I enjoy learning languages. I speak French, Japanese, and a little bit of Spanish from high school. I love the language Toki Pona, because it breaks ideas down to their basic components using less than 120 available words; for example, a vehicle of any kind, whether it's a car, truck, van, boat, airplane, rocket, or time machine, is called "tomo tawa," or "a moving building." If you want to be more specific, just add more words; an airplace is "tomo tawa kon" (literally "air moving-building" or "air vehicle"--as you may notice, adjectives come after the noun, like in French, Spanish, and Arabic). Similarly, any mammal is simply called a soweli, with context or extra words telling the listener what species it is. It's surprising how complicated ideas can get and still be expressable in Toki Pona. I think a language like this is a much better candidate for an international auxiliary language than Esperanto; it's relatively easy to learn, and there are already hundreds of people who speak it. Esperanto is relatively difficult; you might as well learn Spanish, which has over 350 million speakers in many countries around the world.
Toki Pona is especially of interest to anyone visiting this site because its creator, Sonja Elen Kisa, is a male-to-female transsexual--or so I've heard. There's a page on why you should learn Toki Pona, and there's even someone who's a bit cynical about conlangs (constructed languages) and talks about the joys of Toki Pona.
If you're curious about how to pronounce the words, vowels are as in Italian or Japanese (sushi, Mario, kenpo, spaghetti), j is pronounced like English y, n sounds like m when it comes before p, and everything else is the same as in English. So "mije" ("man") is pronounced "mee-yeh." There are no sounds that English doesn't have.
If you'd like to make a language of your own, go to The Language Construction Kit. If you'd like to see my invented language, click here for the grammar and here for samples of the language.
I'll give you an example of how Toki Pona works. Here's what Sonja wrote when she announced her decision to transition:
mi mama pi toki pona. tenpo pini la nimi mi li Kisijan. tenpo ni la nimi mi li Sonja. kon mi li meli. insa mi li meli. taso sijelo mi li mije. tenpo kama la mi ante e sijelo mi. mi meli e selo mi.
ale ni li sin tawa sina. mi toki e ni tawa sina tan ni: sina ken sona e ni: mi meli.
jan Sonja
mama pi toki pona
Literal translation: me parent of talk good. time finish [separator] name me [nominative] Christian. time this [separator] name me [nominative] Sonja. air me [nominative] woman. inside me [nominative] woman. but body me [nominative] man. time come [separator] me change [accusative] body me. me woman [accusative] outside me.
all this [nominative] new to you. me talk [accusative] this to you from this: you can know [accusative] this: me woman.
person Sonja
parent of talk good
(The separator is usually used where we would use a comma in English. "Nominative" means "subject;" "accusative" means "direct object." In the sentence "A dog bites a person," "dog" is the nominative, and "person" is the accusative; this is reversed in the sentence, "A person bites a dog." If you speak German, Latin, Russian, or Japanese, you're already familiar with this.)
English: "I am the creator of Toki Pona. My name was Christian. Now my name is Sonja. My spirit is female. My inside is female. But my body is male. I will change my body. I will feminize my exterior.
All this is new to you. I'm telling you this so you can know that I am a woman.
Sonja
Creator of Toki Pona"
You may have noticed that the English translation looks nothing like the literal translation. This is because each word covers much more ground than in English. The word "kon" means "air, wind, smell, soul." But it's easy to see how all these concepts are related.
You may also have noticed that there are fewer sounds than in English. This is so the words can be easily pronounced by speakers of most languages. (Of course, some languages, like Quechua and Arabic, have only the three vowels a, i, and u, prounounced as in "tiramisu," but Toki Pona is such a great idea that we can overlook this.)
Notice also how a single word can be a noun, verb, or adjective. The word "meli" denotes the overall concept of femaleness. But in this passage, it is used as a noun ("woman"), a verb ("to be a woman," "to be feminine," "to feminize"), and an adjective ("female," "feminine"). Interestingly, Toki Pona has the same word for "female" and "feminine." Kind of reminds me of Jennifer Finney Boylan's observation that many people, even transsexuals, "confuse femininity with womanhood." (If you're wondering what that can possibly mean, it means that a person's gender identity is not necessarily related to how masculine or feminine they are, and lots of people don't understand that.) Looks like Sonja is no exception. This is strange, given that she used to think she was an androgyne (bi-gendered person) until she decided she had to transition.
