Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

You can be up and running very fast in Toki Pona being able to produce and understand simple sentences about broad topics. If you need to be very specific, you will have a hard time but the philosophy of Toki Pona is to strive for simplicity and to focus on your core message.

You would have a hard time writing a scientific paper in Toki Pona but that is not what is was designed for anyway.

What language people have trouble learning can be a bit subjective and also heavily depend on the learning material and other outside factors. Sounds like Toki Pona didn't "click" with you which is fair enough. Maybe you want to give it another try or maybe it just is not for you, there are other interesting conlangs.

Toki Pona is relatively easy to learn not just for the small base vocabulary but also the relative simple phonology (Only 9 consonants and 5 vowel, always stress on initial syllable). Learning how to pronounce and write Toki Pona is extremely easy and regular.

Vocabulary is probably what takes the longest time in language learning, so you get a huge head start. The grammar might be very different to English or Dutch but has many similarities to Asian languages and is not that complex. As I argued for learning Toki Pona for mind expansion, I would argue that the difference is a good thing anyway.

The steep learning curve of most natural languages means it takes months before I can read or say anything nontrivial.

e.g. I might have enquired of a visitor when I was a wee loonie "Far div ye bide?" - "Where do you stay?"

Kashubski is mostly called a language, even thought it's not officially recognized as a regional language (you can't expect to use it in for official matters).

Silesian is mostly called a dialect/subdialect, but there's a regional movement to elevate Silesian to a separate language through political means.

By contrast, you talk to someone from East London, or Birmingham, or Leeds in the UK, and you're in no doubt as to where they are from, no need for special words. Never mind Scotland, West Country, Wales...

This is a little less obvious nowadays than it used to be, as people move around more, but still a big thing.

However, Russian itself has plenty of dialects that can be quite different from the language standard, and there are certain characteristic variations that can readily pin one's geographic origin. For example, standard Russian tends to pronouce unstressed О as А (or rather as shwa biased towards A), but this is most pronounced in southern dialects, and is missing from most northern ones. Similarly, Г in standard Russian is pronounced same as hard G in English, but in southern dialects it tends to become something more like GKH.

As with other countries, dialectal variety has been significantly reduced through universal education (that tends to enforce the standard and frown upon dialects as "uneducated speech") and mass media. The historical tendency for authoritarian and highly centralized governance, both during the imperial period and later in the USSR, exacerbated this.

> Galileo's instrument was the first to be given the name "telescope". The name was invented by the Greek poet/theologian Giovanni Demisiani at a banquet held on April 14, 1611 by Prince Federico Cesi to make Galileo Galilei a member of the Accademia dei Lincei. The word was created from the Greek tele = 'far' and skopein = 'to look or see'; teleskopos = 'far-seeing'.

The primary source for this is "Rosen, Edward, The Naming of the Telescope (1947)".

You are knee deep in a cow piss on a remote farm in Nebraska, offline and some library has some version issue with your proprietary licensed language. A trivial solution if it was free language, but now it requires 300 miles trip. You are in Nagorno Karabakh and just spoke to some random stranger about this new funny speak-language but you cannot give him PDF because it's not free. These issues stings very deep because how artificial and easily solvable would they be. Some things must be free otherwise they cannot be used to their full potential. So you stand there, in Nebraska or Nagorno Karabakh and swear - Never again will I use proprietary language. I have nothing agains proprietary software or linguistic books but the language itself must be free.

kili sike loje isn't enough to distinguish cherries from cherry tomatoes, red grapes, cranberries, red currants, red plums or red apples -- every one of which is a perfectly reasonable thing for me to put on a shopping list.

And so you'll note that we have the words tomato, grape, cranberry, currant, plum and apple.

Now, French has a language academy to decree what is proper, and English --

"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James Davis Nicoll

A language which isn't useful will either change or be abandoned. Natural languages almost always change.