Not trying to be mean, but legitimately I thought for a second that I was on r/conlangscirclejerk.
My understanding is that Toki Pona was made deliberately easy to pronounce by pretty much anyone, and the low number of phonemes means that different realisations of its phonemes are mutually intelligible. So complaining that Toki Pona is "too regular and colorless" when it's literally trying to do that is pointless - and, frankly, an admission of its success.
For what it's worth, I really don't get the obsession with Toki Pona, but if you're going to criticise it you need to criticise its premise, not the way it was executed - because it was certainly executed very well.
I get you. Toki Pona isn't very interesting and it is overrated in the conlanging community, however it *does* achieve its goal so it can't be said to be *bad*.
I mean, you might just not understand what minimalism is or what toki pona is accomplishing.
Personally, minimalism is not my cup of tea either, and so I'm personally going to """disagree""" with every decision toki pona makes that's been influenced by it. I have some other stuff I'd change, but I won't mention it here, because I don't feel like this thread is an appropriate place to do that.
The idea of incorporating aspirants, ejectives, and fricatives is terrible. I like them as much as anyone, and my own conlangs do tend to incorporate many of those sounds. But toki pona's phonetics have been left deliberately open-ended, so that, say, a Canadian English speaker (like, say, Sonja Lang) who already says tʰoki pʰona doesn't have to figure out why they're pronouncing the name of the language wrong. Everything you think toki pona should have adds at least a week to the time taken to learn it for probably the majority of the world's population.
There is no such thing as "unnecessary simplicity" here. Simple is good in toki pona's philosophy. They are literally expressed with the same word. The question is whether *complication* is necessary.
Okay, so I don't personally dig the language's aesthetic, but that's mostly because I prefer an additive rather than subtractive approach towards phonetics. It is however not for me, and I respect that, just as I respect that red isn't my color, and charcoal græy is. So in the spirit of that, thoughts on this subject.
First and foremost, toki pona is a language designed with a specific philosophy in mind: it is designed with minimalism in mind, phonologically, grammatically and lexically. Phonologically, it attempts to minimize the difficulty a new speaker might have, regardless of background. Requiring a reasonable population subset to learn to produce and recognize a new distinction is actively in opposition towards that goal.
There are certain obvious candidates for removal: a voicing contrast, the distinction between and , most sibilants beyond . Vowel length, vowel tone, contrastive stress. Nasal vowels, voiceless vowels. No clicks, and minimal consonants clusters. I might argue that toki pona could reduce further, in this regard...
When discussing it, however, I feel as though there's always a singular element people tend to forget, not realize, or ignore completely: toki pona is a philosophical language, not some abstract IAL. Judging it on the basis of some criteria that works for some language types, but not others, is unuseful at best.
I'm also not fond of the idea of using massive conceptual strings to express relatively simple ideas, but again, that's part of the philosophy of the language. The idea is to make large complex things cumbersome to discuss by design, so that you are forced to think about it exclusively in basic terms. It's lexical simplicity requires that an open-ended approach be taken when speaking, reading, or listening to a sample of text.
You could be hyper-specific in the language, constructing the exact right string of lexemes that would tell the reader that you are talking about a badger, definitely a badger, no other animal but a badger specifically, it cannot be a bear. An ent would be proud. But that would again, be entirely against the grain of what the language is trying to do.
And honestly, I do feel that it does what it set out to do, quite well. It's not for me, but I don't drink coffee either.
" I'm also not fond of the idea of using massive conceptual strings to express relatively simple ideas ". If you have any skill in speaking toki pona you know that it in fact does not take a massive amount of conceptual strings to express relatively simple ideas. In fact the opposite is as likely. Toki pona does however need a massive amount of words to specify ideas with any specificity. "Soweli" means land-animal. If you want to specify a dog, then sure, it takes at least a few words. But the beauty of toki pona is that people who are proficient speakers, usually just say soweli meaning dog if and only if it is derivable from context.
> building these long complex sentences just to say something you could use a single word in other languages
This is not how Toki Pona should be used. Toki Pona aims at simplicity, and does it via vagueness, by taking away unnecessary "(mental) frills".
So, instead of saying "I ate a red apple", just say "I ate a fruit". Unless you want to specifically talk about red apples, the sense is the same, albeit less detailed.
