Ilo sitelen, a handmade computer for Toki Pona | Hacker News Reader

Ilo sitelen, a handmade computer for Toki Pona

toki.increpare.com

204 pointstobr89 comments

I made a manual translation of this text into English further down in this thread, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788461.

There is an Anki Deck for the words / meaning / pictographs... [1] I am fascinated that this is a 14 character alphabet. I imagine if a CS major or mathematician made this they would have been strongly inclined to base 16 for instance. This feels a lot like a language version of lisp...

[1]: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1548566798

Punctuation, 0 (for termination), non-printable characters... having 16 letters stop meaning much in light of all the other characters you'd need anyhow.

I tried two anki apps. The first didnt have file import. Some sort of cloud solution that didn't explain how it was supposed to work. On the second one, import was broken. Recommendations?

The official Anki apps are at https://apps.ankiweb.net/ Your description doesn't make clear whether you tried to use two of those or some unofficial apps instead.

I wasn’t aware of there being an official anki entity as the concept seems relatively generic.

Oh, hello! I made this. If you've any questions just shoot :)

If you share this on r/mechanicalkeyboards, you will be loved.

My favourite hn comment of all time. Finally, engineering and humanity meet at a sweet spot. (Yes, I’m enjoying this a bit too much.)

After you have typed your text, what options do you have to get it out of the machine? Can it connect to a printer? Save to some permanent storage?

I can ssh in and sync (I could get it to sync automatically, but haven't been bothered). Hurrah for R-Pi.

[ I was thinking of connecting it to a thermal printer, but honestly I have enough bits of paper lying around my room already... ]

You use this for journaling, but I was wondering, do you think in toki pona and type out the thought, or do you have the thought and translate it as you type?

This journaling system would make a nice mobile app.

I’m reasonably fluent in it, so I can keep an internal Toki Pona voice going - the main bottleneck is my typing speed on this keyboard still (on a regular qwerty keyboard I can chat realtime fine with people in Toki Pona), but hopefully that’ll improve with time!

tenpo wan la sina weka ike e nimi "e":

> "jan li sitelen toki pona kepeken supa nena seme?"

taso sina wile sitelen e "jan li sitelen e toki pona kepeken supa nena seme?"

mi pona e pakala (tenpo kama lili la pakala li kama weka lon lipu mi :) ). pona tawa sina!

This is awesome! I'll learn toki pona just to build and use my own :)

pali sina li nasa pona kin.

Here’s some kind of automatic translation: http://inamidst.com/services/tokipana?uri=https%3A%2F%2Ftoki...

The machine translation is not completely comprehensible, but there's some beautifully strange things that came out of it. I emotion she strongly!

I speak toki pona so I just made a manual translation, as follows:

== Writing machine ==

* What am I trying to do?

All computers are supposed to speak English. I dislike this. I wanted to make a toki pona-only computer.

First I asked myself this: what do I want to do with my computer?

jan Sate made a calculator. That calculator can work with toki pona numbers. It's a great tool, really fun!

I felt like I wanted to be able to write my language using my machine.

With this idea in mind I didn't say "computer" in the future. I said "writing machine". I wanted to make a writing machine.

* Writing system

Next, I thought: what kind of keyboard will people use to write toki pona?

Toki pona has few words and few sounds. Its keys can likewise be few!

This made me happy. But I thought - I can make it smaller!

I had created a writing system called "multisound lines". With it, you can write toki pona using six keys!

I could make this machine using only six [keys]! Awesome!

* The controller and the display

I bought a Raspberry Pi controller and this display.

The display is good - I can send images to it:

I attached the controller to the back of the display. Look at it:

I bought a small keyboard ⌨️ . Subsequently I would change it and improve it a lot!

Now I had everything. I could begin work!

* First keyboard version

The keyboard had round keys. I didn't like that. I gave it other keys and I put stickers on top of them:

This is decent! This way I could pause the task.

