Toki Pona: an attempted universal language with only ~120 words
cohost.org
cohost.org
That said, I don't speak Tiki Pona, so I don't know how the language is used by the various communities that actually speak it.
I tried to find out what it is for "show up" but apparently, this is a very recent one and originally meant something else entirely:
"verbal phrase, by 1826 as "to disgrace through exposure;"
It then changed to the current meaning only in around 1888, just ~135 years ago:
"The meaning "to put in an appearance, be (merely) present" is by 1888."
Unfortunately, I couldn't find any explanation based on historical use of the phrase (phrasal verb, to be accurate), but given it's a quite recent one, it probably originated from people just trying to emphasize "completion" of the "show" action by adding "up", like with most other phrasal verbs.
It's like leaving out units of measure. We sometimes omit them, but we practically never lose track of when it makes sense to or have to consciously think about it.
One day we show up with the top up.
We're inside and he comes in to tell his parents my car has "a cover or shield"
I don't know why but we all love this.
Probably writers get this more easily. I think they are trained and edited constantly to avoid unnecessary fluff, and identify what is pointful atmospheric detail and what it pointless detail.
Does the story actually change depending on what drink dad enjoyed with his morning paper? Maybe if it was spiked, or if it was a pointed aspect of his character that he drank chocolate which others find childish, and he knows it and doesn't care. So it could, but in 99% of scenes I don't think it does matter, it only matters that it's a common thing that people do, and a common setting prop. If the language were not English and the standard way to say "morning coffee" was something else instead of specifically coffee, the scenes and stories all function exactly the same.
Yes I understand that. Vietnamese works a bit like this although with a far less limited vocabulary.
I was asking about the specific case where it does matter. How complicated is it to differentiate between these two similar drinks when the difference is important?
I would imagine that in a system like this, you end up adding only the particular extra detail that matters at the time, and so you almost never say quite the same thing as what we mean by "coffee".
Instead it would be just "drink" most of the time (and for all I know maybe even that is too specific and it's really just "liquid" or "liquid food", but anyway...)
And then when you come in from shovelling snow, your partner has "hot drink" ready for you, because "hot" is the extra property that matters.
And when you get up in the morning, you want "invogorating drink" to get going, because "invogorating" is the extra detail that matters. (setting aside that I bet "invogorating" is NOT one of the precious few 120 available words, but there will be something like active or up or positive or fast)
And rarely bother trying to express all the of the bag of properties that "coffee" conveys.
And if you DO once in a while, maybe that is not so different from English anyway.
"a steaming hot mug of black coffee" is a lot of syllables, and we would say all of that in English if we happened to want to express all of those facets, so maybe it's not all that different?
liquid of no sleep
If Toki Pona was used as an actual language in an everyday setting in a community, it would quickly get set, established terms and phrases for things, and essentially expand the vocabulary.
Latin vs English, Italian, French, etc.
And a good thought experiment—if one spoke Latin only, how would modern concepts or words be constructed as Latin and not one of its descendants.
"Reginald Foster, a former plumber’s apprentice from Milwaukee who, in four decades as an official Latinist of the Vatican, dreamed in Latin, cursed in Latin, banked in Latin and ultimately tweeted in Latin, died on Friday at a nursing home in Milwaukee. He was LXXXI. "
https://web.archive.org/web/20201227172007/https://www.nytim...
But a language with 200 words necessarily becomes verbose I suppose
Green or black liquid?
Looking it up, it seems like there are only five words for colors:
pimeja (black), walo (white), loje (red), jelo (yellow), and laso (blue and green)
In Toki Pona, the translation for "Would you like coffee or tea?" would be:
"sina wile e kafe anu telo nasa?"
Here's a breakdown:
"sina" = you
"wile" = want/need
"e" = direct object marker
"kafe" = coffee (borrowed word)
"anu" = or
"telo nasa" = literally "intoxicating liquid", often used to mean "tea" or "alcohol" (there's no specific word for "tea" in Toki Pona, but in some contexts, "telo nasa" can be used to mean tea)
It's worth noting that because Toki Pona has such a limited vocabulary, some words and concepts may be represented differently than in other languages.
Loje laso walo = mauve I guess.
For example in Tok Pisin helicopter is called "mixmaster bilong Jesus Christ" (Jesus Christ's food blender) or piano: bigpela bokis he got whitepela teeth hegot blackpela teeth sappos you hittim him he cry out (big box with white and black keys that cries out when you hit it)
Emi fulup gud dei, yumi 2 fela, tekim sol-water 1-eye fela, put im long postofis letahol blong praya-fela pasta-man, tel im:
"Sky islan twinky-twink planty-fela ia!"
This is from Ken Campbell, the UK's greatest populariser of what he called "wol wontok". https://ianlouisharris.com/tag/piotr-baumann/
It's a Ken Dodd joke, in pidgin. Original:
Tok pisin was my first language, left with the babysitter when growing up.
The more those objects got in daily lives, the more incentives was to find proper words.
The point of my comment was to find an example of a _natural_ language where people came up with ways to refer to new objects by using simple vocabulary (As opposed to a conlang like toki pona)
I want to know how/where the word for plane came from? balus
But also remember the tok pisin is a recent language, created from the colonisation efforts so it's not strange to find that modern words will have a translatation. Helicopters and piano's were around at the time.
The thing with pidgins is that when they start out, they are everybody's foreign language and are used as lingua franca. Generally people have their own native language where they may or may not have words for a given concept but then when they talk with other people from another language group they may or may not be able to just sneak in such a word and be understood. That's why sometimes long turn of phrases are used to describe stuff; not because the speaker doesn't have a word but because the speaker and the listener don't have a common word.