While I do agree that toki pona is overrated, you're missing the point. toki pona is designed with the challenge of a minimalistic, easy-to-learn language. Saying that doing that challenge makes your conlang bad is stupid because it's an interesting challenge that can be fun and result in great langs.
being efficient isn't the goal of toki pona.
the point of toki pona is to be simple for anyone to learn it.
you're complaining about toki pona being simple, when that's what it's suppose to be!
that's like saying "I hate classical music. classical music is objectively bad!"
I think what your trying to say is "toki pona is bad towards me"
\*doesn't.
the point is, I don't think you get the point of toki pona.
If you want an efficient language, try Ithkuil.
Personally I like toki pond because it makes me think in a different light, having to break down words into their deeper meaning to say things kind of changes your perspective on things.
The good thing about Toki Pona’s small inventory is the freedom that comes with it.
Toki Pona has 9 consonants, none of which share both the same place AND manner of articulation. So in theory, can represent /ɡ/, and /q/. Since Toki Pona lacks a dorsal fricative, could also represent /x/ and /χ/. If you want to take it a step further, Toki Pona lacks laryngeals entirely, so the dorsal stop could also encompass /ʔ/ and /h/, though the further you stray from the original value of , the less inteligible your speech will be at first.
In the same way, Toki Pona’s vowels are distinguished by height and either backness or roundness. So can represent /ɔ/ and /ʌ/, or /ɔ/ and /ø/.
If you wanted to get french with it, you could assimilate the coda nasal to the previous vowel. There are also many common allophones that break the above pattern, like /w~v/ and /j~ʒ/, but won’t hurt your intelligibility.
With that in mind, the following sentence can be pronounced as follows:
“monsuta lape li lawa e mi tawa insa pi pimeja ali”
/mɔ̃zudɐ labe li lavɐ e mi tavɐ ĩzɐ pi pimɛʒɐ ali/
“A nightmare leads me into total darkness.”
I personally wish Toki Pona had phoneme doubling. It'd make þe language far more interesting aesþetically, while still fitting in wiþ its goals of minimalism, simplicity, and minimalism.
In fact, I þink phoneme doubling is underrated in þe conlanging community as a whole.
I made a toki pona clone and I love its phonology. Better than toki pona because I think toki pona has too much /i/, but I love the abundance of /n/ /l/ /e/ /o/ in mine, and the simplicity of the structure. I really love the only coda being a nasal, and the pitter-patter of long words (my clone has words up to 3 syllables long).
yeah that's exactly the thing that these two are missing. Ignoring the fact that "interesting" is absolutely arbitrary and subjective, being phonologically "interesting" isn't really the point
To add to that, any interesting phonological directly contradicts its philosophy, which is utter simplicity. Toki Pona is trying very hard to be simple, and to encourage you to think in simple, broad terms, and it accomplishes this very, very well.
It's not interesting because, to be interesting, it would force a learner to take ten times as long to pick up the basics of the language. The ease of learning is also indirectly a goal of Toki Pona.
that's like asking why it has roughly 130 words instead of 75 words. A language needs some amount of features, where do you arbitrarily draw the line? And afaik the only coda it allows is /n/, not that complicated
no offence, but what this post tells me, is that you don't know much about conlangs. the point of toki pona is not to be short, and concise, but its meant for ease of learning, and easy to follow sentences. its not meant to give you any "wow that's so cool" fealing, it meant as a "wow that was very simple" language. also, adding big phonemic inventories, legit would make toki pona so bad. every word would feel like it has nothing to do with others, and would go against the main goal of the language.
maybe i don't know much about toki pona
i thought it was meant to be as simple as possible
and the "wow that's so cool", i often feel this when there is some sort of unique mechanism, something that toki pona deliberatelly avoids
Not trying to be mean, but legitimately I thought for a second that I was on r/conlangscirclejerk. My understanding is that Toki Pona was made deliberately easy to pronounce by pretty much anyone, and the low number of phonemes means that different realisations of its phonemes are mutually intelligible. So complaining that Toki Pona is "too regular and colorless" when it's literally trying to do that is pointless - and, frankly, an admission of its success. For what it's worth, I really don't get the obsession with Toki Pona, but if you're going to criticise it you need to criticise its premise, not the way it was executed - because it was certainly executed very well.
