Toki Pona
Dungpusher | 24.3.2015
Toki pona is a nice little, simplistic conlang I stumbled into like a month ago. Essentially, a Canadian linguist named Sonja Lang had created a simplistic, vague language with only 120 words, missing most of everyday vocabulary. I’ve studied it using Memrise and I can claim now to be able to speak it fluently.
It’s pretty awesome. You can express yourself and think simply with it and the full meaning of someone’s text is never revealed. You are forced to be simple when using it. I can imagine some cavemen speaking it among themselves. It has no tense or number and is so attached to present. There is, of course, a way to refer to past times but it’s not necessary. After all, it focuses on basic things in life. It’s not designed to complicated expression of yourself. It’s cool in one way: the reader will never know for sure what the writer meant
To offer an example of it, I translate the first paragraph. It’s not perfect and I changed the composition of language because toki pona can’t into my linguistic diversity:
toki pona li toki lili en pona. tenpo mun pini la mi sona e ni. pona la jan toki Sonja Lan tan ma Kanata li pali e toki pona kepeken nimi ala mute. insa ni li lon ala nimi mute pi ali. mi sona e toki pona kepeken ilo Memrise. tenpo ni la mi ken toki e ni: mi li pona e toki pona
Try to learn language and translate that, so you’ll get the idea!