This has all been observed before and is inevitable. You want them to call it “telo pi lape ala” but that’s shit so they’ll call it tala or lapela or something. That will then become the word for it.
Yes, this is how Toki Pona dictionaries work. For example, there is a surprisingly thick two-way English - Toki Pona dictionary, "ku", which includes more than 11k entries such as "tomo tawa" for "car" or "ilo kalama" for a radio. See https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51n8JCdFlQL.jpg or other images from https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978292367/
Note that as it is descriptive rather than proscriptive, each translation has a superscript indicating what fraction of English-speaking Toki Pona speakers used that particular translation when the book was written. I don't have my copy on hand but I recall that there was a community survey and Sonia Lang used some kind of scale such as 4 for a universally accepted meaning down to 1 or 1/2 as a highly idiosyncratic/fanciful translation only used by a small number of people.
I suspect if the language evolves some people may compress these further so that "tomo tawa" becomes "tomo-tawa" becomes "tomotawa" which may help with parsing written text. Perhaps fluent speakers do not have this problem, but I typically have to read a sentence more than once to parse it correctly.
Note that for linguists, the definition of “word” is so slippery as to not have much use. It boils down to “because it’s written that way,” and even that is a stretch, because this definition is different for other languages. And of course, not every language is written.
To use your Chinese / Mandarin example, Mandarin does something very similar to Toki Pona in terms of inventing new phrases to describe more complex concepts (here I avoid using “words” in this context because it’s not a useful concept for our use): chéngyǔ are four character idiom phrases that are not words, but references to much longer cultural stories. They have a distinct meaning, but they are not considered words.
you haven't do it that way if don't want. It's just the school way and how many people can speak or even understanding fluently after leaving school?
> mi olin e toki pona. mi toki kepeken ona tan tenpo lili. sina ken lukin e tomo tawa mi lon lipu "https://www.youtube.com/@janPolijan". toki pona li pona tawa toki musi, taso ona li jo ala e toki mute e nasin toki mute. kalama ona li pona li lili. kulupu pi toki pona li suli e toki. jan li toki e toki mute e toki musi. taso, toki pona li pona tawa toki insa tan ona li musi tawa lawa. tenpo kama la, sina ken toki pona mute. sina ken toki e toki suli. taso, sina wile ala toki e toki pi ilo tawa kepeken toki pona. jan li toki e toki pi ilo sona suli lon tomo tawa lipu. toki pona li lili, taso ona li musi li ken toki e toki mute.
Re-translated back to English in a new chat:
> "I love Toki Pona. I've been speaking it for a short time. You can see my channel at "https://www.youtube.com/@janPolijan". Toki Pona is good for playful conversation, but it doesn't have many words or complex grammar. Its sound is pleasant but minimal. The Toki Pona community enhances the language. People speak many fun conversations. However, Toki Pona is great for introspective conversation because it's fun for the mind. In the future, you might speak a lot of Toki Pona. You can have long conversations. However, you might not want to discuss technology using Toki Pona. People discuss technological topics in great depth on channels. Toki Pona is small, but it's fun and can express many things."
I love Toki Pona. I've been speaking it from a short time. You can see my vehicle at https://www.youtube.com/@janPolijan. Toki Pona is good for fun conversation, but it doesn't have a lot of talking or ways of talking. Its sounds are nice and few. The toki pona community is growing the language. People do a lot of talking and have fun conversations. But toki pona is good for thinking in because of it and is fun for the mind. You'll be able to talk a lot in Toki Pona in the future. You'll be able to say large things. But you won't want to talk about transportation technology in Toki Pona. People talk in about big knowledge gadgets in book vehicles. [lol] Toki Pona is small, but it's fun and can say a lot of things.
toki pona li suli mute tawa mi. mi kepeken ona tan tenpo lili. sina wile lukin anu kute e toki pona uta lon la, o lukin e lipu Jutu mi lon ni: https://www.youtube.com/@janPolijan. toki pona li pana e musi toki. taso pali pi kama sona li pona li sama ala toki ante. pilin ike li lon ala tan ni: sona pi nimi ale en sona pi nasin toki li wile e pali lili. kin la, nasin kalama pi toki pona li pona li suwi, la uta sina li ken ala pana e kalama ike. kulupu pi toki pona li kama suli li pali mute. jan li sitelen e lipu li pana e kalama musi.
Abstract concepts - The language seems to skate over complex philosophical or scientific ideas. You won't find an easy way to express ideas like "justice" or "quantum". It's a testament to its minimalist design, but it also means some concepts are lost in translation.
Specific flora/fauna - While you can use terms like "kili", "kala", or "soweli" to describe plants, fish, or mammals, respectively, don't expect to convey specific species such as "maple tree" or "cat". It's a broad brush approach that lacks granularity.
Intensive modifiers - Toki pona leans hard on the word "mute" for intensifiers. This simplification might hinder nuanced expressions, as there's a big gap between "mute" and a neutral descriptor.
Collective nouns - The language only really has "kulupu" to describe collectives. So, distinguishing between, say, a "flock" and a "crowd" might get tricky.
Idiomatic phrases - A repertoire of idioms or set phrases for common topics would make conversations feel more culturally rich and engaging. It's one thing to communicate efficiently, but another to do so with character and flair.