* sitelen pona

I felt that I wanted to write in the sitelen pona [writing system]. This way, I could write all of the words of toki pona.

I put a tool for this writing method into the controller (you can see it on GitHub).

This was really fun! (It was really fun, but it was a lot of work too ).

But, was the work over? Nope!

I wanted to improve it:

- I wanted to give it a case. - I wanted to improve the keyboard.

* The case

The writing machine was definitely good, but it didn't have a case:

I wanted to figure out what a case could do. So I made a case using a bunch of boxes:

This helped me.

Mr. Luca had various measurement tools:

Using these I learned a lot about measurements!

I put these numbers into the Fusion 360 tool.

This tool is really powerful and really useful. It gave me two schematics:

Then, I bought some really strong boards.

I felt that I could make a good case using these.

But when I prototyped a case with them, a lot of mess-ups happened:

I sure learned about what the boards wanted to do, heh!

But, with the second attempt, everything was good.

Was the case done yet? Nope!

There was nothing in the bottom part of the screen. I wanted to put the machine's name in this region. I bought a name label from the Schildermax shop.

When it arrived at my home, I put it on the bottom of the screen.

This made me happy. The case was done. Awesome!

* The keyboard

I was unhappy with these keys:

I wanted to improve it. But how?

I bought these sticker sheets:

I could put these images onto the keys.

But this was terrible. I could remove the images with my hands.

I wanted to have good keys. But how?

My friend Tralamazza told me: "I have a machine for making stone. (This machine can make stone out of liquid.) This machine can make keys! If you send me the model for the keys, I'll make the keys."

I used another person's key models. Using them, I could make models for my own keys.

I sent these models to my friend. He made them and sent them to me:

They looked great! I removed the supports from them and I put them onto my machine:

But I felt like having them be composed of just one color was not that great. I wanted to color them.

I colored them using a marker.

But how did this coloring work?

First, I put black all over the top of each key cap:

Then, I removed it using alcohol wipes. But the black remained inside the openings:

But this black was way inside the grooves and it would stay. :) This looked good to me. I blackened each key this way:

I put it on the keyboard and the work was done. The computer project was done!

* The writing machine is done!

I am really happy with this machine. I use it every day.

Now you know: making this machine was a lot of work. I don't want to make many writing machines!

Big thanks to Tralamazza and Mr. Luca. They improved my project a lot and taught me a lot. Thanks to them!

Oh right, I cheated with one factual detail - it was turpentine and not alcohol :( (I tried alcohol first, but turpentine was waaaay better)

"telo pi weka kule", I suppose. :-)

I think machine for making stone is a 3D printer? I guess toki pona doesn’t have a word for that.

Yes, the original text links "machine for making stone" to https://www.creality3dshop.de/collections/3d-printer/product... and "this machine can make stone out of liquid" to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_muoXfXlEg, but I didn't preserve any of the links or images in my translation here. There are several other links in the original text to specific technical resources or details. :-)

Yeah, you're right. The word translated as 'stone' also can mean 'hard object, metal, rock', and refers here to plastic object - so the 3d printer is somehow a "hard-object device". Doesn't make much sense without the link to a video to provide context! (Welcome to Toki Pona, where often things make no sense out-of-context... ).

Toki pona is surprisingly expressive for a language that contains so few words.

Thanks for the translation!

Thanks for the translation. I realized I was unfamiliar with Toki Pana while reading what you wrote. It seems an interesting language idea.

I hadn't come across this translator before. It's pretty fancy!

Wow, I started to read that and couldn't understand a word and kept reading and by the end I could understand most of it. Language is so cool!

Just as I saw the original article, I thought about machine translation. But then I realized that since interpretation of Toki Pona is very context-dependent, it's basically a general-AI task to translate it into normal language.

A conlang designed to be minimal and thus super easy to learn.

Why on Earth would one then make a unique character/glyph set? Any conlang that does not fit neatly into 8859-1 is a nonstarter for wide adoption.

