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sago on Feb 23, 2016 [-]
It's interesting that you're not the only person here who's approached toki pona from a NLP perspective.
toki pona is about the worst case for an NLP language, I would think. It puts all the communication burden on the semantics and pragmatics of the language. It doesn't make human expression, feelings, interests, creativity or community simpler, just the language.
There are other conlangs designed to be unambiguous. toki pona was designed to be the opposite: maximally general.
On the specific point of having to learn a compound lexicon - that is true a little, but not as much as you'd think. Sure there are conventional compounds for saying certain things, but you are very welcome (and aesthetically encouraged) to find other ways of expressing the same thing. You might find 'ilo nanpa' defined as a computer in a compound lexicon, and I use that sometimes, but my 'ilo nanpa' is also my 'ilo musi' and my 'ilo pali' (and sometimes my 'ilo pakala'). The key insight is that the language doesn't have to describe what a thing is, but what it means to you. That changes, it cannot be properly documented, and is almost impossible to parse. I take that as a feature, not a bug. Part of the pleasure of toki pona is the endless poetry of it: the joy of finding curious and evocative ways of expressing yourself.
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