This isn't criticism but an observation of the trade-offs made for simplicity. Every language has its quirks, and understanding these nuances can make for a richer linguistic experience.
# Toki Pona: Snoufax II Advanced
## Basic Particles - *a* - particle - *e* - object marker - *en* - and - *la* - used for conditions and time - *li* - links subject and predicate - *o* - vocative particle - *pi* - of
## Tense and Aspect Modifiers - *sili* - Continuous or ongoing. "mi sili toki" – I am speaking.
## Moods and Modality - *kin* - Potentiality (can/might). "mi kin toki" – I might speak.
## Technical and Scientific Terms - *ilo sona* - Computer (knowledge tool). "mi kepeken ilo sona" – I use a computer.
## Abstract Concepts - *pona nasin* - Justice (right way/path). "pona nasin li tawa mi" – Justice is important to me.
## Idiomatic Expressions - *pakala luka* - Break a limb (good luck). "pakala luka tawa sina!" – Break a leg (Good luck)!
## Politeness Levels - *sewi* - To elevate the status of the person being spoken to. "sewi jan Lisa, mi toki tawa sina" – Honorable Lisa, I speak to you.
## Detailed Descriptors - *jelo pimeja* - Dark yellow (like mustard). "mi jo e tomo jelo pimeja" – I have a mustard-colored house.
## Complex Syntax - *seme* - Universally before a statement to make it interrogative. "seme sina toki?" – Are you speaking?
## Pronouns - *ono* - Neutral pronoun (they/them). "ono li toki tawa mi" – They are speaking to me.
## Numerical System - *ten* - Ten. "mi jo e ten tomo" – I have ten houses.
## Prefixes/Suffixes for Intensifiers - *suli-* - A prefix to mean "very/big". "suli-pona" – Very good.
## Passive Voice - *palisa* - Passive. "mi palisa toki" – I am spoken to.
## Directional Particles - *noka* - Toward. "mi tawa noka tomo" – I am going towards the house. - *monsi* - Away from. "mi tawa monsi tomo" – I am moving away from the house.
## Negation of Modality - *ala kin* - Cannot, impossible. "mi ala kin toki" – I can't speak.
## Temporal Phrases - *tenpo pini* - Previously, before. "tenpo pini la, mi toki" – I spoke before. - *tenpo kama* - Soon, later. "tenpo kama la, mi toki" – I will speak later.
## Comparison and Superlatives - *sama lili* - Less like, lesser. "mi sama lili jan Lisa" – I am less like Lisa. - *sama suli* - More like, greater. "mi sama suli jan Lisa" – I am more like Lisa.
## Conditional Statements - *sama... la* - If... then... "sama toki pona li pona tawa sina la, sina toki kepeken ona" – If you like Toki Pona, then you speak using it.
## Reflexive Actions - *sama mi* - Myself. "mi toki tawa sama mi" – I talk to myself.
## Possession - *pi mi* - Mine. "tomo ni li pi mi" – This house is mine.
## Emphasis Particle - *kin li* - Emphasizes the action or state. "mi kin li toki!" – I really am speaking!
## Uncertainty or Hesitation - *...anu...* - Either... or... "mi toki anu toki ala" – I either speak or don't.
## Verb Structures - *li... e* - Direct object indicator. "mi li toki e toki" – I speak the language. - *tan... tawa* - Cause and effect. "mi tan tomo tawa tomo sona" – I go from home to school.
## Adjectives and Adverbs - *sama sona* - Intelligently, knowledgeably. "ona li toki sama sona" – He speaks intelligently. - *pona mute* - Very well. "mi toki pona mute" – I speak very well.
Justice could be translated as “sama pona” (literally “good sameness”). Quantum could be translated as “wan” (literally “unit”); so a quantum leap in the sense of a non-gradual physical movement would be “tawa wan” (“single movement”), whereas a quantum leap in the sense of a large change would be “ante suli” (“large difference”).
You're right that it is very easy to lose nuance in translation. I guess that's true of translating between any two languages that are quite different.
> Specific flora/fauna - While you can use terms like "kili", "kala", or "soweli" to describe plants, fish, or mammals, respectively, don't expect to convey specific species such as "maple tree" or "cat". It's a broad brush approach that lacks granularity.
The idea is that rather than naming things, you describe them. A maple tree could be “kasi suwi” (“sweet tree”) or “kasi pi ma Kanata” (“Canadian tree”), depending on context. A cat could be “soweli pona” (“friendly animal”) or “soweli utala” (“fighty animal”) or “soweli utala pi luka kiwen” (“hard-clawed fighty animal”) or “soweli kalama” (“noisy animal”) or “soweli pona utala kalama” (“noisy fighty friend animal”), depending on your relationship to the individual.
Toki pona forces you to think about which aspects are relevant to your meaning, and state the context explicitly. This is one of the stated intentions of the language, and therefore a feature rather than a bug :)
> Idiomatic phrases - A repertoire of idioms or set phrases for common topics would make conversations feel more culturally rich and engaging.
There are some of these, for example “jan pona” (“good person”) very commonly means “friend”.
But “good person” and “friend” are two very different things. I might describe a well-known charitable figure as a good person, but that wouldn’t mean I would be calling them my friend. One is a value judgement and the other is a personal relationship.
But English has similar ambiguities. For example, a "girlfriend" is usually not just a girl friend. Other expressions are used when there is no romantic relationship.
I don't know toki pona but there is probably another expression for actual good people. Maybe something like "person of high value".
