trojo: Ease of learning has to be balanced against ease of clear expression.

Esperanto obeys that rule. It is easy to learn AND you can express yourself easily, just by changing the suffix at the end.

In minimalistic conlangs, speed and fast are the same word, so people might get confused.

In English, speed and fast are different words, so there has to be another word to learn.

But in Esperanto, fast is rapida, quickly is rapide, and speed is rapideco. All of them are similar but the suffix changes. You only need to learn a few siffixes. -eco translates as to "-ness" as in "happiness". But in English, you sometimes add "-hood" as in "brotherhood", or "-dom" as in "freedom". But in Esperanto, it's always "-eco".

"libereco" - freedom
"feliĉeco" - happiness
"frateco" - brotherhood

So Esperanto's easy to learn AND you can clearly express yourself.

trojo:Puna on the other hand is just a pointless rip-off.

What about Bon Wen, another minimalistic language also created by Arpee. Arpee started to add a few more words to Bon Wen, but, because he found it hard to learn all the Bon Wen words because there were more words, he got rid of the extra "bulky" words. Now he realized that Toki Pona's also adding words, so that's why he created Puna. Puna contains 18 words, but you can say almost nothing in it. Funny thing is that not only Arpee said that Puna is for simple communication, but it's for global communication. I switched from Bon Wen to Esperanto because in Esperanto, you can express yourself more clearly. But I can't even do simple communication using Puna, so it makes Bon Wen feel more like a natural language. I could say something in Bon Wen, but not in Puna.

k1attack:

What about Bon Wen, another minimalistic language also created by Arpee.

Speaking of Bon Wen, Arpee created it because he thought Toki Pona didn't have enough words. As always, Arpee said "Bon Wen is a language designed for global communication." I think only Esperanto is fit to be an international language, hence millions of people speak it. But when Arpee kept referring to Puna as an international language on the Puna website, I thought "Is Arpee nuts????!!!" I tried to make him translate a few sentences on Youtube but he wouldn't reply, meaning that Puna is an incomplete language.

Arpee could only translate the Lord's Prayer, which is by far the easiest thing to translate in many languages, perhaps. But I bet he couldn't translate the sentences I gave him on Youtube.

I almost agree wih you k1attack, but I wouldn't put Puna in the bin that fast.

Is there a website about Puna?

I tried to understand the Puna version of the lord-s prayer, and I hardly understood...

(the lord's prayer

word's like "nini" (in the text: the lives of others) have so much possible meanings that it becomes really hard. At least one can guess it is a pray (because "ma" appears often).

Also , his use of "li" (mark for modifiers) within words is a bit strange.

I have in fact the same feeling as for Toki Pona, a kind of frustation when you realise you misinterpret words (in fact you don't misinterpret, but took one of the possible meaning, and it wasn't the right one).

jan aleksan:
Is there a website about Puna?

Yes. http://punalu.webs.com

In the guestbook I found mention of Vuyamu, which seemed to me well designed.

K1attack, I hate to crash your party, but mate, you're preaching to the converted, so to speak (I mean, why else would we bloody well be here? .)

Back at the general conversation, language is a form of human expression. If Arpee wants to experiment and share his expression with others, that's fine. All input in these kind of things is good - otherwise, we'd have a stale world where everyone in the West would be greeting each other with "SALVEAMICOE" (salŭe, amikoj) in Old Latin. In fact, we wouldn't be speaking languages, we'd be like chimps, making grunts and hand gestures when we needed to point something out.

I'll admit that I think Puna looks like crap (pardon my French, under 13 people, for whose sake we're not meant to use swear words here), but there's no point in comparing it to Esperanto, let alone Toki Pona (calling it a rip off of Toki Pona? Blimey, glad you guys haven't realised how much a rip off of various sources Esperanto is! Sed, mi ankoraŭ ŝatas Esperanton, ĉar ĝi estas tiu kiu ĝi estas. And I'd hardly call ANY language "original", they all copy the heck out of each other. Lets all sue each other!).

Anyway, people, stop being defensive. Arpee did not go "HEY GUYZ DIS IS LAIK U NOEZ THE BES!T!!!111!! AND LAIK ESPERANDOZ SUX BCAWZ ITS GOT BAJILLIOnz OF WORDSZ!", he's just gone "this language was invented for international communication" - which is so ambiguous that it could mean "Hey guys, if one or three of you wanna speak this over a chat-room, then go ahead" (which can be international too, as the internet is inherently international. "International Auxiliary Language" is a broad term people misunderstand a lot. IAL does not mean "this will be the world lingua franca", it merely means "between-nations helping language (internacia helpanta lingvo)". It is not an ideal, but a pseudo-scientific classification.

Regarding more objective criticism, I feel as if Arpee has gone down a possibly naïve path in language construction. It is an interesting experiment, to try and push further than Toki Pona had gone in regards to ambiguity, contextual dependency and minimalist lexicons. However, he does seem to be assuming that words are what make a language difficult or hard. I would argue that it is concepts, not words that equal difficulty. For example, English is a highly powerful language, yet we use non-native Greek words like "electron". This isn't because we couldn't possibly make a word up ("electron" to my understanding refers to some kind of metal in the original Ancient Greek), but rather because we used it because we had no real concept up until someone used "electron" to describe it. And when people don't understand a concept or think it's special, they rarely delete the new superfluous word, but rather embrace it.

Additionally, Puna's compound words should technically be included in the 18 words as well (which'd make the number 18 jump up massively no doubt) because the relationships of certain compounds for most people will only be clear when they see the definition for the compound as if it was an actual word (even then... Blimey... 18 syllables... Japanese has few syllables and yet even that clocks in at about 100+ possible syllables).

Jan Aleksan:In the guestbook I found mention of Vuyamu, which seemed to me well designed.

Jan did you see the name above the comments? Do you reckon that's the same Greyshades as the one on this forum?

Vuyama is a lot better than Tokipona and the before-mentioned Puna in achieving the same basic idea, I think. The sound set wasn't perfect for neutral communication but the concept was brilliant from what little I saw. Too lazy to learn it though when I'm already trying to perfect my EO, learn Indonesian as my University major and do French as an elective - sheesh!

k1attack:So Esperanto's easy to learn AND you can clearly express yourself.

Easy - Very much so. As for expressing yourself... I believe the logic-languages are the true leaders there (theoretically, Puna could be used to express ones self, but it looks a lot like a work in progress so it depends on where Arpee goes in terms of direction. If he were to expand that compound-word list (which really should be words in there own rights, "18 words" should be "18 base roots" I think), then things'd be much easier to express.

k1attack:
I think only Esperanto is fit to be an international language, hence millions of people speak it.

I think Old Latin should be the only international language, as when it evolved to Classical latin, approximately 50 million people spoke it, which beats Esperanto massively! Just joking. But remember, things are rarely so black and white.

I tried to make him translate a few sentences on Youtube but he wouldn't reply, meaning that Puna is an incomplete language.

I know I'm responding to a lot of what you're saying, but I honestly think you're jumping to conclusions - while it is likely Puna is incomplete, how is this bad? It took Zamenhoff a good part of his lifetime to complete Esperanto (20 years? I'm not entirely sure, maybe a bit more). And also, it's likely that Arpee might have felt either threatened by what he might have seen as people lambasting his experiment, or simply hasn't gotten around to replying.

As this T-shirt says, EVERYONE REMAIN CALM! I'M AN ACCOUNTANT! (is that actually from anything?)