Therauputic uses for toki pona, draft for comment

[janMato]

Prophilaxis and Rehabilitation of Post Stroke language problems
If toki pona is somewhat like computer programming code and algebra, and if a stroke spares the ones ability to write code, and if the effects of the stroke are largely limited to abilities of speech, then toki pona might be useful as a way to express thoughts without relying on the parts of our brains that normally process language and instead rely more on the part of our brains that process math.

For much the same reasons, toki pona may be useful in dementia or brain cancer. In dementia and brain cancer, skills are lost at an uneven rate. Mutlilinguals lose all their skills last. Knowledge of any second language is an insurance policy against this eventuality, toki pona is an inexpensive "policy" in terms of hours it takes to learn.

At the moment, it would be more prudent to learn toki pona long before a stroke. After a stroke, one will probably still want to make an effort to rehabilitate their ability to speak English and it isn't immediately obvious that the effort to regain English is greater than the effort to learn an artificial language.

25%-40% of stroke survivors have aphasia, 100,000 people get aphasia a year in the uS and 1 million have aphasia now.
http://www.med.umich.edu/opm/newspage/2003/aphasia.htm

Communication for disabled children who can not speak or sign.
English is ill suited for pointing based language, i.e. language where you can only communicate via pointing. The alphabet is small, but pointing to all the letters for a sentence is excruciatingly slow.

Bliss symbols in one of the more famous systems created for this purpose, but there are many other competing systems. Toki pona has the advantage of only requiring a ~125 word symbols, 35 syllables and 14 letters or 174 symbols total. If the toki pona community continues to innovate scripts and short hand techniques, toki pona could potentially become more efficient than pointing to the English alphabet. As an added plus, this proposition is eminently testable by determining if equivalent phrases in English and toki pona require more keystrokes.

Another advantage toki pona has over some systems is that the language is rigidly isolating. Symbols do no inflect based on changes internal to symbols-- a technique common in Blisssymbols that some children and adults found difficult.

Adult onset dealfness.
English is ill suited for signing-- it has a heck of a lot of words that need to be signed distinctively. ASL is perfectly fine if you know it, but is a natural language, so it poses the same challenges of French or Spanish in that it takes 500+ hours to learn. Signing each letter is slow and tedious as is writing everything down. A lanugage of a small number of isolated morphemes would be easier to learn for a deaf adult and the hearing community around them. Or they can learn ASL or signed English.

Depression.
Depression is usually treated with a talk therapy or anitdepressants. The antidepressants either work by modifying brain chemistry or they work via the placebo effect.

It's also been speculated that antidepressants work via a neurotropic effect. In that case toki pona could be effective as a way to encourage neuron growth.

The other possibility is that a language that makes it difficult to think unhappy thoughts and easier to think happy thoughts would help the symptoms of depression. This pivots on the various forms of the Saphir-Worf hypothesis, which is considered difficult or impossible to test and certainly the linguistic community is no where near the level of consensus comparable to the level of consensus one sees in the medical community when asked about the relative efficacy of leeches, tin hats or pennicillin.

If anti-depressants work primarily through a placebo effect, then toki pona is an excellent palcebo because conclusive evidence of it's efficacy or lack there of doesn't exist--yet. So anyone using toki pona will get most of the benefit of the placebo effect, if indeed that is the main mechanism. Furthermore, linguists won't stop aruguing about Saphir-Worf effects for years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-deri ... hic_factor

Preventive Care
There are a few charactistics of languages that make them more suitable for prophylaxis than for care after a health event.

Languages need to exist in a community for them to be useful. If a language user doesn't have at least one domain in which to use a language, it won't be used. An unused langauge can't possibly have a therapeutic effect any better than sitting through a Spanish class or underwater basket weaving class, for that matter. That domain of use and the community of friends who use the language need to be established in advance of a health event for a constructed language to be pragmatic.

It takes 500 hours to learn a language, possibly fewer for toki pona. In the case of stroke, brain cancer--there might not be the time or mental resources for taking the time to learn a foreign language. Moreover, the surrounding community would also need to get up to speed on the language.

Why an artificial language and why this one
For some of the purported effects listed, one could just as easily study Spanish or Chinese. Toki pona has the advantage of requiring fewer hours to master. Esperanto (and maybe even Piraha), Basic English also make claims of being unusually "easy" languages. The disadvantage of Piraha is that materials for learning Piraha are extremely rare and aimed at professional linguists.

The state of the art in the design of easy to learn languages has been making progress over the last few hundred years, so there is likely a trade off between ease of use and the size of established community.

As noted before, languages don't exist without a community. Every community is different and the community one finds themselves in will in large part determine what language can be spoken, regardless to their merits.

[jan Ote]

[janMato]

[jan Ote]

[janMato]

Is toki pona ambigous? Yes.
Are computer programs ambiguous? Yes in several ways and no in 1. The specs are ambiguous with respect to their implementations and the implementations are ambiguous with respect to their
Is the syntax of computer code ambiguous? Sometimes-- for example, the source code of programming languages with out line terminantors often can be parsed several ways. Similarly, malformed html (which is the vast majority of html) is ambiguous. Also, the possibility of compiler optimizations means to me that there is some ambiguity the compiler can exploit to improve performance without changing the output too much.

Anyhow, this ambiguity line of thought, I've lost how it relates to my thesis. I said that toki pona and things like XML and code are similar. They both have a BNF form. The production of both can either be done linguistically or like an algebraic proof. When solving a quadratic equation, I'm doing truth preserving transformations until I have X isolated on one side. When I write code, I do transformations that preserve the code's compile-ability. When writing toki pona one can either just speak without thinking too hard about it (rely on one's built in machinery for language production) or one can follow the BNF spec and do validity preserving transformation.

re: HTML has a spec that people don't follow
Yes.

Actually I can think of a programming language that does let otherwise identical looking tokens vary by context, SQL. You can give column names the same names as keywords. It's an uncommon feature to let users use keywords as variable names because it makes life hell for the compiler writers. When a compiler comes across this ambiguity it has to resolve it to the most likely appropriate meaning, the same as people do.

Anyhow, a lot of these objections have to do with how people read toki pona (or how a compiler reads source code or how a CPU reads compiled code), and I'm talking about how toki pona is produced-- it's produced by humans and it is nearly such a limited subset of natural language that one can produce sentences with the same skill (and potentially part of the brain) that it takes to create valid algebraic statements, or valid SQL or XML code.

(Well, I guess people with brain damage will still need to understand toki pona, so in a sense a toki pona listener has the same problems of a compiler writer, they need to take code and convert it into several possible configurations of thought and then pick amongst them which one is best.)

Anyhow, like I said, it's a testable proposition. All I need do is sit and wait until I suffer from localized brain damage and see if the skills of programming, algebra, natural language use and toki pona use all disappear at the same time.

[jan Josan]

Bilingualism as a protection against the onset of symptoms of dementia
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Abstract: This study examined the effect of lifelong bilingualism on maintaining cognitive functioning and delaying the onset of symptoms of dementia in old age. The sample was selected from the records of 228 patients referred to a Memory Clinic with cognitive complaints. The final sample consisted of 184 patients diagnosed with dementia, 51% of whom were bilingual. The bilinguals showed symptoms of dementia 4 years later than monolinguals, all other measures being equivalent. Additionally, the rate of decline in Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores over the 4 years subsequent to the diagnosis was the same for a subset of patients in the two groups, suggesting a shift in onset age with no change in rate of progression.
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This is interesting because no drugs are that effective.
If anyone needs access to the full article, PM me w/ your email address and I can help you find a copy.