[HN Gopher] Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)
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Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)
Author : lelf
Score : 114 points
Date : 2020-03-26 01:00 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| CarlRJ wrote:
| For a humorous taste of a limited language, without venturing
| outside of English, Randall Munroe (the XKCD guy) has a book
| called, "Thing Explainer", that's a sort of encyclopedia written
| using only the 1,000 most common words in English.
| dang wrote:
| 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534
|
| 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153406
|
| 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191186
|
| (Links for the curious. Reposts are ok after a year:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Here are some (IMO) silly/potentially interesting tech projects
| in the Toki Pona world:
|
| ---
|
| ilo nanpa - a calculator using the Toki Pona number system
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgWCLg4H_4U
|
| ---
|
| linja pona - a font for the Sitelen Pona hieroglyphic system with
| fancy character combination logic (goes way beyond the limits of
| my rudimentary font knowledge) - the text is all entered in latin
| but the font automatically converts toe Sitelen Pona (if you try
| copy/paste some text from the second site linked somewhere else
| you'll see it).
|
| https://github.com/davidar/linja-pona
|
| https://davidar.github.io/tp/ a website made with it.
|
| ---
|
| I worked on a R-Pi based word processor computer thing with a
| custom keyboard/case/input system for the same writing system:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2nYoi2dAk4
|
| (I ad enough time with quarantine to get it finished this week,
| but it's not properly documented anywhere yet ).
|
| ---
|
| There's also been a long-standing effort to get the language an
| ISO code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona#History ).
|
| "In 2008 an application for an ISO 639-3 code was rejected, with
| a statement that the language was too young.[22] Another request
| was rejected in 2018 as the language "does not appear to be used
| in a variety of domains nor for communication within a community
| which includes all ages".[23]"
|
| ---
|
| For anyone interested in learning but too cheap/broke to get the
| official book (http://tokipona.org), the next best thing (in my
| educated opinion) is the course of jan Pije:
| http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/okamasona.php .
| aasasd wrote:
| > _goes way beyond the limits of my rudimentary font knowledge
| - the text is all entered in latin but the font automatically
| converts toe Sitelen Pona_
|
| It most likely utilizes ligatures--like when you write 'ff' or
| 'fi', the letters are joined into a custom glyph (in proper
| software and context), so this font does the same for custom
| longer sequences. This is popular lately with programming fonts
| and such.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Yip, it uses ligatures, but it also has a system where you
| can say put a box around text by using the underscore
| character w/ square braces ("[_mi_pilin]" has the "mi" and
| "pilin" characters with a cartouche around them, like on the
| second line of the linked page below), and also I think does
| dynamic compounding of characters (see the current complete
| character list here - https://davidar.github.io/linja-
| pona/nimi - I haven't asked the author how they did it, but
| my guess is that there's something fun/dynamic going on).
| katsura wrote:
| I learned it last year as a fun excercise, and found it pretty
| interesting that there are so many things you can express with so
| few words.
|
| However, in the end you'll end up wanting to express much more
| and the language is just not able to do that, you'll end up lost
| in the compounds, and things become unclear pretty quickly.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| (long-time lurker here...)
|
| Yip, there are definitely topics I butt into where I hit a wall
| too -_- . But with time I got much better at navigating them
| and have had several-hour-long conversations IRL as well as
| online using just Toki Pona (without resorting to compounds
| really - I don't know if it's what you're referring to, but
| compound phrases with fixed meaning aren't really in the spirit
| of the language). There are people online who I talk with
| regularly exclusively using Toki Pona.
| failrate wrote:
| It may not be a concisely expressive language, but I like
| that the small number of word units means it would be easier
| to use as an intermediary language than Esperanto.
|
| Another practical step could be to identify a specific
| minimal set of language units required for any given popular
| nonconstructed language. Is this already a thing?
| Nzen wrote:
| Presumably, that would depend on your conversatonal goal.
| We could refer to the Apollo lander as a spacecar[0] in a
| casual conversation but that could be tedious or misleading
| if a NASA representative were trying to pigdin with an ESA
| representative about the metal casing of a booster rocket
| ballooning past the expansion tolerance of the o-rings,
| using only the 3000 most common english words.
|
| [0] https://xkcd.com/1133/
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > We could refer to the Apollo lander as a spacecar[0]
|
| This seems to be reaching for exoticism for the sake of
| exoticism, given that the standard term is the
| metaphorically identical "spaceship".
|
| It can't even be justified by the restriction to "the
| 3000 most common words", since ship is #1208 in COCA.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| >Another practical step could be to identify a specific
| minimal set of language units required for any given
| popular nonconstructed language. Is this already a thing?
|
| You mean something like this question?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19331307
| urubu wrote:
| Yes, those units are called 'semantic primes/primitives':
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes
| chrisshroba wrote:
| Could you give some examples of things you talk about and
| things that you think would be difficult to talk about given
| the language's limitations?