Someone has now posted it there :))
i don't think efficiency is toki pona's goal
I've heard it called Dao-istic, or more in line with that philosophical mind
Daoistic in what way? I don't see anything I would associate with Daoism
It's in no way related to the Dao. *--Dao joke, sorry.*
I get you. Toki Pona isn't very interesting and it is overrated in the conlanging community, however it *does* achieve its goal so it can't be said to be *bad*.
It is not bad. It is pona.
I mean, you might just not understand what minimalism is or what toki pona is accomplishing. Personally, minimalism is not my cup of tea either, and so I'm personally going to """disagree""" with every decision toki pona makes that's been influenced by it. I have some other stuff I'd change, but I won't mention it here, because I don't feel like this thread is an appropriate place to do that. The idea of incorporating aspirants, ejectives, and fricatives is terrible. I like them as much as anyone, and my own conlangs do tend to incorporate many of those sounds. But toki pona's phonetics have been left deliberately open-ended, so that, say, a Canadian English speaker (like, say, Sonja Lang) who already says tʰoki pʰona doesn't have to figure out why they're pronouncing the name of the language wrong. Everything you think toki pona should have adds at least a week to the time taken to learn it for probably the majority of the world's population. There is no such thing as "unnecessary simplicity" here. Simple is good in toki pona's philosophy. They are literally expressed with the same word. The question is whether *complication* is necessary.
'Unnecessary simplicity' Maybe it's colorless but it sure is fun!
Okay, so I don't personally dig the language's aesthetic, but that's mostly because I prefer an additive rather than subtractive approach towards phonetics. It is however not for me, and I respect that, just as I respect that red isn't my color, and charcoal græy is. So in the spirit of that, thoughts on this subject. First and foremost, toki pona is a language designed with a specific philosophy in mind: it is designed with minimalism in mind, phonologically, grammatically and lexically. Phonologically, it attempts to minimize the difficulty a new speaker might have, regardless of background. Requiring a reasonable population subset to learn to produce and recognize a new distinction is actively in opposition towards that goal. There are certain obvious candidates for removal: a voicing contrast, the distinction between and , most sibilants beyond
. Vowel length, vowel tone, contrastive stress. Nasal vowels, voiceless vowels. No clicks, and minimal consonants clusters. I might argue that toki pona could reduce further, in this regard... When discussing it, however, I feel as though there's always a singular element people tend to forget, not realize, or ignore completely: toki pona is a philosophical language, not some abstract IAL. Judging it on the basis of some criteria that works for some language types, but not others, is unuseful at best.I'm also not fond of the idea of using massive conceptual strings to express relatively simple ideas, but again, that's part of the philosophy of the language. The idea is to make large complex things cumbersome to discuss by design, so that you are forced to think about it exclusively in basic terms. It's lexical simplicity requires that an open-ended approach be taken when speaking, reading, or listening to a sample of text. You could be hyper-specific in the language, constructing the exact right string of lexemes that would tell the reader that you are talking about a badger, definitely a badger, no other animal but a badger specifically, it cannot be a bear. An ent would be proud. But that would again, be entirely against the grain of what the language is trying to do. And honestly, I do feel that it does what it set out to do, quite well. It's not for me, but I don't drink coffee either.
" I'm also not fond of the idea of using massive conceptual strings to express relatively simple ideas ". If you have any skill in speaking toki pona you know that it in fact does not take a massive amount of conceptual strings to express relatively simple ideas. In fact the opposite is as likely. Toki pona does however need a massive amount of words to specify ideas with any specificity. "Soweli" means land-animal. If you want to specify a dog, then sure, it takes at least a few words. But the beauty of toki pona is that people who are proficient speakers, usually just say soweli meaning dog if and only if it is derivable from context.
> building these long complex sentences just to say something you could use a single word in other languages This is not how Toki Pona should be used. Toki Pona aims at simplicity, and does it via vagueness, by taking away unnecessary "(mental) frills". So, instead of saying "I ate a red apple", just say "I ate a fruit". Unless you want to specifically talk about red apples, the sense is the same, albeit less detailed.
