schlagzeug (Schlag: beat) is neither something you use to hit somebody with, nor all the things you need in order to go a-hitting. It's a drum kit.

Not "plane"=sheet, but "plane" from the Greek "planos"=wandering. (Same root as planet=wandering star).

An aeroplane is a wanderer through the air.

Etymonline disagrees; -plane here is from French planer "to soar," ultimately from Latin planus, "flat." http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=aeroplane

There's some historical baggage here.

Consider a man being helped along the street by his friends. He's stumbling, often falling over, unable to keep going in a straight line. A police officer walks up and asks them what's wrong.

Scenario 1: his friends say "He's drunk off his ass."

Scenario 2: his friends say "He has imbibed intoxicating beverages to excess."

To many native English speakers, if you presented those two as skits, they'd find the second one much funnier. And the reason would be the use of "high-class" vocabulary in a decidedly low-class situation (a drunk stumbling along the street).

Now consider the English word hydrogen. And then consider the German word Wasserstoff. Native English speakers sometimes find the German word funny -- it sounds just like "water stuff"! But they don't reflect on the fact that "hydrogen" means essentially the same thing when you look at the Greek roots.

This happens because words with Germanic roots are often "low-class" in modern English, while words with obvious Greek and Latin roots are high-class. And that... is because modern English developed after the (Romance-language-speaking) Normans took over England from the (Germanic-language-speaking) Anglo-Saxons. The vocabulary of the Normans, since they were the ruling class, is prestigious in modern English, while the vocabulary of their Anglo-Saxon subjects isn't.

And guess what language family Icelandic is in?

This reminds me of a Rabbi who I forgot his name. There are Jewish communities that like to speak in Yiddish and others where the members do not know Yiddish. There was a Rabbi who wanted to appease to a greater audience by giving his sermons in Yiddish. The only problem was that he didn't speak Yiddish, nor did a lot of people who wanted to hear him. So, he made a list of about 300 Yiddish words and small section about grammar. It was meant for people who knew Hebrew and English (Yiddish is basically German + Hebrew + Russian + Eastern European languages). He then learned how to use all of those words.

The idea was that the Rabbi would only use the 300 words on the list (plus Hebrew, English, and Aramaic for quotes) during his sermon. That way, it wouldn't be to hard for a non-native Yiddish speaker to understand his sermons.

If you have more info about this, I'd love to see it!

I can't find that much online in English, but here is a picture of one page of a list of words used during sermons.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/itgeU.jpg

the priest engineer, i like it.

Previous discussions of this article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406 (a year ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534 (two years ago)

I learned toki pona in 2009 and I enjoy it a lot. Among other things, I used in this MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle

http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2012/puzzles/into_the_woodstock/s...

Related, but with an extremely different ethos:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage

The focus on simplifying language reminds me of "Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity In Words of Four Letters or Less"

http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html

That, in turn, reminded me of Guy Steele's "Growing a Language" [1] speech on programming language extensibility at the 1998 ACM OOPSLA conference.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0

The idea isn't new, 1984 explores what such restricted language become: a tool for restricting thought(Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) by limiting the conceptual space of language speakers("Double-plus-ungood"). Toki Pona is a form of Newspeak, not some mind-expanding tool. By replacing signified concepts with primitive composition and generic fit-all 'thought-idea' it removes all abstract meaning to what is essentially emotional picture of a concept(e.g. "belly-feel" of 1984).

"Avoid using the word 'very' because it's lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don't use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason boys - to woo women - and in that endeavor, laziness will not do." - Dead Poet's Society

> Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women

Rule #1: Know your Audience

Are you afraid widespread usage of Toki Pona will lead to a more Orwellian society because you don't trust people to use it in a balanced, nuanced way?

I'm learning it after reading this article for the sake of testing the theory of if it promotes mindfulness. I'm also evaluating it in the context of nonviolent communication to see if it can adequately communicate fundamental human emotions & needs.

I have zero worries that Toki Pona will take over as a primary language in the foreseeable future. It's more of a research toy than a language for daily use.

