whither toki pona?

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janAlopo
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whither toki pona?

Post by janAlopo »

What kind of future do you see for toki pona? Entry-level language used as tool for teaching language acquisition techniques? New-age religion or atheist (humanist) liturgical language? Secret language for teens and tweens? Texting tool? Linguistic sudoko for langfreaks? Entertainment for social groups, or inter-family fun? Academic tool for analysis of meme evolution within or across languages? The next Big Fad after the vampire obsession? What is your personal intended use or reason for kama sona e toki pona?
janKipo
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Re: whither toki pona?

Post by janKipo »

What kind of future do you see for English? This just seems to be an inappropriate question about a language. To be sure, conlangs are different from natural languages but to force purposes on them does not follow. tp is of value in and of itself. Whatever purposes it may eventually fill are incidental. Again, jSonja seems to have had a couple of uses in mind: facilitating a simpler life and a way out of destructive mental conditions. But the success of the language does not depend on how well it performs these tasks, nor any other that someone might propose (aside, of course, from being used as a language).
janAlopo
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Re: whither toki pona?

Post by janAlopo »

janKipo, my query is not intended to spark a controlling purpose for toki pona. I am merely interested in what motivations (or simply pleasure-center seratonin response) people may have for learning and enjoying toki pona. I am a dedicated Ido supporter for utopian and rational conlanguistic reasons, among which a primary reason is my heartfelt antagonism for English. I view toki pona as an interesting, challenging, fun diversion, like chess or go or othello. Part of the challenge and fun is getting others to share in the enjoyment, even those who are not by nature (or personality disorder) driven to acquire polyglot fluency. To that end, offering some possible advantages or benefits couild entice those others to join in, and possibly carry them past the point of adventure and into the realm of cognitive dissonance, where it becomes a significant part of their lives simply because it is a significant part of their lives. ;)
janKipo
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Re: whither toki pona?

Post by janKipo »

Madison? Milwaukee? I'm from Hayward myself (though a long time ago).
Fair enough. I think most people learn tp because 1) it doesn't take long (unlike even Ido and its papa) and 2) it is a challenge to see what you can say in such a limited language. And then some of them get hooked and others decide it is no fun anymore and drift off. Higher purposes don't seem to come into much at all. So I guess the best selling point is that you can learn to do a passable job in tp in a day -- if [all sorts of conditions here, but most fairly easy to meet].
aikidave
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Re: whither toki pona?

Post by aikidave »

tenpo pini mute la mi moku e telo nasa lon ma tomo Milwaukee.

I was drawn to TP by the small vocabulary and the ease of learning. My intention was / is to see if I could write about every day life and still understand what I wrote 6 months later. I also wanted to create a few new synapses in my brain.
I don't have a great short term memory, so it took me about 2 weeks to memorize the vocabulary. jan Pie's excellent lessons taught me the basics and members on this forum corrected my TP writing as I went along. That feedback was/is vital for learning TP. There are also a number of questions that jan Sonja needs to answer in order to get everyone on the same page:
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1181
There are a number of concepts of 'thinking in TP' which I don't have down yet. These include no passive in TP, no multiple clauses, inanimate objects cannot think, have ownership, being careful not to use calques, etc.
My verdict is still out on how much I can write about using TP without using too many Unofficial words for clarification. I am still having trouble reading and understanding other people's TP writing. I am hoping I will understand more with practice.
Oh, and I also liked the idea of TP being a secret language, known only to a small number of people. Hopefully this will grow to a large number of people in the future.
janAlopo
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Re: whither toki pona?

Post by janAlopo »

I've hoisted a few in Milwaukee, too.

Born in Wausau, many years and several marriages Milwaukee area, currently Antigo but soon (2 years) Tennessee.....

The puzzle (and "Ive got a solution!") characteristics of toki pona make it attractive to people who by dint of personality and intellectual profile are interesting to others of the same type of profile. So there's a social (network?) aspect to toki pona that's attractive. It's like Mensa stuff, without the towering egos and irrelevant ADHD distractions in discussions.

Perhaps, better than "whither toki pona?" would have been "whence your toki pona interest?" for a topic title.
janKipo
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Re: whither toki pona?