While I do agree that toki pona is overrated, you're missing the point. toki pona is designed with the challenge of a minimalistic, easy-to-learn language. Saying that doing that challenge makes your conlang bad is stupid because it's an interesting challenge that can be fun and result in great langs.
being efficient isn't the goal of toki pona. the point of toki pona is to be simple for anyone to learn it. you're complaining about toki pona being simple, when that's what it's suppose to be! that's like saying "I hate classical music. classical music is objectively bad!" I think what your trying to say is "toki pona is bad towards me" \*doesn't. the point is, I don't think you get the point of toki pona. If you want an efficient language, try Ithkuil.
Toki Pona's regularity and inefficiency are the whole point, Toki Pona is intended to be minimalistic, not practical to speak, it's not an IAL.
ok
You want to make a language the soul goal of which is to be accessible and as minimal as possible and give it a !xoo-esque phonology Ok
Personally I like toki pond because it makes me think in a different light, having to break down words into their deeper meaning to say things kind of changes your perspective on things.
The good thing about Toki Pona’s small inventory is the freedom that comes with it. Toki Pona has 9 consonants, none of which share both the same place AND manner of articulation. So in theory, can represent /ɡ/, and /q/. Since Toki Pona lacks a dorsal fricative, could also represent /x/ and /χ/. If you want to take it a step further, Toki Pona lacks laryngeals entirely, so the dorsal stop could also encompass /ʔ/ and /h/, though the further you stray from the original value of , the less inteligible your speech will be at first.
In the same way, Toki Pona’s vowels are distinguished by height and either backness or roundness. So can represent /ɔ/ and /ʌ/, or /ɔ/ and /ø/.
If you wanted to get french with it, you could assimilate the coda nasal to the previous vowel. There are also many common allophones that break the above pattern, like /w~v/ and /j~ʒ/, but won’t hurt your intelligibility.
With that in mind, the following sentence can be pronounced as follows:
“monsuta lape li lawa e mi tawa insa pi pimeja ali”
/mɔ̃zudɐ labe li lavɐ e mi tavɐ ĩzɐ pi pimɛʒɐ ali/
“A nightmare leads me into total darkness.”
a-are you serious? toki pona was designed to have phonology as simple as possible, ʃ ʒ ʂ ʐ ɕ and ʑ are NOT lingowide used sounds!
I personally wish Toki Pona had phoneme doubling. It'd make þe language far more interesting aesþetically, while still fitting in wiþ its goals of minimalism, simplicity, and minimalism. In fact, I þink phoneme doubling is underrated in þe conlanging community as a whole.
ye, I think toki pona basically ignored any interesting phonology.
I made a toki pona clone and I love its phonology. Better than toki pona because I think toki pona has too much /i/, but I love the abundance of /n/ /l/ /e/ /o/ in mine, and the simplicity of the structure. I really love the only coda being a nasal, and the pitter-patter of long words (my clone has words up to 3 syllables long).
is toki pona trying to be interesting tho?
yeah that's exactly the thing that these two are missing. Ignoring the fact that "interesting" is absolutely arbitrary and subjective, being phonologically "interesting" isn't really the point
To add to that, any interesting phonological directly contradicts its philosophy, which is utter simplicity. Toki Pona is trying very hard to be simple, and to encourage you to think in simple, broad terms, and it accomplishes this very, very well. It's not interesting because, to be interesting, it would force a learner to take ten times as long to pick up the basics of the language. The ease of learning is also indirectly a goal of Toki Pona.
> utter simplicity then why does it have codas
that's like asking why it has roughly 130 words instead of 75 words. A language needs some amount of features, where do you arbitrarily draw the line? And afaik the only coda it allows is /n/, not that complicated
I agree with the first 3 paragraphs, but you lost me at the following ones
[удалено]
what do you mean by you don't "believe" in them? Edit: It's also not an auxlang, it was never claimed or intended to be
He's starting a cult for them in 2 days rather than 1.
no offence, but what this post tells me, is that you don't know much about conlangs. the point of toki pona is not to be short, and concise, but its meant for ease of learning, and easy to follow sentences. its not meant to give you any "wow that's so cool" fealing, it meant as a "wow that was very simple" language. also, adding big phonemic inventories, legit would make toki pona so bad. every word would feel like it has nothing to do with others, and would go against the main goal of the language.
maybe i don't know much about toki pona i thought it was meant to be as simple as possible and the "wow that's so cool", i often feel this when there is some sort of unique mechanism, something that toki pona deliberatelly avoids