The phrase "meli insa" (literally "woman inside") is actually in the official Toki Pona phrasebook. I wondered why Sonja put things like that in the phrasebook without including more basic things like, say, "left" and "right," but when I learned that she's transsexual, it made a lot more sense.
Toki Pona syntax is relatively simple. You don't have relative clauses (like "the ten very happy robots who passed the bar exam", or "that the ten very happy robots passed the bar exam") or multiple adjectives to worry about (as in "pretty little girls' school"). Instead, you write separate sentences, as in the South Seas pidgin languauges that inspired Toki Pona:
ilo jan luka luka pi pilin pona mute li pona lon lukin sona suli. tenpo pini la, ilo ni li tawa tomo sona pi meli lili. tomo ni li pona lukin li lili.
The ten very happy robots who passed the bar exam went to a pretty little girls' school.
I can't imagine you'll ever need to use that sentence (I put it together from sample sentences used in the Toki Pona group), but let's examine it. First, we split it up into three sentences: "Ten very happy robots passed the bar exam. They went to a girls' school. It is pretty and little." (The last part may differ depending on your interpetation of "pretty little girls' school.") Now we translate the sentences one at a time.
We'll need phrases for "robot" and "bar exam." So we think about what a robot it. It's a machine that looks like a person (at least with today's technology; maybe someday a robot will be a person that's made of machine parts). So we call it "ilo," or "tool." But that's not specific enough to let the listener know you're talking about a robot. You could be talking about a hammer, a fork, a knife, a flute, a sewing machine, or a computer. So you specify that it has a human appearance: "ilo jan," or "human tool." The bar exam is just a big exam, and an exam is a testing of knowledge, or, loosely, someone looking at what you know. So you call it "lukin sona suli," or "big looking of knowledge." To pass it would be to do well on it, so that becomes "pona lon lukin sona suli." Happiness is given to us in the dictionary as "pilin pona," or "good feeling." "Mute" means "a lot." So "very happy" would be "pilin pona mute."
But hold on there! You can't say "ilo jan pilin pona mute," because "ilo jan pilin" would be a robot that feels. So "ilo jan pilin pona" would be a good robot that feels, and "ilo jan pilin pona mute" would be many such robots. So, instead, you use the spearator "pi," which is roughly translated as "of." So you would say, "ilo jan pi pilin pona mute." This tells us to treat "ilo jan" as one noun and "pilin pona mute" as another. And the number must follow the noun "ilo jan" so that we know that it's ten robots and not ten many good feelings (which doesn't even make sense). And though the use of "luka" ("hand") for the number 5 is looked down upon, people do it anyway. Numbers are added by putting them together, so ten is "luka luka."
So now we have:
ilo jan luka luka pi pilin pona mute li pona lon lukin sona suli. Ten very happy robots passed the bar exam.
In Toki Pona, "ona" can be "she," "he," "it," or "they." So if we just use that, it's ambiguous as to whether we're referring to the robots or the exam. This could be understood by context, but not always. Maybe the exam really did go to a pretty little girls' school. So you would say, "These robots went to a pretty little girls' school." But in Toki Pona, you can just say "ilo ni," or "these tools," because the robots are the only tools being talked about.
A similar process is done with the rest; a pretty little girls' school can't be "tomo sona pi meli lili pi pona lukin" ("school girl pretty"). So you separate them in a similar manner.
I really like trying to come up with the way to say something in Toki Pona. It's a really fun logic puzzle. Plus, if you can successfully learn it, it'll help you with natural languages you decide to learn. If you can learn how to speak without using tense or plurals, it'll help you if you decide to learn Chinese someday.
This says, "Fight linguistic extinction. Invent a language!"
Here's the Wikipedia entry in Toki Pona under "meli insa:"
meli insa li meli. sijelo ona li ken sama mije tawa oko.
woman inside [nom.] woman. body he/she [nom.] can (be) like man to eye.
