How did the tp community grow so large?

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janMato
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How did the tp community grow so large?

Post by janMato »

Reposted from the shapado site. My answer got so long I thought I should post it somewhere with a larger audience.
http://tokipona.shapado.com/questions/h ... w-this-big

jan Sonja is a master of online social networking and used livejournal, irq, yahoo mailing lists to connect to hundreds of people world wide, many of those were Esperantists. The typical Esperantists is a talented polyglot. So when the idea of a new simple language came along, relationships were already in place with an audience of likely fans.

jan Sonja also realized that wikipedia is a type of social network and particpated in that as well, leading to someone creating a toki pona article and for a while, a toki pona Wikipedia. Both of these irritated some people on wikipedia. Also, wikipedia has a rule that you can’t have an article unless your material is notable and has 3rd party sources. This motivated jan Sonja to contact the media and ended up with a radio appearance in Canada and most importantly a large LA Times article. The toki pona wikipedia was closed and migrated, but the toki pona article stayed up. Since then, the article survived multiple deletion attempts and has been translated into more than a dozen languages, giving it an hard to match advantage compared to other constructed languages which generally can’t get into Wikipedia for lack of 3rd party sources.

The language has some structural features that help, but in my opinion are less important. For example, the language is fairly small, reasonably complete relative to it’s initial goals, easy to learn, work okay in some limited scenarios.

Also, since jan Sonja used Irc to communicate with initial fans and published a lesson set early on, there were enough materials to learn the language’s core fairly quickly.

Finally, like many successful conlangs, they attracted at least two or three hard core fans and the creator didn’t have any obvious problem with the hard core fans. Namely jan Pije, who wrote the current cannonical lesson set which jan Sonja promised but never delivered on, also jan Kipo, who has been the grammarian and tutor since 2005. In toki pona’s case, jan Sonja has very little friction with the hard core fans because jan Sonja has largely been absent from the community since about 2002 or so, with a few short bursts of activity.

And that neglect isn’t necessarily bad. In fact because of this neglect, toki pona has been largely stable and evolving very slowly. Had jan Sonja created ten more similar languages, or radically changed or expanded the language, I suspect the community would be much smaller.
Kuti
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Re: How did the tp community grow so large?

Post by Kuti »

It came in 2001, on internet . At that time a real change comes to internet.
Most countries develops unlimited internet or/and ADSL, the price was cheaper thant in the 90's so more people came on internet than before.

At the time of Esperanto it was slow because they had to publish books etc... now it is much faster, and I think it is a part of the whole thing.
janMato
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Joined: Wed Dec 02, 2009 12:21 pm
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Re: How did the tp community grow so large?

Post by janMato »

Good point. But I think the internet was necessary, but not sufficient. All conlangs are doing better than they did before broadband became cheap and widespread. It's too bad there isn't more evidence on the failed languages for comparison. I'm sure in the 2000-2002 window there were a bunch of other conlangs that could have ridden the wave that didn't-- knowing what made the difference would be useful to know.
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