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| sure!
|
| Talking about daily life works pretty well (general chit
| chat - asking people how they're feeling, what they've been
| doing, assuming you know something about their lives
| already there won't be many ambiguities). online, I often
| share pictures as I go (they give points of reference). So
| I can say "mi pali e pan suwi" (i made sweet bread) and
| show a picture of a cake; my friend could say "ni li pona
| ala pona?" (is it good or not?) and I could reply
| appropriately. I could say if I plan to make it again,
| maybe talk about the ingredient composition slightly.
|
| Commonly also, sharing toki pona memes/making jokes,
| finding deliberately silly ways to refer to things. (A
| running game I have with a friend is referring to lots of
| places as "tomo awen" (waiting house). Hospital? "tomo
| awen", because most of your time there is waiting. Waiting
| in line at a supermarket? "tomo awen". And right now, our
| homes are also "tomo awen", because we can't go out...).
|
| One thing I'm looking forward to doing when it gets
| warm/we're not quarantined anymore, is going to the zoo,
| walking around, and deciding how to describe all the
| different animals "soweli pi lawa sewi" (animal with a high
| head) for giraffe for instance. Going to a gallery or the
| like would also probably work pretty well - you can point
| at things, talk about how you feel about them. (It would be
| more about immediate experience than prior knowledge I
| guess). Any activity/situation with a lot of ready-to-hand
| context is likely to work.
|
| Doing activities where you have a fixed frame of reference
| a language with limited vocabulary can work quite well. I
| played 2-player local coop of Wilmot's Warehouse (
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAcyPIJYOx4 ), where the
| sould of the game is categorising packages with various
| random/abstract designs and deciding where to put them in a
| warehouse. That would probably be a good exercise for any
| language, but it worked in toki pona.
|
| I met up with someone I didn't otherwise know and we talked
| about our professions, where we grew up, etc. (One cheat is
| that in Toki Pona's 120 word count, borrowed words aren't
| included - but there are conventions for transliterating
| words from other languages if you want to talk about
| English (Inli) or America (Mewika)).
|
| You can go shopping and cook with someone - trying to
| describe what ingredients you're looking for is I guess a
| game, and once you have them at home you can probably issue
| instructions with enough accuracy using Toki Pona's
| vocabulary.
|
| What's difficult to talk about? Time and scheduling,
| especially under time pressure. Trying to clear up a
| scheduling confusion via txt messages with a friend was
| absolutely zero fun, especially when misunderstandings
| start creeping in that can't be quickly rectified.
| Scheduling discussions have been the ones where I've hated
| Toki Pona the most.
|
| Talking about technical matters doesn't work - I can't talk
| meaningful about maths in toki pona beyond the absolute
| vaguest of euphemisms - and while people have tried to
| state theorems/etc., it basically doesn't work in my
| experience.
|
| Talking without a concrete frame of reference can be hard.
| If I can't see you, can't share pictures with you, can't
| use emoji, etc., the range of what I can communicate is
| severely limited. I can say I worked, I can say I'm feeling
| good, I can say what country I live in. I can talk about
| eating flat round bread with red paste on top (pizza), and
| that my girldfriend didn't like it or whatever...which is
| still manageable chitchit I guess, but much more limited.
| (There are toki pona songs that work well at this level of
| speech though - e.g.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjlwov4JiD0 ).
| schoen wrote:
| It's interesting to me that you focus on the 'high'
| meaning of sewi, because I've always focused on the
| 'religious' or 'divine' meaning. So I would hear "lawa
| sewi" as something like 'religious head' or 'religious
| leader'. Probably my first parse of "soweli pi lawa sewi"
| would be 'the rabbi's cat' or something, rather than a
| giraffe. Or I would imagine an animal whose head is
| similar to some concept or representation of divinity.
| :-)
|
| mi wile e ni: tenpo lili la mi mute ale li ken tawa tan
| tomo awen pi mi mute!
| chrisshroba wrote:
| Thank you very much for this write-up! This sounds like a
| lot of fun, maybe I'll spend some of my quarantine time
| looking into it. Any recommended resources for learning?