For instance imagine that rather than a cat your pet is a chuckwalla, while that name is quite precise, it is almost certainly useless to the average conversation partner because most people have no idea whatsoever what a chuckwalla is (or that there’s something called a chuckwalla in the first place).
But how is that not just a compound word that needs to be learnt? Because I would not guess justice from "good sameness", it might as well mean morality.
So now you have to learn these compound words and the idea of a 130 word vocab is a bit dubious.
If everyone starts to use "good sameness" for "justice", you now have a 131 word vocab. Repeat for how many combinations become common. Eventually you will end up with as many words as any other language. It's almost like the proponents of the small vocab of this language don't actually understand what a vocabulary is
The commenter thinks justice is good and about equality, do you? It's mostly a challenge in self-discovery, to know how you would describe different things with the limited dictionary
It's not really made to communicate, although it is of course possible
Then again, half a millennium ago, English had 4 such words: 2 for yes, 2 for no. (Sir Thomas More tried to explain this circa 400 years ago, and even he got it wrong.)
Norwegian and Czech, both of which I speak very badly, preserve two forms of "yes" and I cannot keep them straight.
It's a fascinating read. You can get it from Anna's Archive.
In German, plane is Flugzeug (flight tool), fridge is Kühlschrank (cooling closet). In Hungarian, they are repülőgép (flying machine) and hűtőszekrény (cooling closet) as well, calqued from German.
English speakers often perceive this as some kind of endearing primitive Tarzan-like communication without all those classy prestigious words, but English also has plenty examples. How about "washing machine" for example?
In English, "calque" is a loanword, but "loanword" is a calque.
"Television" is tele (Greek, 'far') + vision (Latin, 'seeing'). German for Television is "Fernsehen" - fern (German, 'far') + sehen (German, 'seeing').
My main criticism of the language is that the word are so abstract that understanding spoken Toki Pona at real speed is practically impossible. Too many possible translations. Too many ways of combining these words, and no mechanism to identify which words form a compound.
In that sense, is it like deciphering Moby Dick in Emoji (Emoji Dick)[1] but with more consistency?
1: https://ia800305.us.archive.org/7/items/emojidick/emojidick....
You can't treat all languages the same. Just because you struggled with English doesn't mean that English is as hard to understand as speed as Toki Pona
a) Local dialects, similar to sign-languages. e.g. "good fruit" might mean "mango" in one Toki Pona community or "apple" in another
b) It felt kind of freeing, because a lot of words convey a very broad concept. It is actually really interesting to talk about certain emotions, because "a bad day" is "a bad day" and one doesn't really need to go into specifics into _what exact kind of bad_ in order to be consoled by the other person. This is not super helpful if you need a problem solved or need to describe what kind of pain you feel to a doctor, but just for the every-day venting it was kinda nice.
So to read English, you’re looking at 104 distinct characters, and that’s before you discuss diphthongs and digraphs.
E.g.: If you’ve seen the letter “o” in one variant, you’ve seen it in other variants too.
I think Cyrillic doesn't even have letter-case, which I've often found interesting.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets, https://learnrussianstepbystep.com/en/capitalization-in-russ..., etc.
There are dozens and dozens of possible emotion words but very few actually used in practice, which supposedly limits people's ability to introspect and manage their emotions.
(I skimmed the dictionary just now as a result of this submission, not an expert, never heard of it before.)
At any rate, very smart exercise in linguistic minimalism. I wonder whether even smaller languages are viable using data driven design (e.g. via mining large language corpora for particularly well connected lexical meanings to identify most useful concepts for periphrasis)
But yes, quite a lot of things about languages have been subject to unhealthy sensationalism, like the story with “over 50 words for snow in Eskimo” or “Piranhas unable to count”. Linguistics is not that easy.
I experimented to design a variant of Toki Pona with only two-syllable words, but then I realized that's why it's a linguist who designed Toki Pona. One of the points: the phonemes in a language are not evenly distributed, and even the combinations thereof are not. For example, /ne/ might be twice as frequent than /pa/. I as a programmer started with something like an uniform distribution, and immediately realized that it felt awkward.
It's like the secret sauce: choose the right 120 words and their pronunciation wisely!
Basic Vocabulary:
suno - sun, light, day moku - food, eat tomo - shelter, place, structure telo - drink, water, fluid jan - individual, person soweli - creature, animal kama - future, approach, event tawa - move, direction, towards ni - this, present mi - self, I sina - other, you ona - they, he, she, it Grammar:
Basic Structure: Subject + Verb (or Predicate)
mi moku. - I eat. sina suno. - You shine or You are sunny. Direct Objects are introduced with "e":
mi moku e telo. - I consume water. (I drink water.) sina tawa e tomo. - You move towards the shelter. (You go to the house.) Questions:
For yes/no questions, use "seme" after the verb. mi moku seme? - Do I eat? sina tawa seme? - Are you moving? For open-ended questions, place "seme" where the unknown is. seme li moku? - Who eats? sina tawa e seme? - Where are you going? Tense Indication:
Past: Use pini before the verb. Future: Use kama before the verb. mi pini moku. - I previously ate. (I ate.) mi kama moku. - I will eat soon. (I will eat.) Negation: Use ala after the verb.
mi moku ala. - I don't eat. Possession: Use pi between the possessor and the thing possessed.
mi pi tomo. - My house. sina pi moku. - Your food.
------------
If anyone is interested in practicing with me, let me know!
edit: Not to mention compound words in English, which any linguist would say are just one word ("hot dog") but because of spelling conventions, people tend to parse as two words. (In English, you can tell when something has become a compound noun by the stress pattern; John McWhorter calls this "backshift" and it's also the difference between the noun and verb forms of words like "record" and "rebel.")
