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Comment by fataliss | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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