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Anthony McCarthy
Sun May 4 12:20:04 49558,
The trick is translating it in a way so that a person who doesn't know the story, or the section translated, would understand what was going on in it. I
was familiar with the story and I am familiar with Toki pona and I would never have been able to figure out what was happening in the story. Toki pona, with
its radically tiny vocabulary cannot do what is done by Claude Piron in that book, give people an easy to learn language which will provide them with a
vocabulary and grammar able to do what can be done in any natural language with the same level of precision and specificity. If you want an easier challenge
you could try to translate the texts and exercises of the Zagreb Method textbook - available all over the place, free, online, with an even more reduced vocabulary. I will bet you won't get far into it before the resources of Toki pona are proven to be unable to produce the same equivalent use of
language that Esperanto does and has since the end of the 19th century. I counted the vocabulary for the first lesson at about 40 words, or a third of the entire corpus of Toki pona, By the time you get to lesson 4, you already surpass the corpus of T.P. words for numbers and I'm sure in many other categories of vocabulary.
I am sure you might give some vague sense of what is going on in the original, though not much that is very specific. And according to the inventor of the language, that was her intention. To only be able to talk about very simple things, not a full range of human experience. It does no one any good to pretend you could possibly do that with 120 words. Plus or minus "unofficial"
neologisms which, as it is the nature of neo-logisms, will start muddying the water as fast as you invent them to clear things up. Anyone who has ever read
novels in a second language will know that experience, especially when those words are ones you can't find in any but the most specialized dictionary of
jargon.
The history of Ido as opposed to Esperanto shows that once you start fiddling to "improve" a language, you'll more likely drive your reform into decadence.
I can read Ido - it's really a dialect of Esperanto, more or less - but if I'm going to use a conlang I want one where people will understand what I'm saying instead of being confused by my "improvements" or "reforms" or neologisms. I
do agree with the late Claude Piron on the desireability of clarity over novelty. I am certain you will never be able to translate his fine study La Bona Lingvo into TP.
As I said, I have no problem with people wanting to play with Toki pona or Lojban or Ido but except for the ever fading project of Ido, there is no chance of them becoming a useful conlang for general communication.
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http://www.orenwatson.be/anthonymccarthy.htm
#TokiPona #Ido #Esperanto #Lojban #conlangs #konlan #anno2019