So it seems like the HN title is wrong, and it explains the limitations pointed out in a few comments.
In toki pona, "hello what is your name" can be expressed as "toki! nimi sina li seme?"
> [User]: Please translate this Toki Pona into English:
> [User]: o! mi sona e toki pona. mi lukin sona e toki mute... taso mi toki ike e toki ale. toki mute li jo e nimi mute. nimi mute li pona ala tawa mi. toki pona li pona e mi tan ni. toki pona li jo nimi lili. nimi lili li pona e me
> [GPT-4]: Here's a translation of the provided Toki Pona text into English:
> [GPT-4]: "Oh! I know Toki Pona. I have studied many languages... but I speak all languages poorly. Many languages have many words. Many words are not good for me. Toki Pona is good for me because of this. Toki Pona has few words. Few words are good for me."
> [GPT-4]: Note: Toki Pona is a minimalistic constructed language with a small vocabulary. The translation may not capture all the nuances, but this is a close representation of the message in English.
> grug brain developer not so smart, but grug brain developer program many long year and learn some things although mostly still confused
Using the example provided in the main link, ChatGPT-4 had no trouble at all: https://chat.openai.com/share/3b8faf2e-4eca-4d52-97fb-ac89a4...
"In mathematics, a real number is a number that can be used to measure a continuous one-dimensional quantity such as a distance, duration or temperature. Here, continuous means that pairs of values can have arbitrarily small differences. Every real number can be almost uniquely represented by an infinite decimal expansion."
->
"toki pi nanpa, nanpa lon li nanpa li ken lukin e suli tawa wan. lon ni la, nanpa tu li ken ala li poka li ken lili. nanpa lon ali li ken lukin kepeken nimi nanpa mute tawa pini ala"
->
"Talking about numbers, when a number is present, it can be seen to be important or significant to an individual."
"In this context, the number two might not be significant or might be seen as small or lesser."
"All numbers can be seen using many number names endlessly or without an end."
ChatGPT 4, obviously in separate chats: as you can see a complete failure to convey and roundtrip the original message.
I’ve only heard of Toki Pona for about 20 minutes, but everything I’m reading says that’s just a normal property of the language, not a limitation of ChatGPT.
As a human, which of the 120 Toki Pona words would you confidently and correctly translate as “continuous” or “real” or any of these other linguistically uncommon concepts?
Based on my own chat with ChatGPT, I feel almost certain that it warned you about this exact limitation of the language, but you ignored that?
->
said of an algebraic structure such that for every x != y there exists z such that x < z and z < y
->
characteristic ("nimi"?) of a set ("poki") where for ("tawa?") all ("ale") thing ("ijo") different ("ante" + "lon"?) than other ("ante" + "nimi"?) thing ("ito") there exists ("lon") a new ("sin") thing ("ijo") such that the first ("wan" + "nimi" + "ito"?) thing is less ("lili") than the new thing ("sin" + "ito"?) and the new thing ("sin" + "ito"?) is less ("lili") that the second thing ("tu" + "nimi" + "ito"?)
Would need some way to join into a grammatical structure and probably a preamble that establishes that the context is mathematics.
> The text you provided is in Toki Pona, a constructed language with a minimalistic vocabulary. The translation to English is challenging due to the highly context-dependent and simplified nature of the language. Without further context, here's a rough translation:
> "When I count many things, cutting things is not possible. When one new thing comes, I increase the count by one. But I can't increase the count by cutting it. In the case of counting many things, this is not possible: two things and a cut of one thing exist. But when I count large things, cutting all numbers is possible. When something becomes large by cutting one, I can increase the count by cutting one. Cutting can make everything small. This counting method can count large things, long times, and hot things. In the case of counting large things, it's possible: when I write a number, this writing can count it but is not the same as writing a different number. But with many numbers, its writing is always large and cannot end."
> Please note that the translation might not capture all the nuances, and the interpretation may vary based on the context in which the text is used.
In short, expect hallucinations and other lies.
This is probably easy mode for it, given the tiny vocabulary at hand, even though it has surely seen very little Toki Pona in the wild. Large language models are extremely good at translation. I’ve personally tested ChatGPT-4 against Google Translate and other translators on some hard translations (languages that are not similar to English, such as Chinese), and it has consistently provided better translations than Google Translate in my opinion. As an example, for validation purposes, news stories that have been reported worldwide make things easier, since you can establish the facts of the translation by hand, and then compare what comes out.
What does your comment actually add to the discussion? Yes, ChatGPT can be wrong. So can Google Translate!
If you’d like to provide a clear example of ChatGPT-4 (not ChatGPT-3.5) making up a Toki Pona translation that is completely disconnected from reality, please do. That would be legitimately interesting conversational material. General cynicism isn’t.
ChatGPT absolutely has limitations, and translation is a hard problem, even for the industry-standard tools. Crossvalidation with multiple translation tools and ideally humans is important for any translations that actually matter.
Well. That's an opinion I suppose.
-edit- After posting, I decided this was too snarky/low value on it's own. So to add:
I personally get quite a bit of value out of it as an ad-hoc German tutor and as one-among-many tools for research and learning on new topics for which I am not already an expert.
I've also used it to help me make and troubleshoot very simple code in languages that I am not an expert in.
I personally have trivially found lots of uses that probably all cluster around "educational" to one degree or another.
Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Does it hallucinate/get things wrong? Absolutely. Is it useful despite those limitations? Emphatically yes.
This idea that its "only valid use" is entertainment doesn't even make sense to me. "Entertainment" is perhaps where I find it the most deficient relative to other current options.
> In this case, I validated against the hand-translated example in the main link. It did fine.
I could use sentence that could mean literally hundred thousand of different things, but if I explain it properly once, you are expected to keep it as context.
ChatGPT4 will struggle to keep all context as it will surely accumulate.
Here is what I got on the first try: https://chat.openai.com/share/88b0358e-c96d-4880-b939-7c62cf...
The answers seem plausible, and the words are actual Toki Pona words.
My special instructions have nothing to do with language or translation, but for the sake of transparency I did it a second time with custom instructions disabled: https://chat.openai.com/share/b85a59d9-2678-45c8-8c2e-8b8a80...
Regardless, there is a very limited dictionary to work with in Toki Pona, so communicating extremely specific ideas seems like it is always going to be problematic. The language doesn’t even have a specific word for “dog”.
So, I gave up on that idea because I believe that there is not enough training data, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
That is intriguing. Link?
https://chat.openai.com/share/50fd27af-7515-4f89-b0e1-228501...
Translating English to Toki Pona:
Talk -> Toki
Toki -> To speak, Communicate, Use language, Think, Say "hello"
The language forces you to be less specific in your meaning, but also to focus on core human emotions instead of unnecessary complexity. Having a translator perfectly convert English to Toki Tona is gonna be a lot easier than the reverse, anyway, unless you have a lot of context to piece it together.
Note: I tried learning this language many years ago and this is my personal opinion. It may not be shared by everyone.
If only! For most words in most sentences, you can find direct translations, but between most language pairs, I'm pretty sure any given text (just one page or so, let alone books) will have at least one point where you have to interpret the text to translate it: choose what meaning the author intended or what saying/expression conveys the same meaning the closest without going into descriptive mode.
I suppose that might be what you meant by "in comparison", but it seems misleading, at least to anyone not fluent/proficient enough in another language to know that lossless translations isn't how languages work
But, yes, toki pona lifts this to a whole 'nother level. Does anyone happen to know how Esperanto compares? As far as I know, it should be quite similar to a "normal" (non-con)language in this regard (just simpler to learn, with bonus points if you speak a romance language afaik)
China and Japan used to have a lot of Esperantists before WWII, for that reason.
https://www.loc.gov/item/2021670575/
> After World War I, the League of Nations considered adopting Esperanto as a working language and recommending that it be taught in schools, but proposals along these lines were vetoed by France.
It may be Eurocentric, but it's hell of a lot easier for diplomats to learn than English or French!
Esperanto was at some point in time the "workers latin", because the less educated worker could learn it as a means to talk with people from other nations. That ended with pushing English or other "more practical languages" in schools to this day.
Esperanto still is a working living language with a working worldwide community.
By saying you create a diplomatic language, you are marketing towards the elite, as I wrote in my post.
By saying that everybody speaks it as a second language, which is indeed what Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, wanted is a different focus. The first is focusing on an elite, the latter focuses on the people.
It's like the distinction between "computers for knowledge workers" and "personal computers", the first is only for a small elite, the latter is for everybody. Or the distinction between "politics for a couple of few" and "politics elected by everybody", the first is called a form of dictatorship, the latter democracy.
Esperanto is from 1887. I was curious what holidays were like at the time:
> According to Stowe (1994), “many nineteenth-century Americans traveled, and many more participated vicariously in the experience of travel by reading travel letters, sketches, and narratives in newspapers, magazines, and published volumes” (p. 3). Similarly, the appetite for travel in the U.K. was also voracious --https://regrom.com/2020/08/26/regency-travel-traveling-abroa...
So also a goal Zamenhof could intend. I don't know how you get to the conclusion that, because it wasn't intended for my mom to use while I was a baby, it wasn't intended to be used by my mom or me on holiday if we're not "diplomats", unless you call any tourist an international diplomat
You get so many internationalist movements out of Russia because it already was in many ways international internally. Lots of languages and land, but both travel and speech were restricted by authorities, secret police seemed to hover invisibly everywhere. The language of everything important, the language of rulers, was Russian. Vacations were in-country, if they happened at all.
Looking to the UK, France, and the US is in this case misleading.
Posts like these are the 'no fun allowed' of constructed languages, and it pops up most often with Esperantists. Like a diplomat, you refuse to let people use words carelessly, or loosely.
Toki Pona is in itself a reaction to that. It's an exploration in wordplay, puns, and local culture.
EDIT: You also left like... a wall of text explaining why Esperanto is far superior to Toki Pona? That isn't fun to read or talk about. If the idea is to replace English as a language of the world, we don't have to bring the stern attitude of an English teacher along with it.
The sister post got my intent well.
Wtf? What 'no fun allowed'?! In the community is fun allowed how and why are you making that stuff up based on what actually? What interpretation are you constructing, which is not based on any reality? We have wordplays, puns and local culture. People do these all the time and annoy the more grammatically inclined people with it all the time. These conflicts inside the community are normal any community will develop people who need to care about the language more and people who care less about any language. That's how new concepts are generated.
> EDIT: You also left like... a wall of text explaining why Esperanto is far > superior to Toki Pona? That isn't fun to read or talk about. If the idea is > to replace English as a language of the world, we don't have to bring > the stern attitude of an English teacher along with it.