The “you can write it in latin or in hieroglyphics” aspect of TP seems insane and contradictory to me. That’s the opposite of minimalism.

It's not a conlang in the sense that anyone expects it to be taken up as an international auxiliary language. It's a conlang created for creative and artistic purposes. It's not meant for "wide adoption." It's meant for fun.

Sure, but toki pona is also designed to work with a small subset of ascii, so the question remains.

The cost/benefit ratio of investing the time to learn a new language goes up as the number of people with whom you can speak it increases. Even for fun.

nitpick, I think you mean the cost/benefit ratio goes down, as the cost remains fixed and the benefit increases?

is 1:10 to 1:500 not an increase in ratio? do i have it backwards?

The former is 0.1 the latter is 0.002

My cursory research on the topic suggests that while the ratio itself is a fraction, the "size" of the ratio refers to the inverse: the magnitude of difference between numerator and denominator, with 1:1 being the lowest ratio.

This seems to be more of a linguistic thing than a math thing, which makes this thread on-topic again. :D

If we are going to talk linguistics, then saying "the cost/benefit ratio improves" is probably more clear than saying it gets larger or smaller then.

I find your opinion regarding the Latin Alphabet to be very common in conlang communities. However, I have to disagree with this sentiment. I have not in years encountered a system that does not use some sort of Unicode as its character set, a character set that includes multiple dead languages. From my experience it is possible to create a custom font (in the private use space) + input method for a conscript in a single day. In addition, this idea that latin1 has more universal computer support in legacy and low power systems is unfounded. There are likely far more systems in use today that only support Shift JIS[1] than only support latin1. If you look at actual low power hardware such as this commonly used LCD display[0] you will find that it does not fully support latin1 but does fully support Katakana.

Technical concerns aside, as an English speaker I can't even name some of the characters in latin1 like å and ã, let alone type the more exotic ones, so I'm not sure about accessibility.

[0] https://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/LCD/ADM1602K-NSW-FBS-3.3...

[1]https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/8239...

Minimalism is one side, but having fun is another side. Having a small number of words also lends itself a lot to hieroglyphic systems - people love inventing new writing systems (also number systems...) for it.

I think by sticking to latin1, adding directional words and arabic numerals officially, this could stand to be a major global auxiliary language, with all the associated human benefits. Fragmenting the readership and writership with an alternate writing system robs it of that potential, in my view.

I like your device and post, fwiw. I just think that languages are a tragic waste if they are not used and learned, and fragmentation harms both of those.

Blissymbols (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols) were created to address such a need.

Radiolab has a great episode (https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/bliss) that gives the backstory of the creation of Blissymbols and why they did not get as widely adopted as their creator hoped.

It's a noble idea, but a problem with writing-only constructed languages is that they can only map one-to-one for natural languages if the word order is the same. The example sentence in that article is a good mapping to the English form of the sentence "I want to go to the theatre," but what if your native language is Japanese and you're used to saying "theatre to want to go" (with the personal pronoun implied)? You have to learn new rules about word ordering in sentences, and at that rate you might as well go ahead and learn the full new language. Perhaps Bliss has considered this issue and has an answer for it (can the symbols be written in any order according to the writer's native language?) but I don't see a solution for it mentioned in that Wikipedia article.

I’ve been learning it over the last week or so since I saw it pop up here. I think it could make a worthwhile pidgin for people without a common language, it is so simple. The heavy contextual dependence and simplicity make it harder to justify as a language proper. We are so complex in our modern cultures, and toki pona is so simple! That was the point, after all - “pona” means both good and simple. I haven’t yet seen non-english speakers really using it online but I admit to not looking all that hard.

TP has a roman alphabet, that is what the blog post was written in.

Is that like an ancient Roman language?

An alphabet isn't a language.

I mean on the website dumbass.