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| My pleasure!
|
| The best place to learn is from the official Toki Pona
| book by Sonja herself:
|
| http://tokipona.org
|
| If that's too much of an investment, the next best thing
| is the course "o kama sona e toki pona" by jan Pije:
|
| http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/okamasona.php
|
| There are active discords, subreddits, telegram chats,
| facebook groups, etc. - probably the handiest list is in
| the sidebar of /r/tokipona:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/tokipona/
|
| There are a bunch of different communities/resources - I
| learned a lot from the "ma pona pi toki pona" discord,
| which is probably the best community for learning Toki
| Pona (people are generally friendly and generous with
| sharing knowledge). There's also a lot of music written
| in Toki Pona on youtube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?
| list=PL2eg_FknCSeoWL6tFBKOn... (some of them are
| decent!), which is nice for passive consumption.
|
| And, as I mentioned elsewhere the meme reddit mi_lon
| https://www.reddit.com/r/mi_lon/ is pretty good as well.
| BelleOfTheBall wrote:
| Honestly, a language like this could be quite beneficial if it
| was widely used (maybe even taught in schools) as a fallback
| method for cases where you need to communicate with someone
| without having a language in common. Instead of trying to
| puzzle out what the other person is saying, you just switch to
| Toki Pona and use these very basic concepts to slowly figure
| things out.
| dk8086 wrote:
| It feels like taking a picture and converting it to the lowest
| image format. Even if you know what was there previously, it's
| impossible to convert it back to a meaningful piece of
| information.
| masukomi wrote:
| having played with it i will say that it was an interesting and
| valuable experience to try and distill something that's
| emotional to you down into the basic basic concepts required to
| try and express it, which is exactly the point of TP. It's not
| for trying to have real conversations in.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Trying to interpret sentences out of context in Toki Pona is
| indeed tricky!
|
| However, "sina wile ala wile moku e telo pimeja?" (Do you want
| to eat black water?) can be quite accurately reconstructed as
| "do you want a coffee?" if you know it was said outside of a
| cafe.
|
| With a given context that you can refer to (in a cafe, walking
| in the park, cooking food), the expressive power/range of
| reference of 120 words is vastly greater than, say, in a letter
| to a stranger. This is probably one reason why the meme
| community in Toki Pona is reasonably lively (
| https://www.reddit.com/r/mi_lon/ ).
|
| I don't know how you extend that metaphor to image-
| decompression though! (I guess if you know you're decompressing
| a picture of a face you can train your decompresser on other
| picture of faces first :) ).
| aasasd wrote:
| > To view posts in r/mi_lon you must continue in Reddit app
| or log in.
|
| Ah, here's some new ugly stuff by Reddit.
| toisanji wrote:
| semi related ( and work in progress): https://concepts.jtoy.net
| anselmio wrote:
| It's weird to see so many words that I already "know" from the
| Tokipona language just because I'm Finnish and lived a few years
| in Poland. The words in Tokipona have of course a "wider scope"
| in their meaning, but here's a few I spotted scrolling through a
| Tokipona dictionary [1]:
|
| "Kala" is a fish both in Finnish and Tokipona, "nena" is a nose
| in Tokipona which is "nena" in Finnish, "sina" (you) is "sina" in
| Finnish, "nimi" (name) is the same in both languages, "noka"
| (leg) is "noga" in Polish, "ona" (she) is the same in Polish.
| There's more that I'm easily able to remember like "linja" (line
| in Finnish) which has a similar meaning in Tokipona, not to
| mention numbers like "wan" and "tu" and words like "mama" (mom)
| and "mani" (money) etc.
|
| [1] http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/dictionary.php
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| There's a compiled etymology list here, for those interested.
|
| http://ucteam.ru/toki-pona/
| imglorp wrote:
| This concept is used heavily in ASL (American sign language).
|
| Simple signs can be grouped to make other concepts.
|
| There are conjugations or tenses -- explicit number and time are
| their own signs -- and articles and prepositions are usually
| dispensed with, much like headlines.
|
| Example "teacher" is TEACH PERSON. Plural would be TEACH PEOPLE.
| Student is LEARN PERSON, etc. There are the equivalent of
| modifiers indicated by motion, facial expression, etc.
|
| This sounds wordy but in practice the bit rate is about the same
| as spoken because some signs stand in for multiple things, plus
| the omissions and modifiers as above are meaning multipliers.