The wall of text tried to answer the question sincerely of how they compare. Also it included my personal bitterness of about people who constantly piss on Esperanto for the wrong reasons. Like such as exactly this post of yours. And that's also why I stopped writing it. I wrote that it's lacking "functionality", that makes Esperanto more complex. Toki Pona is minimalist, it can't be the best language in the world for everything. But that does not make it bad. People enjoy learning it and despite what you try to make people in the Esperanto-community look like, there are a bunch of them speaking that language too for its value of minimalism, its value in playing around with the sapir-whorf-hypothesis regarding depression (it's after all the language of good), its value in finding a community, etc.
You see something, interpret it wrongly and then piss on it, for the wrong reasons.
> Toki Pona is in itself a reaction to that. It's an exploration in > wordplay, puns, and local culture.
That a niche of people who are inclined to perfectionism, down-beating and snobbishness are also inclined to favor Toki Pona is shown by your comment.
Interligua may be "more useful" as an auxlang but the size and history of the Esperanto community appeals to me.
I'm also studying Bahasa Indonesia right now; it also has a very regular and simple grammar. It's said to be the easiest non-European language for European language speakers to learn.
However, I'd say that well-developed languages (which for me means having many hyper-specific words and a diverse vocab available) allows interpretation to be more precise and functionally allow communication to happen. With Toki Pona I have the sense that a lot more is lost, and we end up interpreting broad strokes of the original meaning. This isn't bad, it's just different. Poetic if you like.
As an Esperanto-speaker with a shallow understanding of Toki Pona I can say the following comparison:
1. Esperanto has way more vocabulary, which is useful for translating nuances from one source language to another language and back. This was added over the years and is still expanding, as any other living language does.
2. Esperanto words are way more specific than the one of Toki Pona. A sentence which I took from a Toki Pona cheatsheet "soweli li moku" can be translated as "a land animal is eating", "a cat is drinking", "a dog is ingesting", etc. so highly context depending. Esperanto would for the specific meaning of "a cat is eating" allow "kato estas manĝanta" or, if you don't care for the present progressive tense, which is normally how people speak it, "kato manĝas" (present tense).
3. Toki Pona glues words together by putting them each after the other, without glueing the roots together. "telo pimeja" was one example of trying to say "coffee". The Esperanto principle would be to say nigroakvo (a kind of water, which is black). Besides that Esperanto allows more nuanced distinctions like adjectives, so "nigra akvo" would mean "black water", the water, which is black. Also as I wrote earlier, the roots in Esperanto are way more specific. "akvo" is in Epseranto just water, not liquid, not fluid, not beverage as is the meaning of "telo" is in Toki Pona. Also "nigra" is in Esperanto "black", not dark, not unlit, as is the meaning of "pimeja" is in Toki Pona. Besides that was just an example based on the word coffee, which someone else in this topic used. The actual word of "coffee" in Esperanto is "kafo" and for tea is "teo", because words which are sufficiently internationally understood are put into the language by the speakers of it.
4. Esperanto is simpler to learn, it provides the same high rewarding learning curve as does Toki Pona, but it's steeper, because it's a bigger language. Depending on intelligence, learning style, being able to focus on things regularly, motivation, connections to other speakers, time I would say people can use the language after 3 months to one year. How good that is, that's another question. I learnt the language more intensively in the first year and then just maintained it, used it and improved upon it.
5. Esperanto uses an agglutination based way of building words, as I wrote in the example of point 3, based on my little understanding of linguistic terms, this could be called "synthesizing" words, but it also supports building phrases as does Toki Pona in an analytical way. "Ĉu mi povas uzi la lazertranĉilon?" (Can I use the lasercutter?) or "Ĉu mi povas uzi la ilo kiu tranĉas per lazero?" (Can I use the machine, which cuts with a lazer?). Toki Pona would be something like "mi li pali ala pali e suno ilo" (Can I use the sun-tool?). "ilo" by the way is a word taken from Esperanto, as the creator of Toki Pona also understood Esperanto, which means "tool".
6. Esperanto has 136 years of literature behind it, Toki Pona doesn't. Let's wait another 136 years and see which of all the current constructed languages are then still around and see how much is produced in them.
7. When you learn Esperanto you have acquired some shared vocabulary in romance languages, but also a little bit of other languages in the mix, like German. Which can be a little bit helpful when learning after Esperanto then those languages. Or trying to navigate on a trip through Italy, you won't understand 80% of what people are saying, but here and there you will encounter words, which sound familiar. Which shows the so called "eurocentricity" of Esperanto, which is then used by some to campaign against the language, as if that property makes it the ultimate evil in the world, if they would apply the same standard to speaking English, then they would stop writing in the internet at all.
8. Toki Pona is overhyped. Esperanto is not hyped anymore. Any long existing constructed language loses it's appeal at some point, because the times have changed, people don't understand the history of it, believe anything which at first sounds enough plausible, but is in fact bullshit. Worldwide auxiliary languages like Esperanto always have the problem to be not "perfect" enough, they all replace each other in an eternal asymptomatic drive towards "more perfection", without ever reaching that goal. Thus in the end the most working language in that category is still Esperanto and hopefully will be for the next 136 years. But that's only my personal pet opinion.
Anyway, as I'm digressing into some general rant about planned languages, I end this comment, I can surely answer concrete questions about comparing these two languages later on, if wanted.
https://chirper.ai/tokipona?tab=activity
Deciding on usefulness of this experiment is left as an exercise for the reader.
I wonder if they were both having the same conversation.