Agreed, it is just a toy, but the parent level comments mainly seem to say that they find both this and emojis to be a step in the wrong direction. I seriously doubt they think people playing in this mini-language will bring about an Orwellian dystopia.

I'm slowly trying to develop a human programming language with mathematical foundations in categorical neuroscience. It's meant to be a standardized way to create personalized scripts for people to follow to achieve whatever changes in their brain/mind/body they want. Think of it as a strict subset of natural language.

Toki Pona or something like it seems like a useful tool in that context, though I'm not sure how it might fit in yet.

I'm not afraid of what Toki Pona is now, its the whole reductionist attitude("one picture worth a thousand words") that strips semantic load from communication, restricting the communication to "just fundamentals" as if we meant to be a primitive culture that can't express complex ideas. You can see this attitude with emojis and SMS-speech, which both reduce the intellectual effort to level of pre-school chat, which feels less of a cognitive load than full communication of adults. Its like a mind-virus that makes you less inclined to form complex thoughts, or anything more expressive than a pair of emojis. Toki Pona is essentially a set of about a hundred emojis in text form. When there is semantic gap, Toki Pona users have to juggle around and combine their emoji-words to get a generic feel of the idea, just like emoji-users have to deal with limited conceptual space by composition.

Are you speaking from your experience of speaking Toki Pona or is this conjecture?

It doesn't really work that way. Stephen Pinker talks about this in some of his books.

In the real world, some communities have used very restricted languages ("pidgins") for work and trade. But when you raise the next generation in such a language they quite spontaneously complexify and enrich the original pidgin into something called a creole. And creoles are full-featured languages.

I had to laugh at this point:

> Numbers are also minimal. Lang initially only had words for one (wan), two (tu), and several (mute). Many Toki Pona speakers have expanded the word luka (hand or arm) to mean five, and mute to mean 10.

Being a barely-used conlang, it already starts to behave like a real language and sprout random exceptions that non-native speakers will struggle to understand. I can picture the dialogue:

"See, luka is hand, or arm, but sometimes it's five. It makes perfect sense!"

"Okay, but when I hear luka how do I know if it is a hand or five?"

"Oh that's easy. Pick one that seems natural."

"Sure, yeah that's easy and natural to you: you speak the language. I don't!"

The entire language is (and is meant to be) ambiguous. Compared to other examples, I find the use of "luka" as meaning five quite clear.

Upvote this thread if you're interested in seeing Toki Pona added to Duolingo: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/7016286

That'd be cool. I already started looking through the first link I found online for learning it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzWrG9iM9ac

Here are some resources I used to learn a bit earlier this year before I gave it up because there are other languages that I want to learn.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQIv3xnDxZq...

http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/okamasona.php

https://aiki.pbworks.com/f/tp+in+76+lessons+English.pdf

http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/toki-pona-le...

http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/dictionary.p...

There are also memrise lessons.

forums & facebook group

http://forums.tokipona.org/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/sitelen/

There's toki pona on memrise

I feel like a duolingo course would be too prescriptive, which essentially defeats the point of Toki Pona. Toki Pona is not about direct translation, but reflecting on how to make yourself a better communicator by thinking about what other people hear instead of what you're saying

Hmm, it seems like you intentionally CAN'T say some things in Toka Pona. I wonder if there is some minimum that is required to say EVERYTHING that can be said in a language? Something in natural language akin to 'Turing Completeness' for a programming language?

I am not sure... in practice, words are continually added to a language when new things need to be described, although there was obviously a way to describe the thing before the new word came along..

Answering this is a goal of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage

One thing that's confused me about this project is how much they are relying on people's prior human experience to understand the explications -- maybe a question of how much they use extensional or intensional definitions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_de...

thanks for this link. I have been thinking a lot about what the language "primes" are, and my approach was looking at chinese writing's "radicals", a small list of symbols that it combines to form every written word.

i wonder also how well you could get language primes to align with the axes of a word vector, as used in word2vec and other neural network based translation engines. what would a pure vector based language look like, I wonder?

APL is a real programming language used in specialized domains like finance since the 70's I believe and can convey a lot of information in a single line of code. It looks like Greek symbols because it was developed by a mathematician. Pretty cool stuff. The primitive data type is the array so it works well with parallel calculations...etc.