| elldoubleyew wrote:
| In high school I was the founder of our (small) Esperanto Club. I
| gave Esperanto lessons each week at our club meeting designed as
| a one year course, usually by the end of the year if someone
| attended each week and did moderate self study outside of class
| they could communicate in Esperanto really well. We even had one
| international student who really struggled with english that
| after a few months of attending our club could communicate with
| us in Esperanto more fluently than English!
|
| We had one a freshman join during my senior year who was a huge
| advocate of Toki Pona as a conlang. We decided to devote a month
| of the club to Toki Pona instead of Esperanto and it was mind
| boggling how quickly everyone was able to get a grasp of it.
| Granted Toki Pona is much more "wordy" than Esperanto, you often
| have to use many words to convey an idea that you could express
| quickly in a language with a larger vocabulary. Regardless it was
| an absolute blast to learn and I'm surprised by how much I
| remember.
|
| Once I got to college there seemed to be a severe lack of
| interest in Esperanto, or any conlang for that matter, amongst
| the student body. I could never really keep enough people
| interested the same way I could in high school so I gave up after
| my sophomore year. I really miss teaching people Esperanto. I
| believe the club at my high school still runs to this day, I'd
| love to be able to go back and visit one day.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I bloody wish there were good modern Esperanto courses. I've
| found a Michel Thomas method Esperanto course once but it was
| incomplete. I would really love to buy a complete one (even for
| a price higher than what other languages cost).
| [deleted]
| gweinberg wrote:
| I'm not sure how well this works in practice. Unless you already
| know a horse is a wonder dog and a hippopotamus is a water horse,
| when someone says "river wonder dog" will you know what he means?
| godelski wrote:
| This is actually really common in languages. Like the other
| commenter noted in Chinese. I'll give another example.
| Bear(Xiong ) + cat(Mao ) = panda(Xiong Mao ). There's tons of
| these that don't make sense unless you already know. There are
| also plenty that you might be able to put together with context
| (electric + brain = computer). But we can go into any language
| and find things like this. The article mentions "microscope"
| which is already a compound word in English[0]. German has
| "sick wagon" for "ambulance" and "finger shoes" for "gloves".
| French has "animal companion" as "pet".
|
| I'll also mention that German and Mandarin have a significant
| amount of compound words. There's even a joke about German,
| that if you want to make a new word you just smash two words
| together. Animal that lives in my house? House-animal. Haustier
| (pet).
|
| [0] English is a "bastardization" of a bunch of languages.
| There's plenty of words in it that are compound words from
| other languages.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| Like many languages, you'd have to learn more than the base
| vocabulary. If you were learning Chinese, could you guess what
| an electric brain (diannao, Dian Nao ), a vertical rise machine
| (zhishengji, Zhi Sheng Ji ) or a cat head eagle (maotouying,
| Mao Tou Ying ) was? Maybe not, which is why you'd learn the
| Chinese for computer, helicopter, and owl.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| This is how many languages works, but the spirit of Toki Pona
| is genuinely different (though many learners come in with the
| impression). Learning compound phrases won't really help you
| much.
|
| One could say that the idea is to, if you have to refer to
| something in a given context, you try to cobble together a
| description, just enough to differentiate it from other
| things. "sike tu" (two circles) will be useful to
| differentiate a bicycle from a car, but if you want to
| differentiate them from a pair glasses you'll probably need
| to use a different term - "sike tawa" (moving circles) maybe!
| What you have to learn, instead of set compound phrases, is
| the ability to improvise names/descriptions for things on the
| fly :)
| miles-po wrote:
| doubleplus-good
| lidHanteyk wrote:
| Exactly. Is "kute pona" somebody who is good at listening, or
| somebody who is obedient? Like (Ingsoc) Newspeak, Toki Pona's
| poor vocabulary and overloaded semantics lead to a very simple
| and incurious language perfect for shrinking peoples' minds.
| xena wrote:
| Sed esperanto estas la lingvo kiu inspiris Ingsoc de
| Newspeak. Esperanto ne havas vorton por "bad"; esperanto
| havas malbona, aux "ungood". Simile maljuna por "old" ("not-
| young") kaj malgranda por "small" ("not-big").
| lidHanteyk wrote:
| Sure; the Ranto [0] explains why this is a poor way to
| build a language.
|
| [0] http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html
| xena wrote:
| Sed facila. Nenio malhelpas vin uzi vortoj sxati "vieila"
| (de la ina formo de la franca por maljuna) por "maljuna",
| sed multoj parolantoj de esperanto eble komprenos.