Not a duplicate, but related from 11 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22689959

2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534

2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406

2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191186

Could someone explain, preferably in English, why keyboard is so strange? Is this an art piece?

the Toki Pona conlang uses only 14 letters, and has a philosophy of simplicity/minimalism, so this is a tiny computer with a reduced keyboard specifically for the language

it's more or less an art piece, yes

The input system is a bit fancier/more obscure than that. Toki Pona uses 14 letters when written with the Latin alphabet (on screen, for those confused, it's displayed as Sitelen Pona, a hieroglyphic writing system for Toki Pona - http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/hieroglyphs.php ). But because there are 120 words in total, you can merge letters without any ambiguity arising (merging 'b' and 'p' in english lets you still distinguish 'bell' from 'potato'). Because there's a closed list of 120 words you can bring this to an extreme of requiring only six input-buttons for the characters (so, e.g. 't', 'o', and 'k' are all on the same button), and the computer can disambiguate.

(This approach was inspired by Book Pahlavi - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlavi_scripts#Book_Pahlavi ).

It's a bit of an art piece, but I also still use it daily for journalling :)

I know you say it was difficult to build and you won’t do it again, but you should consider selling these and sharing the joy with other people who wants to enjoy this language.

Thank you for sharing.

The example of B vs P is interesting, as modern Korean has the same. The airport code for Busan (South Korea) is PUS because there is no practical difference between B and P in Korean. Same with G/K, R/L, and D/T: each pair is interchangeable and has been subject to changing fashion over the years in Gorea.

The sounds are different in this case. You can use a single letter to denote both, because the sound is unambiguous from context.

I speak/read toki pona and am still trying to figure out this keyboard.

Wonderful to see increpare making this. If you've never checked out his other work I highly recommend it.

Some context: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona

Tiki Pona is a constructed language with a vocabulary of about 125 root words, and 14 phonemes (allowing a very economical keyboard, from the looks of it).

So presumably, we could read the page with a couple afternoons of practice? I'm curious how long it takes to pick up the language, if anyone can chime in. If it's something you can matter in less than a month it could be amazing...

I think your assumptions are correct (I haven't learnt it but have read quite a bit about this and other artificial languages). It's very cool! The people who have learnt it talk wonders about it. However, I find it too limited to be practical. For example, it does not have words for numbers, or for left and right.

Does anyone knows of some kind of slightly extended version of Toki Pona?

>For example, it does not have words for numbers

It has two official number systems (described in the official Toki Pona book - https://tokipona.org ). They're not practical for big numbers, and they are a bit cumbersome, but they're there.

>left and right. I've never had it be necessary to use these words. Often "on my/your side" if I'm walking with someone, or "beside/towards X" if there's a feature there.

(it has deficiencies, and can be cumbersome, but these aren't them)

>Does anyone knows of some kind of slightly extended version of Toki Pona?

certain people add/coin words to do certain things, and some people use obsolete/archaic ones, but nothing's caught on generally. More generally think there's a world of minlangs (minimalistic languages), but I don't know much about it, alas.

>> left and right.

> I've never had it be necessary to use these words. Often "on my/your side" if I'm walking with someone, or "beside/towards X" if there's a feature there.

> (it has deficiencies, and can be cumbersome, but these aren't them)

Surely the lack of words for left/right would make it pretty cumbersome to describe, say, the vehicle code, or to give driving directions, no?

Yeah.

Vehicle code is a good example. Having a limited vocabulary hits you hard when it comes to technical/legal texts, and when you don't have context to refer to (The text on the page linked to doesn't make sense when you can't see the pictures). If a very specific word isn't in the language, and can't be easily described using other words, it just gets very messy/unpleasant (even if you can technically do it, nobody's going to want to read it).

You can often give directions in english pretty well in many places using landmarks "go to the crossing, you'll see a church - go there, then...etc." . But yes, not having left/right is a bit cumbersome for this application. If I was giving directions in Toki Pona to someone, I'd probably just draw a map if it was in any way complicated ... .

