Has anyone tried learning Toki Pona that has only 120 words in it? I didn't know that some of the words originated from esperanto.

This is an interesting article about it

Alkanadi:Has anyone tried learning Toki Pona that has only 120 words in it? I didn't know that some of the words originated from esperanto.

This is an interesting article about it

Thanks for yet another interesting link, amiko.

I think its a really interesting idea and I'd probably give it a go if I had a free weekend. I think there's a lot of interesting conlangs out there like Toki Pona and Solresol.

Alkanadi:Has anyone tried learning Toki Pona that has only 120 words in it? I didn't know that some of the words originated from esperanto.

This is an interesting article about it

But..........how much can one really say with only 120 words? Even with Esperanto's affix system, that doesn't leave much room for free conversation.

orthohawk:

Alkanadi:Has anyone tried learning Toki Pona that has only 120 words in it? I didn't know that some of the words originated from esperanto.

This is an interesting article about it

But..........how much can one really say with only 120 words? Even with Esperanto's affix system, that doesn't leave much room for free conversation.

I did a little reading up on it, and it sounds like it was painstakingly designed to be as general/minimal as possible. Her idea in creating it was that thinking about a problem in such a simple language would help you more easily deal with it, and apparently there are some researchers using it for that purpose (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). It apparently is influenced by Taoist or Buddhist philosophies. The words are all incredibly general and seem to serve multiple purposes:
suli = big, tall, long, important
pona = good, simple, to fix, to repair

It misses words for things like "banana" or "pancake", but I'm assuming all of the most general ideas/terms are somehow included. It's almost like a language for talking with humans who have lived on another planet for eons, and having words for such things would not make sense for people who have no bananas or pancakes (or banana pancakes). Perhaps another analogy is a language where it is punishable by death to make a dictionary with new words to make life easier. To get specific you have to recite a dictionary definition of the word every time, essentially.

It also kind of reminds me of RISC (reduced instruction set computing) microprocessors, which use more of a smaller set of simple commands to do processing.

I think it is a very interesting little language, and at a cost of only 120 words I might just try to learn it and see what that leads to. I don't see it in any way ever competing with Esperanto, and that is not its goal. It might well be a useful tool to bet/dare someone to learn it as a way to ease them into the idea of Esperanto, since 120 words is a pretty good selling point.

I have not studied Toki Pona in depth, although I have read about it and seen a few samples. In a vague way it reminds me of Kenneth Searight's auxlang Sona, which had 375 basic forms, about three times Toki Pona's. In Sona also, a given morpheme can have multiple meanings. I have links to Sona materials on my own webpage at this link. Generally such languages (con- or aux-) tend to be classified as oligosynthetic. Esperanto as Zamenhof originally published it, with its 800(?) roots, might have been considered such, but I myself would not consider it in that way, inasmuch as a given root tended to have more or less a single meaning.

bartlett22183:I have not studied Toki Pona in depth, although I have read about it and seen a few samples. In a vague way it reminds me of Kenneth Searight's auxlang Sona, which had 375 basic forms, about three times Toki Pona's. In Sona also, a given morpheme can have multiple meanings. I have links to Sona materials on my own webpage at this link. Generally such languages (con- or aux-) tend to be classified as oligosynthetic. Esperanto as Zamenhof originally published it, with its 800(?) roots, might have been considered such, but I myself would not consider it in that way, inasmuch as a given root tended to have more or less a single meaning.

That's interesting, "sona" is the word for "wisdom" in toki pona.

Apparently there are many various opinions as to what a language must be fitted for. A language like Toki p., it seems, can be a medium for very primitive understanding of "surface" meaning only, not a reflection of the depths of human experience. It is like a child's game of Pig Latin, a way to chat in front of your parents without them understanding what you are saying. The reason that Esperanto has developed as it has, is that it goes much beyond such chatter. There have been more than 126 years of vocabulary and terminology evolution involved, a feat that a new "conlang' (sic) can barely hope to accomplish.

orthohawk:

Alkanadi:Has anyone tried learning Toki Pona that has only 120 words in it? I didn't know that some of the words originated from esperanto.

This is an interesting article about it

But..........how much can one really say with only 120 words? Even with Esperanto's affix system, that doesn't leave much room for free conversation.

It's difficult. Thanks to the ambiguity, it can be easy to write or speak, but it can be hard to understand if you don't share a context with someone.

Here's a couple of videos showing it in live use (rather than scripted)
Cooking in Toki Pona
Random translations

robbkvasnak:A language like Toki p., it seems, can be a medium for very primitive understanding of "surface" meaning only, not a reflection of the depths of human experience.

Depends what you call a 'deep' meaning, I guess. Existential stuff? The meaning of life?

That's actually part of what it's designed for. Maybe the big words sometimes get in the way of understanding what's really important.

Or, in toki pona:
sina toki e "suli" la sina wile pilin e seme? ijo pi kon lawa? ijo pi tan ali?

toki pona li lon tan ni kin. ken la toki suli li pakala e ni: sina jo e sona pi ijo suli.

oreso:

robbkvasnak:A language like Toki p., it seems, can be a medium for very primitive understanding of "surface" meaning only, not a reflection of the depths of human experience.

Depends what you call a 'deep' meaning, I guess. Existential stuff? The meaning of life?

That's actually part of what it's designed for. Maybe the big words sometimes get in the way of understanding what's really important.

Chapeau! So true. You don't gain depth by increasing details.