Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by dan_blanchard | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

dan_blanchard

The title of the article should really say "Toki Pona: An artificial human language with 120 words."

Something like this would be way too inefficient to actually be used by people.

View on HN

> Something like this would be way too inefficient to actually be used by people.

The same is true of most conlangs. Remember that kid who absolutely refused to use Klingon after he was old enough?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language#Speakers

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.08/mustread.html?pg...

To be fair, this is common of many bilinguals when the other language is not in common use in their lives. I personally know at least 8 bilinguals ranging from Chinese to Zulu that can understand the language, once-upon-a-time spoke it well, are spoken to in the language, but respond in English.

It happens frequently when the only time they ever use the language is with their parents/family and their parents can understand English just fine.

If you managed to spread it so almost anyone knew those 120 words then it would make a very useful and accessible international language. To handle the little things while abroad without having to learn another "starter pack" of words/sentences everywhere your business takes you, that would be great imho.

One of the problems with doing things that way is that you'll still develop locale-specific conventions. You might go somewhere and say "electric brain," but they call it a "fast counting beans." And then you'll be speaking different languages anyway.

Having heard neither phrase before, I'm pretty sure I know what you meant by them. It's not a perfect system but it's better than talking extra-loud English and adding hand signals.

My point is more about how language evolves from common roots, and even if we all start with the same language, it will probably diverge over time we'll be back where we started. Though I suppose it could act as a temporary reprieve, assuming you ignored the costs of teaching it.

She lost me when she got into finding adjectives to describe the experience of interacting with a car. If you're relying on abstractions and adjectives to replace nouns, then it's a dead-end. We already have a universal primitive language in the form of facial expressions and gestures that (almost) everyone has access to, with which we can bootstrap communication quite easily.

It would be much better if everyone learned English - an actually useful language, and that is what is happening right now.

While it would be indeed the best scenario that the whole humanity learned a common fully developed language, let's face it, it's highly unrealistic. The good thing about a stripped down, simple language like Toki Pona is that it would make it easier/less expensive to learn and therefore easier to spread. Plus as it is not tied to any country it avoids the classic chauvinism of some people who simply refuse to learn something coming from a "competing" nation.

If by 'everyone' you mean 'around 25%'...

Used for what purpose?

You can probably meet a stranger and exchange some pleasantries on a hike together. You won't write a physics textbook. But languages can be used in different functional domains, and that's fine.

>physics textbook

Well, at least some people are trying :

http://tenhundredwordsofscience.tumblr.com/

That is not a textbook. That is people explaining to children what the field is about.

Try translating this, from an actual textbook, to toki pona: "This section shows how depth-first search can be used to perform a topological sort of a directed acyclic graph, or a 'dag' as it is sometimes called. A topological sort of a dag G = (V,E) is a linear ordering of all its vertices such that if G contains an edge (u,v), then u appears before v in the ordering. (If the graph is not acyclic, then no linear ordering is possible.)"

This one is a little insidious, because presumably you are not allowed to introduce new words into Toki Pona.

Sonja might say that toki pona was designed to make texts like this difficult to express, but an extra challenge is that there are so few words that could be repurposed as technical terms. For example, the existing term wawa means 'force, power, strength, energy' (which are of course all different technical terms in physics, so if we wanted to say "change in energy is the integral of power with respect to time" or "change in energy is the integral of force with respect to distance", we're already kind of out of luck, even ignoring how toki pona doesn't clearly have a way to refer to integration or multiplication).

We might try to describe the dag in this way.

mi mute li lukin e ijo mute e linja mute. linja ale li kama tan ijo wan li tawa ijo ante. sike ala li lon.

('we see many objects and lines. all lines come from one object and go to another object. no round thing is present.')

However, it is still ambiguous whether "wan" refers to an arbitrary node or a specific node (because toki pona has no term for "each" vs. "any"). We could try to get around this with a process-oriented approach ("choose an object"), but I've never found a clear way to say "choose". And of course a reader might interpret "sike ala li lon" as saying that the nodes aren't circular or that the edges aren't curved, as opposed to that no cycles are present in the graph structure.

As an update, I think a lot of speakers would guess the right interpretation of

nasin sike li lon ala ('round paths are not present')

for the cycle-free condition. We could also try to say

nasin li kama tan ijo wan li tawa ijo sama la nasin ni li lon ala ('when a path comes from one object and goes to the same object, this path doesn't exist')

This kind of abstraction -- referring to conditions based on hypothetical individuals -- is very rare in toki pona. (There isn't even a grammatical way to directly form relative clauses.)

So you would use "mi mute li lukin e ijo mute e linja mute. linja ale li kama tan ijo wan li tawa ijo ante. nasin sike li lon ala" whenever you want to say dag. In a section where dag is mentioned ten times, that would be kind of painful.

It gets even worse because there are no relative clauses! I guess you could refer to the entire dag as a "sitelen" (here 'image, picture') and then say "mi mute li lukin e sitelen ni. ona li jo e ijo mute e linja mute..." and then refer to the dag as "sitelen" on every subsequent reference.

I'm definitely not going to defend toki pona's convenience or utility for talking about math. :-)

What you get in Toki Pona is a series of lexicalized phrases from word compounds.

In a natural language, you would get these along with the borrowings or coinages, to a greater or lesser extent based on the culture's attitude toward lexical borrowing.

Toki Pona has a strong cultural bias against borrowing, and probably (perhaps somewhat like Pirahã) a strong cultural bias against discussing complex, abstract concepts precisely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com