I wanted to thank you for mentioning NSM. I hadn't heard of it before and it's quite exciting and interesting research—seems like a fantastic jumping-off point for building a small language!

A minimalistic Turing-complete language is usually not very useful. Nobody seriously programs in Brainfuck.

It is entertaining to look for corresponding patterns between formal languages (programming languages) and natural ones. For example, defining new words is essential and corresponds to procedures. What about templates/generics? I think the concept of adverbs and adjectives comes close. You take a generic word "car" and specialize it "blue car". Natural languages have namespaces, but they are implicit. A jaguar could be an animal or a car depending on context.

Isn't the absence of user-defined abstractions the problem here? You cannot seriously program in BF, but you could program in lambda calculus or combinator logic, and it has just two primitives.

Maybe if there existed BF where you had a macro system for user-defined sequences, it would be possible to program in such a language.

I tried it once, it was called m4bf[0] and it abused the C preprocessor.

[0] https://github.com/federicoculloca/m4bf

If you like thinking about programming languages in terms of spoken ones, check out the book on J, which talks about gerunds, verbs and adverbs http://www.jsoftware.com/help/learning/contents.htm

recursion and embedded structures has been posited by some linguists as one possible explanation for similarities between languages cross-linguistically, however, controversially, Dan Everett's work on Piraha claims that this does not exist in Piraha. The mainstream community disagrees with him however.

This is an interesting question. On the one hand, I think that you could argue that there is indeed some limited subset of words that can be used to say everything that can be said in a given language. One way to prove this, perhaps, would be to count all of the words that are used in the definitions in a given dictionary. I suspect that in most dictionaries, the total number of unique words used in the dictionary definitions is less than the total number of defined words.

This is related to what you wrote, "in practice, words are continually added to a language when new things need to be described". Consider new technologies for which new words are invented: these can generally be defined using the existing set of words in a language. The new word just provides a one- or two-word short form method of referring to that technology.

On the other hand, there are certain things - and I'm thinking specifically of human experiences as one set of those things - which are not easily summarized in a sentence and these get their own words. Consider emotions as one example. As the set of "known" human experiences (emotions, perspectives, etc.) grows, based on a more sophisticated understanding of human nature (via psychology, literature, etc.), new words are needed. Sometimes these words are borrowed from other languages, like "schadenfreude" and "empathy" (I was surprised to read that "empathy" first appeared in English in 1909, based on another German word).

On this basis, it would only be possible to limit the set of possible words if it were possible to limit the set of human experiences, which I don't think is possible. A transhuman/sci-fi example would be if a method was invented to perceive visual wavelengths that are currently outside the human visual spectrum as colours (i.e. infrared and ultraviolet, but perceived directly in the same way we perceive red and purple). I can't currently imagine a way (although perhaps there is one) of describing something like this using the existing set of words.

“Darmok! Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.”

Shakash, when the walls fell

I'll admit, they had me fooled, and they weren't even trying to fool me; at first I thought that this was an authentic Amazonian or South Pacific language, until I started reading the article more carefully. The part about only having words for 'one', 'two', and 'many' particularly reminds me of Daniel Everett and the Pirahã...

I once translated the beautiful short story "The Egg" to Toki Pona: https://morr.cc/sike-mama/ The original was written by Andy Weir (of "The Martian" fame).

It features a side-by-side view and might be interesting if you want to look at a longer Toki Pona text.

I was surprised that https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ was not mentioned, but then again, he uses _a thousand_ words in his book!

I think 1000 is a more realistic estimate of how much words you need in a language, than 100.

Toki pona is nice in concept, but too restrictive in practice.

Voice of America, the international radio service, uses a restricted subset of English with about 1500 words and manages to sound natural rather than baby-talky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_English

Toki Pona inspired a fantasy non-linear hieroglyphic system, reminiscent of Mayan carvings: http://www.jonathangabel.com/archive/2012/artworks_lipu-lawa...

