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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).

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.

> 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"?

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.

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.

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. :)

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).

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.

> 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.