(2023-12-11) There is something special about Toki Pona, isn't it?
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As a wise man once said, "you can learn anything in about 30 minutes, and
then spend a lifetime learning the details about it". This saying is more 
than true for any artificial language, especially for Toki Pona. Yes, I 
capitalize it although the name in the language itself is not capitalized as 
it's not a proper noun and just means "a good language" or "a simple 
language" or, as its author, Sonja Lang, named her first book, "the language 
of good". The first version of the language appeared in 2001 and it has been 
developed by the author _alongside the community_ since then, and in January 
2022 it finally got an ISO 639-3 code, "tok". Also, Gemini network users may 
be familiar with the "moku pona" phrase, which is the name of an open-source 
news and phlog feed aggregator. This name means "good food" in TP, but 
"moku" also can mean other forms of consumption, so the name fits perfectly 
here. See, this is the main thing with this language: each core word, except 
special particles, has multiple meanings. This is what is called "semantic 
space". And TP speakers operate with semantic spaces instead of exact 
definitions, like, all the time. And this is the most interesting feature of 
this language that became the primary reason I've continued learning it. For 
real this time.

This post is going to be rather short as I'm not going to turn it into a
basic TP guidebook (I guess Anglosphere has enough official, unofficial and 
not-even-remotely-close-to-official materials on it already), I want to 
share my own impressions about this language and some thoughts on its 
real-life usage perspectives in the nearest future. Because right now, TP is 
in its active growth phase, as well as the online community around it. It's 
only a matter of time when serious players get interested in it as well. But 
let's talk one thing at a time, okay?

So, onto my impressions. Well... Remember my stories about 58mm Victorinoxes
I carry around? Classic SD, Classic Alox, Rambler... Well, Toki Pona is the 
Classic SD/Rambler of languages. It's extremely small, lightweight and 
somewhat cute yet extremely functional and reliable to get you throughout 
the day. The smallness of its core vocabulary (right now, the "essential" 
wordlist has 137 words but again, it's up to the community to expand it if 
necessary) is fully compensated by the flexibility of the grammar and 
ability to use almost any word as almost any part of speech and any part of 
sentence. Yes, some types of compound sentences can't be expressed in TP and 
you have to split them into individual sentences, but the other and most 
substantial part of compound sentences is totally possible using the 
ni-clauses and la-clauses. The latter ones, used to specify the context for 
the main sentence, are a very powerful feature on its own that eliminates 
the need in multiple tenses, adverbs, "if", "when" etc. All it takes is 
just... adopting another way of thinking.

Yes, there's that. Not only was the language developed to test the idea of
linguistic relativity aka the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that says that the 
structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, but 
it also forces _everyone_ who speaks it to bind their mind to think in 
semantic spaces and flexible vocabulary usage. Unlike e.g. Esperanto which 
is pretty much eurocentric, Toki Pona puts everyone in equal conditions. Its 
simplistic phonology was designed to be universally understandable across 
the globe, and the graphics is even better: besides the Latin alphabet 
(sitelen Lasina), there's another, fully independent official hieroglyphic 
script called sitelen pona which has been already defined for all 137 
"essential" words and some extended vocabulary as well, and also has a 
unique way of writing proper names inside cartouches. Given that we 
currently have some fonts that can properly render all sitelen pona glyphs 
and there also is a standing UCSUR proposal to include them into Unicode, I 
guess this writing system has a bright future, at least it will be better 
than the unofficial and kinda cringey "sitelen Emosi" spec for encoding all 
the glyphs as existing emoji characters.

Speaking of future, I think TP has one. Its community is now more vibrant
than ever, its media coverage and the amount of speakers grow year by year, 
it got an ISO code and some popular things like Minecraft translated into 
it, it began growing its own unique cultural layer and, most importantly, 
its demographics began reaching beyond the first-world countries and conlang 
enthusiasts per se, giving it the potential to become (if not already) the 
second most popular constructed language in the world after Esperanto. On 
the contrary, other conlangs seem to be stagnating at best, only living in 
small conlang-related online groups and committees. Because, let's face it, 
there's no real demand for another eurocentric Esperanto replacement as of 
now, and as for non-eurocentric conlangs, which one is more appealing to the 
general public outside those groups — Lojban or Toki Pona? Especially if we 
consider they are pretty much opposite in almost every aspect, simplicity 
included: Lojban's official grammar textbook is a 584-page PDF, while the 
TP's grammar can fit into just one page ([1]), if we omit sitelen pona. Yes, 
you can learn Lojban if you're a conlang enthusiast, maybe even in a 
relatively short period of time, but can you get a 5-year-old child or even 
any adult who's not a conlang enthusiast to learn Lojban in a short period 
of time? My overall point is simple: languages don't exist in a vacuum, they 
exist to serve a purpose of communication. So, if two people who don't know 
each other's languages want to talk, the total time they both need to spend 
on learning the third one (that would allow them to understand each other) 
must be drastically less than any one of them spends the time on learning 
the other person's language. And in terms of the least time spent on this, 
Toki Pona may be the absolute leader and can be a real lingua franca for 
those who didn't or couldn't even learn English well enough, because, 
newsflash, English actually is pretty hard to learn, both by time and effort.

And like I said, it's a matter of time before interested parties recognize
this potential in Toki Pona and try making some profit out of it. I hope the 
community won't let it happen and won't cede the control over the language 
to anyone in particular. Because the language of good must only belong to 
the people.

mi tawa.

--- Luxferre ---

[1]:
https://jansa-tp.github.io/tpcheatsheet/Toki%20Pona%20Cheat%20Sheet%20v2.pdf