A "woman inside" is a woman. Her body can look like a man to the eyes.
meli insa li kama lon ma la jan li pilin e ni: jan lili ni li mije. taso ona li meli kin, li jo taso e sijelo nasa.
woman inside [nom.] come at land [sep.] person [nom.] feel [acc.] this: person little this [nom.] man. only he/she [nom.] woman still, [nom.] have only [acc.] body crazy.
When a "woman inside" is born (lit. "arrives on Earth"), people think this child is a boy. But she is still a girl; she just has the wrong body.
meli ni li ken ante e sijelo ona, li ken meli e ona. tenpo mute la meli insa li wile jo e pona tan jan sona sijelo.
woman this [nom.] can change [acc.] body he/she, [nom.] can woman [acc.] it. time many [sep.] woman inside [nom.] want have [acc.] good from person know body.
She can change her body and can feminize it. Often, a "woman inside" wants improvement from a doctor.
mije insa li sama meli insa. taso ona li mije. sijelo ona li ken sama meli. ona li ken mije e sijelo.
man inside [nom.] like woman inside. but he/she [nom.] man. body he/she [nom.] like woman. he/she [nom.] can man [acc.] body.
A "man inside" is like a "woman inside." But he is a man. His body is like a woman's. He can masculinize his body.
But it seems that that article doesn't talk about what happens if they don't change their bodies. In fact, "meli insa" is translated as "male-to-female transsexual;" just like in English, the same phrase is used for a biological male who has undergone a physical feminization through medical treatment as for a biological male whose sense of gender identity is female. If there were a real Toki-Pona-speaking culture, a meli insa would probably be more like Samoa's fa'afafine.
The Ongoing Debate
The biggest obstacle to Toki Pona becoming a new international language is the division in the community of speakers. Many believe that Toki Pona is the Simple Language of Good and should only be used to speak about topics that are in keeping with the Taoist philosophy of voluntary simplicity in which Sonja strongly believes. For them, it is nothing more than a tool to help them think in a simple philosophy. If you ask how to talk about a complicated thing in Toki Pona, many will say, "Just don't talk about such things. That's not what Toki Pona was meant to be."
A minority of speakers wish to be able to translate anything into Toki Pona. I'm one of them. I believe in freedom of speech (obviously I do, since I made this site), and am opposed to attempts at censorship. Plus, I think Toki Pona is the best way to create an international auxiliary language. If it is to be used as an international language, then we must be able to talk about anything in it. The problem is, no one can agree on how to best talk about some things--like big numbers. Sonja's original idea was to only have "wan" (one), "tu" (two), and "mute" (many), like some tribal languages; "luka" (lit. "hand") came to unofficially represent the number five. So the number 19 is expressed as "luka luka luka tu tu." The problem with that is that it gets difficult to talk about numbers bigger than 30 or so. Many solutions have been proposed, but no one can agree to use one. I've seen "luka pi luka" for 25. By extension, "luka pi luka pi luka" would be 125, creating a base 5 system.
I find it really strange that Sonja has written an elaborate sexual vocabulary but doesn't have basic words like "left" and "right"--or a way to talk about big numbers. There's a Yahoo! group dedicated to fleshing out Toki Pona, but there's a lot of disagreement on whether the speakers should adapt the language to the world or adapt their thoughts and speech to the language. The same debate exists within the Latin-speaking community; should Latin add vocabulary to talk about the modern world or just be used to read Roman literature? I don't think either debate will ever be resolved.
Toki Pona links
Maybe someday I'll have some interesting things to translate--I'd love to translate the script of The Little Mermaid (meli kala lili) into Toki Pona, for example. But until I do, have fun with these:
The Official Site Where it all began. Come here for the official word list and some useful phrases.
lipu pi jan Pije Lessons, texts, comics, video games, and a method of using the Tengwar script to write Toki Pona.
Toki Pona Lessons Here are the lessons.
lipu lawa Wikipesija Once you've learned enough, come practice by reading some articles in Toki Pona.
lipu pi jan Jakopo Lots of Toki Pona links.