I wonder how fast a community could learn Toki Pona if that was the only way of communicating and nothing else was allowed? It'd be interesting to see who has less and more difficulty sectioned by age, culture, education level, etc...
Also worth mentioning that Toki Pona was created by Sonja Lang(a fellow Canadian <3) during a period of depression. Here's her main website where you can see more of her work: https://www.lang.sg/
Semdom.org (and/or rapidwords.net) has some useful checklists if you're looking to create a comprehensive vocabulary or map concepts across existing ones.
Also, I find it highly interesting how groups of people will evolve branches of languages, in the large usually called dialects. But also in the small, like with any customs and styles, local variants are developed. Seems to be a very fundamental human trait. That can be an age-dependent variation - most age groups have their version of a language, and also culturally. Like certain groups of immigrants picking up their style of the local language. And on the big scale, look at English, which seems to be the closest to an universally spoken language so far. There are quite some flavors depending on which continent it is spoken on.
I could say nuclear reactor, or I could say “hot danger room cook mix build make sun” or some other inane lengthy sentence mushed from smaller words. It’s inefficient and inprecise.
This is like an assembly language. Simple but unusable because of the simplicity and ambiguity.
I've read the coffee used in these comments, so I'll stick with that. If you think life is complicated when things like a double espresso pumpkin spiced ice caramel latte is a normal order in some coffee shop, you can just reject the notion of its existence.
Is coffee even too specific? Perhaps. How about just needing a beverage? toki pona will have your back with that one. Even a "hot beverage". You might get a surprise, perhaps tea, Coco, or coffee, but this is all you really require. When monks need to eat, they take a food vessel (bowl) and ask people to fill it with food.
If you can get through life with the simplest of communication, maybe you have simplified your life adequately.
Also it's understood by ChatGPT (at least version 4). I asked it for "my hovercraft is full of eels" and got "tomo tawa mi li jo e kala mute" which a speaker of Toki Pona confirmed is a good translation. (Roughly: "My moving house has many fish")
Asking ChatGPT to translate it back a month later got "My vehicle contains many fish." which is not bad for a language that relies on context a lot.
Once Duolingo starts a Toki Pona course, I'm in.
However, human languages haven't been widely adopted with much success when designed/created top-down. Even more advanced and well developed languages such as Esperanto, haven't take off, though more widely adopted.
Personally I agree with Prof Steven Pinker, that Language is an Instinct, and that it evolves in communities, in stages, such as 'pidgin -> creole -> first/native language', most importantly developed & fortified by children.
The human brain has capacity for storing, processing and remembering tens of thousands of words, example [2]:
- 13K words for an average 3-year-old
- 60K words on average by the time they graduate from high-school
- a 3-year-old is likely to remember a new word casually mentioned in a conversation for up to 5 weeks
you may save in storage at the expense of processing, orchestrating, learning, and rather crucially accessibility. Except for fun, it's kinda pointless otherwise.
[1] Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism "that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made avail- able by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, stating that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers".
[2] Language Instinct, Steven Pinker
Explain in toki pona what is toki pona.
ChatGPT: toki pona li toki pi toki lili. ona li pali e nimi mute lili tan toki mute. ona li jo e nimi luka wan e nimi tu. nimi luka li jo e nimi tu lon toki mute. nimi mute li ken toki e sitelen sin sama nimi luka. nimi lili mute li pona tawa toki pi toki pona. sina ken toki e ni: "toki pona li toki tawa pi toki lili."
Can someone who speaks toki pona tell us if he's doing a good job?
That would be sort of like stenography shorthand
The thing missing from this analogy is compilation. RISC machine code isn't supposed to be manually written most of the time. I wonder if there's something similar that could be applied to human communication? As in, an intermediate simplified language that's rarely written or read on its own, but instead provides disambiguation between human languages?
http://move.rupy.se/file/talk.txt
Emoticon chat is the future.
...like the one we're using right now?
With only 120 words...
...me could try talk like caveman.
Iodine. Basil. Capybara. Torque. Homotopy. Fedora. Felony. Gasket. Sciatica. Cumulonimbus.
Seems like it’d be way easier to parse/AST Tokki Pona than many natural languages we have.
Is there some translation website built for it?
(I see some chatgpt attempts at this in this thread)
Very cool!
E.g. "mi wile tawa wawa" could be parsed as:
- "mi (wile) (tawa wawa)" ("I want, towards strength")
- "mi (wile tawa (wawa))" ("I want to go powerfully/quick")
>
> adjective: epic, awesome
Not sure if this is meant to be a joke, but I like it.
But you could say "ko lete", "walo lete", "ijo lete", or "lete", I guess. Or "telo lete pi kiwen mute ala" which is kind of a nuisance. ("Not-very-hard cold water.")
I think "telo lete walo" or "ko lete walo" would be widely understood.
The problem, rather, is that any such definition will be confined to that conversation, or at least that group of speakers - there are no "reusable libraries".
That is because in their language, they had no words to describe the concept of the sky having a color. So they didn't even comprehend or notice that the sky was blue.
Be careful with any trend to publicize or normalize a smaller language that can be shared with everyone. It's a trap. It's a trap so that people lose sight and memory of things that exist. Who wants you to forget what exists, and why? Who wants to take away words and what words are those?
Double plus ungood.
I personally think of toki pona as a tool of self reflection and understanding because of how you have to break things down to them speak the meaning out, but maybe others use the language differently. It is in no way a trap to lose touch with reality though. It's not removing words for reality, just expressing it in a different way.