|
| Lojbano probable havas sistemo por vortoj tiel. Vortoj
| havas multojn lokojn en la "loko strukturo" de la vorto.
| La vorto por iri estas {klama}, difinita kiel:
|
| {x1 venas/iras al celita loko x2 el deirpunkto x3 tra
| vojo x4 per rimedo/veturilo x5}
|
| {lo klama} estas la viro de iri
|
| {lo se klama} estas la celita loko
|
| {lo te klama} estas la deirpunkto
|
| {lo ve klama} estas la vojo de vojagxi
|
| {lo xe klama} estas la ilo de iri aux la veturilo
|
| Multoj lokojn por substantivoj signifas tion {klama}
| estas kvin vortojn!
|
| Sed Lojbano havas la senvocan veluran frikativon (/x/ en
| la IPA aux "kh" en araba). Estas malfacila por
| anglalingvanoj.
| lidHanteyk wrote:
| u'i coi nintadni .i xu jbobau
|
| lo jbobau ku bridi bangu .i lo ka klama ku selbri .i pe'i
| drata lo glibau .a lo sperybau lo ka bangu
|
| ku'icu'i zo'oi "good" jbobau se smuni fi mi lo ka xamgu
| ku .a lo ka vrudi ku .a lo ka zabna ku .a lo ka to'e
| xlali ku ...i xu ma drani smuni?
|
| u'i di'ai
| elliotec wrote:
| Check out this tokenizer for it as well:
| https://github.com/Xe/x/blob/master/web/tokiponatokens/toki_...
| xena wrote:
| I used this for recompiling a subset of toki pona to a subset
| of prolog: https://github.com/Xe/x/tree/master/cmd/la-baujmi.
| This is something I wish I had more time/effort to develop out
| more.
| elliotec wrote:
| Your blog has been a really exciting corner of the internet
| for me the past couple months. Thank you, big fan, keep doin
| what you're doin.
| xena wrote:
| Thanks! I'm working on a blogpost analyzing the speed gains
| I got by porting my webassembly environment to Rust. So far
| it's about 50x as fast on average, but most of the gain is
| from using an ahead-of-time compiler instead of an
| interpreter.
| yongjik wrote:
| I've said it before, but the problem with having only a hundred
| words is that they are the _hardest_ one hundred words in any
| languages. To a foreign learner, easy words are hard, and hard
| words are easy.
|
| To someone learning English as a foreign language, "banish" is
| easy to understand: it has just one meaning, so once you memorize
| it, you can recognize it whenever it's used.
|
| "Turn out", on the other hand, has half a dozen meanings and you
| have to rely on context.
|
| In the extreme case, imagine explaining the word "the" to someone
| whose native language doesn't have an article.
| monadic2 wrote:
| Sure but your "easy" words are useless in most sentences. Think
| of all the words not in this sentence!
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > imagine explaining the word "the" to someone whose native
| language doesn't have an article
|
| Much like "turn out", there are many different ways in which
| "the" might be used. But as contrasted with "a" ("explain it to
| someone who doesn't have articles"), it's not that bad -- "the"
| is used to mark noun phrases that are already present in the
| conversational context, and "a" is used to introduce new noun
| phrases into the conversational context.
|
| More generally, "the" and "a" are markers for what is known in
| linguistics as "definiteness", with "the" being an
| unspecialized definiteness marker and "a" being a more
| specialized indefiniteness marker. But there are many other
| determiners that require or mark definiteness -- possessives
| like _my_ and _their_ are definite; demonstratives like _this_
| and _that_ are definite; _some_ is a fully general
| indefiniteness marker...
|
| (Compare "there's some guy outside scaring customers away" with
| "there are some guys outside scaring customers away", then
| consider that _a_ would only be permissible in the first one.)
|
| > To a foreign learner, easy words are hard, and hard words are
| easy.
|
| Yep. I've pointed out before that most people have the instinct
| that when a foreigner doesn't know the language well, you
| should talk to them the same way you'd talk to a small child.
| But that's completely backwards. The typical small child only
| knows common words and can handle any native grammar at all. A
| foreigner will have trouble with common words, effortlessly
| comprehend rare words (after looking them up), and have extreme
| trouble with grammar beyond the basics.