Some of my favorites in Toki Pona:

- ike li kama (bad comes): shit happens

- telo nasa (crazy liquid): alcohol

- telo nasa pan pi wawa ala (crazy liquid bread without power): light beer

- mije li lon sewi meli (male positioned high relative to female): missionary position

- pana e telo jelo (give away yellow liquid): urinate

Reminds me of of emoji almost. Ambiguous, short on vocabulary, but you can get ideas across. An advantage over Toki Pona is that everyone already "speaks" it, but I assume TP has more in terms of linguistic structure

    There’s good reason to think that emoji are more like gesture than
    language. When you crunch the numbers (and I have), the face, hand,
    and heart emoji are by far the most popular — not the emoji that
    represent noun-like items. Furthermore, the vast majority of emoji are
    used beside words, not all by themselves in extended emoji-only
    stories. People aren’t using emojis as a substitute for language,
    they’re using it as an addition to it, just like you wouldn’t want to
    talk in person with your hands tied behind your back and a paper bag
    over your head. 
    […]
    Emoji are a universal language the same way that pointing at stuff and
    grunting is a universal language. Useful, under a certain set of
    circumstances! But what makes language really powerful is its ability
    to talk about stuff beyond the here and now, beyond the easily
    visualizable. In other words, abstraction.
    […]
    For example, look at the tremendous difficulty that scientists have
    had in communicating the fairly simple concept DANGER THERE IS NUCLEAR
    WASTE HERE STAY AWAY in a way that will continue to make sense to
    humans for the next 10,000 years. Circle with a slash? Nope, could be
    a sideways hamburger. Skull and crossbones? Nope, could refer to the
    Day of the Dead and/or pirates.

from http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-episo... (via http://lingthusiasm.com/post/154520059101/lingthusiasm-episo... )

Sometimes I use a 26 word language and it sure seem capable of saying everything...

Maybe that's a 26-character writing system?

Maybe it's finger spelling. :)

I'm more comfortable using just two words.

How to say everything with a language with only two numbers...01

But does it have swear words??

Probably they are just the equivalent of "bad words".

From http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/dictionary.p...:

- pakala (noun): blunder, accident, mistake, destruction, damage, breaking

- pakala (verb): mess up, destroy, accident

- pakala! (interjection): damn! fuck!

or...

- jaki (noun): dirty, nasty, trash

- jaki (verb): to pollute, to dirty

- jaki! (interjection): ew! yuck!

Could also be used to insult other people and their relatives:

- o! mama meli sina li jaki!

It's referenced in the article and I've never heard about it before: a gorilla, named Koko, that talks using over 1,000 ASL signs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNuZ4OE6vCk

Don't believe the hype. She does know an impressive number of signs to signal things, but there's essentially no evidence that she has any kind of "language" in the sense of being able to use grammatical structures, and there's certainly no evidence of Chomsky-style linguistic recursion.

You can teach animals to signal different things for different mental states (like teaching a drug-sniffing dog to sit down when he smells drugs) through conditioning, and it's seems like Koko's abilities are a very advanced version of that. She is absolutely an impressive animal, but she has no true language. That, alas, is still the exclusive domain of humans.

I've just heard about it and my mind was understandably blown, but thank you for putting things in perspective.

This reminds me of Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe (of xkcd). Granted, that book uses 1,000 words instead of ~100, I think the concept is pretty much the same.

https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/

Slightly off-topic, but one of Ryszard Kapuściński's African reportages had an amusing story of traveling with a driver who only knew two (2) words in English. The words were listed as:

Problem No problem

Armed militia ahead ? Problem. It looks like they're going to let us pass ? No problem. Low on fuel ? Problem. Shelter found ? No problem. Storm is coming ? Problem. The remaining communication was done by hand waving (a snake, etc), watching his darkening or lightening facial expression, body language, various gestures.

No, it wasn't expressive at all, but it got the job done. Ryszard traveled where he wanted, the driver got paid.

Binary language. I can dig it

It seems more useful as a pidgin language to help people communicate the basics, rather than a language to be considered a prime candidate. "enough to get by" rather than "reasonably complete communication".

If you go to a foreign speaking country you just need to buy two books, one for you language and one for the other.

Why not just use emoji's for the toki pona and skip a step?

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