On the other had, as you can see by the translation someone made in the comments here of my page, you can talk about some technical things just fine, like building a computer! (if you have enough photos to refer to).

Edit: Oh, here's what the creator of the language had to say about it:

"Toki Pona has a rather narrow range of functions. Although it is very easy to meditate and communicate honest thoughts and everyday activities in Toki Pona, it is impossible to translate a chemical textbook or legal document in the language without significant losses. Such texts are products of the complex, modern civilization we live in and are not suited for a cute, little language like Toki Pona.

As an artistic language with limited means of expression, Toki Pona does not strive to convey every single facet and nuance of human communication. Nevertheless, the results we can achieve with so few elements prove to be very interesting, if not spiritually insightful."

It might be interesting to explore what a minimalistic language explicitly for technical concepts might look like. It's easy to imagine falling into 'import blocks' declaring what particular variable jargon placeholders will refer to... But probably there's a more elegant way to deal with the problem of an explosion of concepts as you get into the weeds of a technical area.

Or to go full Sapir-Whorf, one could ask what it would look like to design a language where (say) linear algebra is intrinsic, and thus intuitive.

This is something I would be very interested in.

I think that the combination of an array language (like APL or J, but smaller like K) which intrinsically incorporated geometric algebra so that concepts like complex and imaginary numbers or trigonometry are not essential, and a minimalist artificial language like Toki Pona, would make an excellent tool for communication of technical concepts.

I'm sure you could go for something like "drivers side" and "the side the driver is not on". From a quick look at the toki pona dictionary that'd be something like "tawa ilo lawa" for drivers side and "ala tawa ilo lawa" for the not drivers side.

It's not terribly compact but it works.

> not practical for big numbers

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I remember "big" was something like 20 or 30. So it's not possible to tell ages (at least not mine!), prices, or even the current year. That's fine, but I consider it a very serious deficiency for a language.

I would find very useful to have some minimalistic international language, but if I cannot use it to buy something, ask for directions, or say the date, it's just a toy. Maybe a very nice one, I find fascinating how people can communicate with so few, but i don't feel compelled to learning it.

toki pona has two number systems. One is "zero, one, two, many", the other lets you specify exact whole numbers by combining together words for 1,2,5,20,100 additively. (so 63 is 20,20,20,2,1). It's yeah a bit cumbersome, but works mostly tolerably for numbers up to, I don't know, 500. So your age can definitely be specified :) (OTOH, part of the philosophy is to keep things simple - it doesn't want to assist in representing big/complicated numbers).

As the numbers get big though it gets increasingly cumbersome. I once tried to generate a text represntation of an isbn number in toki pona and ran out of disk space after many GBs....

Dates are tricky though. Buying groceries is ok, buying a house probably not. As for directions, it depends on how featurefull where you live is.

That does not sound too bad. I stand corrected.

I find surprising that numbers are not represented concatenating decimal digits (just after a quick look at the dictionary, I would imagine you could say 63 as luka wan en wan tu and you could say 2042 as tu en ala en tu tu en tu, or something like that). But I guess there are still many things I can say with numbers up to 500.

Thanks, with your computer project and your comments you practically convinced me of giving toki pona a try after all.

If you have the numbers zero, one, two, couldn’t you write ternary numbers? That would be a lot less cumbersome than an additive system. Plus it would still be fun!

You'd still have to specify the system before you could use it, and that would probably require new syntax/grammar to be added to the language. ( Silly analogy: "C has latin character support; why can't it support Roman numerals?" )

C can be extended with your own datatypes though. You could create a Roman numeral datatype if you wanted to. You wouldn't have literals, of course, but you could initialize them using string literals. This is how arbitrary-precision numbers work in the C library GMP [1].

So the question is: can you make up new words in Toki Pona? It would seem the answer is no. This would keep the language very simple but also drastically limit your ability to express complex ideas within it.

[1] https://gmplib.org

> does not have words for numbers, or for left and right

Some people use "luka wawa" 'strong hand' for 'right', though as a left-hander I'm not totally thrilled about this.