|
| I had a Chinese tutor once who was embarrassed when a rare word
| came up in some reading, and assured me that this was a "really
| fancy word" and it didn't matter if I didn't know it. The
| assurance was not needed -- at the time, my vocabulary was
| negligible; to me there was no difference between a really
| fancy word and its dirt-common equivalent. It's taken a lot of
| work to get to the point where I can be annoyed to encounter a
| fancy substitute for a word I feel I should have known.
| canjobear wrote:
| > "the" is used to mark noun phrases that are already present
| in the conversational context, and "a" is used to introduce
| new noun phrases into the conversational context.
|
| > (Compare "there's some guy outside scaring customers away"
| with "there are some guys outside scaring customers away",
| then consider that a would only be permissible in the first
| one.)
|
| This rule is OK but it fails for the following case: A man
| you've never seen before runs into your office and says "The
| President is outside!" Now, the President wasn't part of your
| conversational context, in fact there was no conversational
| context, nor any context with the speaker. But "a President
| is outside!" is clearly wrong.
|
| More generally, any attempt to give simple rules for this
| part of English grammar will fail, and will not generalize to
| other languages with articles. The rules of natural languages
| are extraordinarily complex, although we have the illusion
| that we can understand them explicitly. That's why rule-based
| NLP systems have always seemed attractive, and have always
| failed.
| kaoD wrote:
| > any attempt to give simple rules for this part of English
| grammar will fail, and will not generalize to other
| languages with articles
|
| Why? GP's explanation was just wrong, but articles are
| pretty well defined, easy to explain, and generalize well
| to other languages.
|
| - "The" (definite article) marks a noun that refers to a
| particular instance of the class designated by that noun,
| distinctly recognizable from other instances.
|
| - "A" (indefinite article) marks a noun that refers to a
| generic instance of the class that isn't explicitly
| recognizable among other instances.
| schoen wrote:
| > Now, the President wasn't part of your conversational
| context, in fact there was no conversational context, nor
| any context with the speaker.
|
| That's an awesome example! My proposed patch would be:
| singular instantiated concrete nouns in English always need
| a determiner, and we should use the most specific
| determiner that pragmatics will give a plausible meaning
| to. (So also "our mother lives in Boston" is preferable to
| ?"the mother lives in Boston" but the second option is
| possible in some contexts.)
|
| > More generally, any attempt to give simple rules for this
| part of English grammar will fail, and will not generalize
| to other languages with articles.
|
| Yeah, that's a great point. For example, Portuguese
| commonly _requires_ articles with abstract nouns, where
| English would _forbid_ them.
|
| "O amor e um dos maiores prazeres da vida."
|
| '(the) love is one of the greatest pleasures of (the) life'
|
| Someone learning one language from the other might first
| think "oh, great, this language has definite and indefinite
| articles, just like my native language -- it's no problem,
| I already understand this". But that understanding will
| fall down when confronted with situations like abstract
| nouns.
|
| Ancient Greek has definite articles but no indefinite
| articles, and I was taught that definite articles are
| _mandatory_ with people 's proper names (o Platon, '(the)
| Plato'). But it's apparently more complicated than that,
| because for example in
|
| https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atex
| t...
|
| sometimes he's called o Platon and sometimes Platon (for
| reasons that I don't grasp). And similarly in Portuguese,
| it's common to refer to people in the third person by a
| proper name plus definite article (o Joao, a Maria) but
| neither obligatory nor universal. My intuition is that it's
| a very mild honorific and that it's only done when we think
| the listener is already familiar with the person referred
| to, but I'm not a native speaker and I bet that intuition
| isn't quite right either.
|
| So yeah! These rules feel super-simple, and they're really
| not.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| As I noted, there are many ways to use "the". You're
| correct that the rule I gave doesn't cover most of them.
| You're mostly wrong in the details:
|
| > Now, the President wasn't part of your conversational
| context, in fact there was no conversational context, nor
| any context with the speaker.
|
| This is very wrong; the President, like all proper nouns,
| is part of the conversational context. You may validly
| assume that your listener knows the identity of "the
| President" in the same way you assume that they know the
| meaning of the word "outside". For this reason, all proper
| nouns, arthrous [= marked with "the"] or not, are always
| definite.
|
| Some English proper nouns are arthrous and some aren't;
| there is no rule governing this.
|
| > But "a President is outside!" is clearly wrong.
|
| It's not ill-formed in any way[1], though it raises some
| questions about how you know there's a president out there
| without also knowing which president it is. But more
| importantly, I restricted my comment to cases where "the"
| contrasts with "a", and this is not such a case. "The
| President" and "a president" are not parallel formations.
