Toki pona is an artificial language invented by jan Sonja — Sonja Elen Kisa1. It is unique in that it has only 118 words. Despite this, you can discuss a surprising number of topics: politics, religion, sex, philosophy all become really easy to talk about in toki pona. Of course, it's impossible to discuss them in very complicated detail — but the purpose of toki pona is to talk simply.
nasin sona
Toki pona was designed to be very simple to learn. With only 118 words, you can learn most of the vocabulary while you are learning the language itself. One of the hardest parts of learning a foreign language (for me) is memorizing the new vocabulary words, and toki pona certainly makes this easy.
jan Sonja says toki pona was inspired by Taoism, primitivists like John Zerzan, and pidgin languages. Its words come from English, Tok Pisin, Finnish, Georgian (the country, not the state!), Dutch, Acadian, Esperanto, Croatian, and Chinese.2
Toki pona is reductionist. More complicated concepts like 'friend' or 'child' can be broken down into more fundamental ideas. A friend is a good person; a child is a small person. A great deal of toki pona's vocabulary comes from combining the root words into phrases.
nasin toki
Toki pona has a loose grammar where the same word can represent a noun, a verb, an adverb, and an adjective. It uses only three particles (compare around eight particles in Japanese) to break up the sentence.
All toki pona sentences have the same form:
[ Optional adverb / context + 'la' ] subject + 'li' +
[ direct object ] + [ Optional prepositional phrases ]
which is not too terribly different from most european languages. One of the problems I have with toki pona is that word order is kind of strict.
Toki pona is normally written in lowercase roman letters, but jan Pije came up with a way of using Tengwar. You can also use Japanese katakana, as toki pona and Japanese share almost the same syllables.
jan pi toki pona
Toki pona has perhaps ten or twelve active, fluent speakers, and surely many more learn toki pona as an amusement. People have translated things like Tolkien's opening poem, William Wallace's speech in Braveheart, and zen koans into toki pona.
And now, for your reading pleasure:
Just to get a hang of toki pona, I translated the first couple opening pages of Thomas Reid's Inquiry and Essays to toki pona and back:
jan Tomasu Le : wile sona lipu toki lili.
wan: tenpo ni - nasin sona pi jan Descartes en jan Malebranche en jan Locke.
Section One: Introduction - The epistemology of Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke.
ken la toki e ni: nasin sona pi tenpo ni li ike. nasin sona pi tenpo ni sama ala sama e sona nanpa? sona nanpa en sona pi suno lili pi sewi en sona suno li sona pona li ken ante ala. taso nasin sona ante ala ante? sona pona ala la ale li pimeja tawa mi mute.
Maybe it could be said: our present
epistemology is complicated. Is the current epistemology like
mathematics? Mathematics,
astronomy (the study of little lights in the sky), and
optics (the study of light) are well known and unchanging. But is our philosophy unchanging? Without
common sense, all becomes dark to us.
jan Descartes li wile pona e nasin sona ni. ona li weka e ma selo li jo e insa e lawa. ona li lon li jo ala e tan pona la ona li sona ala e ni. jan Descartes toki e ni: jan li sona la jan li lon tan sitelen lawa nasa ni. taso mi sona la mi lon ala lon kin? mi lon la mi sona ala sona kin? ni li sona sike.
Descartes wanted to fix this, so he threw away the external world (outside earth) and held on to the mind and the inner self. If he existed, yet had no good reason for thinking this, he did not believe it. Descartes says this: If man thinks, man exists, because of this drunken dream. But if I think, do I not already exist? If I exist, do I not already think? This is
circular reasoning.
1"jan Sonja - Wikipesija", toki pona wikicity, http://tokipona.wikicities.com/wiki/jan_Sonja
2Sonja Kisa, "Why Toki Pona?", http://tokipona.nytka.org/about/why.html
If you want to learn toki pona, check out the lessons at http://tokipona.nytka.org/lesson/lesson0.html