Post by janKipo »

Being a retired professional ADHDer (but of the hyperfocused variety), I resent having the problems of living with Mensa attributed to that condition, rather than just wgo. But then, I probably didn't notice.
Yes, I think the why are you here question gets more informative answers. I am a habitual second speaker, who then gets totally involved and was coming off a life-long (well, it seemed that way) involvement with the logical languages, when I came upon tp as an example for a paper I was perpetrating on the first Language Creation Conference. By the time I had finished the paper, I found I had the basics of tp in hand (NOT all the words memorized, but an idea of what was there and thus where to look) and so I tuned in to the old forum, read jPije's lessons and got advice. And asked lots of questions (or rather made snippy remarks that got responses). So my next paper was about what was happening in tp as a case study of what happens to a "successful" conlang (always keeping the paradigms of Vollypuke and its usurper and kin in mind + Loglan, of course). And so I accidentally became an advanced student. I also did a mass of scutwork for a while, trying to see what was going on across the spread of the language -- and thus picking bits about personal styles and compound formations and so on. So, the answer is, because it's fun and I am not too bad at it (unlike numerous real languages).
jan-ante
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Re: whither toki pona?

Post by jan-ante »

it is suitable as a research tool, as i wrote elsewhere in this forum. however at the moment (to my knowledge) only one research group (from holland) use it in their published research.
piotr goldstein from poland suggested to use tp as a auxlang in conflict areas like balkans. during his travel he observed that albanians do not want to speak serbian (although they can) as it is an enimy language. serbians generally cannot speak albanian, but they can speak english. however they dont want to talk in english to albanians because english is the language of the world's greatest operssor, who oppressed serbia as well. so piotr goldstein suggested to use tp in such a situations, as this conlang is neutral and requires minimal efforts to learn. it gives no much possibilities for to express many different things, but it is still better than nothing.
also i could infer the putative motivation of jJosan expressed in his translation "toki pi kalama pona suli":
jan musi li jo e ilo pali ale pi musi suli la, ona li pali ike. jan li sona pona e toki la, ona li pali ike, kepeken toki ni. jan li sona lili e toki ante la, ona li ken pali e musi pona en suli, kepeken toki ante ni. ... jan li sona ala e nimi ale la, jan li wile kepeken e sona sike, e sitelen ante.
probably hokku is a right genre to prove this point
janMato
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Re: whither toki pona?

Post by janMato »

I first discovered toki pona in a bout of boredom in 2007. I studied it because I wanted to feel like I've learned at least one second language in my life. (If you can't climb mountains, climb molehills) The bit about toki pona being invented during a bout of depression, possibly as a solution to depression was interesting because I time to time suffer from depression-- more of the sort due to being locked up in an unnatural and isolating environment for 8 hours a day than for any other reason, I think, but still, office work is a burden on mood in a way that farming or hunting and gathering most likely is not.

I do take the position that a language needs a reason to live. If it only has existence value (that warm fuzzy feeling you get knowing that someone somewhere in a university still speaks ancient Akkadian) then it won't last long.

Toki pona is well suited as a recreational language, an easy language, and may be well suited as a mood therapy language (it isn't reasonable to ask a depressed patient to invest 5 years learning Serbian or Urdu or !Xhosa to see if it helps with their depression).

Toki pona isn't really well suited to a lot of other applications for conlangs unless you are willing to fork it. For example, if I wanted to write a novel in toki pona, by the end of the novel there would be so many idioms and opaque compound phrases that the language I started with wouldn't be entirely the language I finished with.

Toki pona is so-so as an auxiliary language. It is more complex than a pidgin, less complex than esperanto. Depending on how you look at it, you either get the best of both or the worst of both (easy to learn, but not very expressive as compared to eo, but still harder to learn and much stricter than a pidgin.)

Also, the hallmark of a pidgin, imho is that people are highly unmotivated and don't really care how it sounds. That is why pidgin is easy to produce. Toki pona users tend to be pretty motivated to speak well and prefer to hear it used well, so it doesn't really fit the same social role as a pidgin (a tool for communication between two people who don't care enough to learn each other's language)
Mako
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Re: whither toki pona?

Post by Mako »

I heard about Toki Pona years ago (around 2003, the time of the minimal phonology challenge), but only became involved this year. I decided to learn it because it had a small vocabulary. I also was interested in the mental clarity of composing in TP, and I'm not enough of a mathematician or logician to deal with Lojban. I also found it interesting that TP was still developing. I've been a conlanger since high school, but never had one that anybody else showed interest in learning. TP, as it stands, is too ambiguous for auxiliary language use. I do use it for mental floss (like other L2s of mine, including Latin and one indigenous language) and emotional health. I also use it on memos in the office, when it's confidential information. :lol:

It seems to me that Toki Pona has conflicting goals in being minimalist (125 words is still a small number) and an auxiliary language (which demands more roots than TP currently has).
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