"right" has some connotation too

Yeah.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/laevus

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sinister#Latin

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scaevus#Latin

and so on in numerous languages.

I think people talking about extending Toki Pona may be missing the point. This is the Brainfuck of human languages. It's almost the simplest language imaginable. It's an experiment to see how simple a language can be and how many words do you really need for day to day activities.

The area is poorly understood, but language has impact on how we think. The supposed advantages of Toki Pona - happiness through simplicity - may be a bit overstated, but it's interesting and probably harmless. Like PyPy, it may might* not have value on its own, but it gives food for thought and produces insight.

* weasel words

I think Toki Pona is great, don't get me wrong. It's good to explore how small a language can get, and it looks to me like TP did a good work in that regard.

The comparison with programming languages is interesting. I see Toki Pona as lambda calculus: pure, fundamental, very cool, and worth learning. I want something like Lisp: more practical to write programs, but still much simpler than for example Haskell (Esperanto).

More like an electronic typewriter. Seems like outside of that one application, all the other software running on the Raspberry Pi is still the standard Linux stack. According to the translation in the other comments, the article likewise only calls it a "writing machine".

Yeah. I had originally mocked up a command-prompt, scripting language etc., but in the end I realised the only thing I actually wanted to do with it was write, so I focussed on that as my goal :)

The keycaps are beautiful. What switches did you use?

Thanks!

The base keyboard is a commodity koolertron one-haded keyboard ( https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B07WC4YBVY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_... ), and the switches it uses according to the spec manual are OEM Outemu switches (and according to the box red ones :) ).

Offtopic:

I stopped reading an introduction to Toki Pona when I learned that „complicated” also means „bad” or „evil”.

How I see it, lots of things can be complicated. Calculus equations. Some emotions. Some recipes. Etc.

It’s hard for me to call them bad at the same time.

How others are looking at this?

It's all about context, in this context the reader won't read something like calculus as "bad" but rather as "complex" unless your phrase clearly goes towards that direction

Very nice. One question though: as far as I understand, it relies heavily on the fixed-size vocabulary to reduce keyboard size. Is it still able to handle names (of persons, countries...) which are not part of the vocabulary?

Most languages deal with that problem by simply taking names as they are, sometimes transliterating to fit the alphabet available. It doesn't matter if I'm speaking dutch or english, my name is unchanged.

The only wide exception to this tends to be country names which mostly seem to get a global and a local name. There's no real reason to do this when using toki-pona.

you could go for constructs like "ma pi suno tewi sewi" which'd translate to "land of the rising sun" or more literally "land of the sun going up" but I fail to see the point. Any toki pona ''native'' would be able to read and pronounce "japan" since all the letters are available in the toki pona alphabet, the pronunciation even matches well enough. If someone doesn't know japan they won't know what "land of the rising sun" refers to and you'd need to reach for more descriptive language in any case.

Disclaimer: my grasp of toki pona grammar is tenuous at best, I'm sure there's better translations for "land of the rising sun".

The official Toki Pona book details a procedure for word-borrowing (and also has a suggested list of translated country names). The online the only source is a way more linguistically-flavoured article by the creator of the language, that goes into way more detail than the official book itself:

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

There’s a process of transliteration/loaning that you can do if you want to import words from foreign languages. They’re slightly firewalled form the rest of the language (they’re not first-class content words), but because you can talk about a “jan Mewika” for an American, maybe it’s a bit disingenuous to talk about it having just 120 words :P

As for how my device supports words not on the list because as you smartly noted it’s optimised to the vocabulary size so how do you add randomo loan words? Thankfully the hieroglyphic display orthography I’m using has the same problem. The solution is to do it nato-alphabet style, and put the loaned word in a cartouche. Which is very labour-intensive to read as well as to write.

look finish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona

Toki Pona takes lots of words from Finnish! - http://ucteam.ru/toki-pona/

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