|
| [1] If you insist on capitalizing President [referring to a
| specific known individual], then it is indeed ill-formed.
| Proper nouns are definite and "a" is indefinite.
| canjobear wrote:
| It's probably true that in real natural languages, the 100 most
| frequent words are also the most ambiguous. Languages have
| evolved this way because (native) speakers can easily
| disambiguate, so there's no need to be precise all the time.
| But Toki Pona is a constructed language, so it might not have
| this property.
| Florin_Andrei wrote:
| Reading the article, I realized there must be some optimal
| sizes for vocabulary. I say sizes, plural, because there must
| be some layers there in terms of usage frequency. Toki Pona
| clearly goes to an extreme of simplicity in vocabulary space.
|
| But what is "optimal"? You would expect languages, in their
| natural evolution, tend towards it all the time.
| csa wrote:
| Optimal for whom?
|
| Any system is fairly trivial for native speakers -- they just
| learn it.
|
| For non-native learners, the optimum level is probably the
| closest to what their native language is. Simple examples,
| it's easier for a native speaker of Japanese to learn
| Mandarin since their is substantial overlap in vocabulary via
| the significant Chinese influence in the Japanese language.
|
| That said, all other things being equal, the number is
| probably on the low side. As a simple example, Indonesian
| seems to be a relatively easy language for folks coming from
| any language to learn, even if their native language is
| linguistically distant. I believe this is due to the
| relatively small amount of functional vocabulary.
| csa wrote:
| Totally agree, and I have data to support this buried in some
| drive somewhere.
|
| Interestingly, I had a famous SLA researcher/professor tell me
| that this was a non-issue. I assume it was because she dealt
| mostly with Dutch learners of English, but I found it to be
| fantastically short-sighted.
| Piskvorrr wrote:
| Good. Ten times ten speak English also good?
|
| ;)
|
| In other words, it's a cute experiment.
| bitwize wrote:
| "If this end of the ship is pointed toward space, you have a
| huge problem and will not go to space today."
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| What about an English version of Toki Pona? (maybe Eng-Toki
| Pona?)
|
| Why? Because English is very common already, and it seems an easy
| way to not only have usable words in two languages (English and
| Eng-Toki Pona) but also it would be useful to actually learn.
| (foreigners could _actually_ use this for real)
|
| This is the biggest hurdle I have with made up languages, they
| have very little actual utility value.
|
| As an afterthought, a simple charades like game where you have
| the limited vocabulary on a board, card or print out where people
| have to describe an event,book/story, object, movie, etc... using
| Eng-Toki Pona. Everyone could do it right now (even kids), and
| learn a new language at the same time. (one of the easiest ways
| to learn something is by making it fun and a game)
|
| Edit: A reverse of this - Japanese-Toki Pona, all the same words,
| but in Japanese. Same with every other language (Russian, German,
| French, etc...). Then, after you learn one Toki derivative, you
| can easily pick up others. I figure it's possible you could learn
| the choppy/odd sentence building technique in your native
| language, and then add other languages later. Could also be fun
| as a group game once the English version gets easy. And all of
| these would be useful everywhere... not just speaking with other
| Toki Pona speakers.
| Complexicate wrote:
| Ogden's Basic English [1] with 850 words [2] and a simplified
| grammar was an attempt at making an international auxiliary
| language from English.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English
|
| [2]
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Basic_English_word_l...
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| That's interesting. This seems like actual work to learn
| though.. (850 words AND grammar rules vs Toki Pona's 100
| words and grammar free-for-all)
|
| The reason I made my suggestion is because it would be based
| on Toki Pona itself, a subset of all languages as it's core
| philosophy, which seems like a universally good idea.
|
| But to increase adoption of this idea, I feel it needs to
| have broader appeal and real world value (ie, actually be
| able to use it somewhere). Otherwise it feels a bit like
| trivia or a toy.
| iaabtpbtpnn wrote:
| I have long wondered whether it would be possible to identify
| the most basic, core words of English, and construct a
| dictionary such that all definitions eventually reduce to
| those words. That way, a speaker of a foreign language could
| learn the meanings of the core words by translation into
| their native language, and then the process of learning a new
| word would be: look it up in the dictionary, and if there are
| any words in the definition that you don't already know, look
| those up, and so on until everything is reduced to the basic
| words you already know. The question then is, how many basic
| words must there be, and which ones are they? I realize
| nobody actually learns a language like this, but it's still
| conceptually interesting, analogous to the idealized process
| of reducing a mathematical proof all the way to the axioms
| (which, of course, mathematicians don't actually do, but in
| principle they could).
| fbreton wrote:
| This exists : https://learnthesewordsfirst.com/ is a "multi
| layer dictionary". There are 360 base words, the very first
| ones are explained with images, then each word is defined
| using the previous ones. Then there's a list of 2000 more
| words defined using only base words. The last layer is a
| full dictionary whose definitions use only these 360+2000
| words.
| iaabtpbtpnn wrote:
| Very cool, thanks for sharing! I knew I couldn't have
| been the only person to think of this. :)
| _abattoir wrote:
| Most of Toki Pona sounds like English anyway:
|
| wan: one
|
| tu: two
|
| meli: female, from Tok Pisin mewi, from "Mary" (as in, the
| Virgin)
|
| lukin: looking
|
| ale: all
|
| en: and
|
| ike: icky
|
| jaki: yucky
|
| insa: inside
|
| jelo: yellow
|
| kalama: clamor
|
| kama: come
|
| ken: can
|
| kule: color
|
| lape: sleepy
|
| lawa: law
|
| linja: line
|
| lili: little
|
| lupa: loop
|
| mani: money
|
| mu: moo
|
| musi: amusing/music
|
| nanpa: number
|
| nimi: name
|
| open: open
|
| pilin: feeling
|
| sama: same
|
| selo: shell
|
| sike: circle
|
| suno: sun
|
| mun: moon
|
| toki: talking
|
| wile: will
| schoen wrote:
| The only one of these that I think doesn't work is lupa,
| which is a hole or opening, which doesn't necessarily have
| that much in common with a loop. I guess they _could_ both be
| circular, but lupa applies to any kind of opening, circular
| or not.
| mrob wrote:
| Same origin as loophole (hole in a wall), which can also be
| any shape?
| jhbadger wrote:
| Indeed. In the book detailing the language, the author says
| that the language was inspired by the various pidgins that
| have formed around the world where English words are modified
| to meet native phonology and combined with a simplified
| grammar.
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| I know, I've studied it. But I gave up because no one else
| cared to learn it with me.
| richard_todd wrote:
| It's funny that they only have 120 or so words, and one of them
| (pu) means "interacting with the official Toki Pona book."
| [deleted]
| kazinator wrote:
| > _In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a
| microscope a small-watcher._
|
| In Latin, microscope is also "small-watcher", namely,
| _microscopium_.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| That's Greek. (Well, the -um ending isn't, but the rest is.)
|
| Latin for small is parvus, and Latin for watcher is visor[1],
| but Latin doesn't tend to form compounds the way the Greek
| does.
|
| [1] Visor is literally "watcher", an agent noun formed from the
| verb videre "look at". _Microscopium_ just uses an ordinary
| noun ending, not an agentive construction. I don 't know what
| happens in Icelandic.
| jhbadger wrote:
| When I studied German I was initially amused that the German
| word for television was "Fernseher" (far seer). How quaint!
| Until I stopped and thought for a moment what "television"
| literally means -- tele from Greek meaning "far", plus Latin
| "vision".
| godelski wrote:
| In English "microscope" is "micro-scope", namely small-view.
|
| I find it funny that many don't understand that this is how
| languages work, until they learn other languages. Especially
| with English, which is a bastardization of a lot of other
| languages. For example, if you learn French basically anything
| that is fancy in English is just the normal term in French
| (e.g. "house" -> "mansion" or "famous person" -> "celebrity")
| yiyus wrote:
| I like the idea of a very small language and I think it may be
| very useful for science and technology, but Toki Pona does not
| fit the requirements. Eg: it lacks words to express numbers.
|
| Lojban looks interesting for this purpose, but it's way too
| complicated.
| DapperZoom wrote:
| As a student of Japanese, I often get confused when listening to
| Japanese because there are so few sounds and therefore many
| homonyms.
|
| This gave me the idea of a language with only two sounds, "ku"
| and "ka", being used to express everything. Sort of an analogue
| to the idea of encoding everything using the binary digits of
| zero and one.
|
| kakakukukakakukukukuka, as the great philosopher once said.
| firethief wrote:
| Let's make that into a complete language:
|
| ka := the S combinator
|
| ku := the K combinator
|
| Done. Now kakuku is as expressive as any other Turing-complete
| language.
|
| ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus )
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