Toki Pona's community

[Raphaël]

In Esperanto, it has created a community to deal with the evolution of Esperanto (new words, new grammar rules etc. ...). So all those who want to create this community respond to this topic. Check out all the artificial languages that do not create a community of this kind: they are forgotten almost as full and nobody will talk, if you want that to happen in toki pona, do not be supportive this community project.

Pour l'esperanto, on a crée une communauté pour s'occuper de l'évolution de l'espéranto(nouveaux mots, nouvelles règles de grammaire etc...). Donc que tous ceux qui veulent créer cette communauté répondent à ce topic. Regardez toutes les langues artificielles qui n'ont pas crée de communauté de ce genre: elles sont tombées dans l'oubli le plus total et quasiment plus personne ne les parles, si vous voulez que ça arrive au toki pona, ne soutenez-pas ce projet de communauté.

在世界语，它创造了一个社区，以处理世界语的发展（新词，新的语法规则等...).因此，所有那些谁想要建立这个社会应对这一问题。检查所有的人工语言，不建立一个这样的社会：他们几乎完全被遗忘，没有人会说话，如果你想这样的事情发生在土岐波纳，不要支持这社区项目。

In Esperanto hat sich eine Community mit der Entwicklung des Esperanto (neue Wörter, neue Grammatikregeln etc. ...). viel geschaffen Also alle diejenigen, die diese Gemeinschaft zu schaffen reagieren zu diesem Thema wünschen. Check out all die künstlichen Sprachen, die nicht schaffen, eine Gemeinschaft von dieser Art: sie sind fast so voll, und niemand wird vergessen reden, wenn du das in Toki Pona passieren wollen, werden nicht unterstützt diesen Community-Projekt.

エスペラント語では、コミュニティをエスペラントの進化（新しい単語、新しい文法規則など...).を対処するために作成しただからすべての人々は、このトピックに対応するこのコミュニティを作成する。この種のコミュニティを作成しないでくださいすべての人工言語をチェックアウト：あなたはトキポナで発生する場合は、それらがほぼ完全に、誰も話をすると、この支持してはいけない忘れられているコミュニティプロジェクト。

[Kuti]

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[janMato]

I favor governance bodies, but without an emotionally mature language inventor (I think we have that), an inventor with *some* spare time (not sure about that), and a community of highly involved people (we probably almost have that), which may have differences, but not especially dramatic ones (not sure here), then the prospects for governance are mixed.

One example of the emotionally immature inventor is Volapuk (the inventor didn't get along with early adopters). I guess early "jan pi lawa toki pi toki pona" would have to be pretty emotionally mature and good at diplomacy. (It could happen)

The example of a blighted democracy is the one where most of the community doesn't show up to vote and those who do bother to show up aren't representative of the whole. By Sonja's numbers there are 2000+ people who'd buy a book if they could, by my numbers there are about 200 people who've written something in toki pona and posted it to the net, and there are about 5-10 people who are highly actively in the tp community at any point in time.

Zamenhof didn't have any design constraints, so the higgldy piggldy loan words wasn't a problem. If a committee decided to double or triple the base vocabulary, I think this would really make toki pona worse.

Also, at the moment only jan Sonja and jan Pije have enough prestige to make a change and see the community follow it. Everyone else's innovations are being followed on accident-- the sort of accident that is hard to make happen on purpose.

Up to now, various proposals for utilitarian things like, numbers, math, dates, defining "pu", weights and measures, have been ignored. Script proposals get some attention, but not much because most proposed scripts can't be typed easily.

I think I posted somewhere around here what I thought the big questions in toki pona are, jan Kip has too. What do you think are the big unsolved question in toki pona?

[jan Josan]

你哪裡找到土岐波纳的中文名字嗎？

土岐波纳 tǔ qí bō nà : some kind of a slope or side path for receiving/diverting waves

很有意思的名字。

[Raphaël]

我发现这对谷歌翻译。

[Logomachist]

What do you think are the big unsolved question in toki pona?

I'm not fluent in the language yet, so there could easily be outstanding grammatical issues about which I am totally unaware, but off the top of my head? This is a prioritized list of what I think Toki Pona needs:
<ol>
<li>Produce plentiful instructive material- e.g. the book, updating the wiki to contain definitions for all the official words.</li>
<li>Allow tp users to coin their own unofficial words, and give them the ability to create personal dictionaries on the public wiki to which they can link when they use their new words so other people can easily figure out what they're saying.</li>
<li>Set some sort of working group to manage the language and adopt coined words into the official dictionary should they catch on among tp speakers, and to tweak definitions when it becomes necessary.</li>
</ol>

Personally I'm thinking about creating some learning material of my own, partly for my own benefit... partly because it would make an interesting project and partly because I think that sort of thing would be useful to have more of.

[jan Josan]

Produce plentiful instructive material- e.g. the book, updating the wiki to contain definitions for all the official words.

This one I'm for, but the unofficial words? I hope you only mean proper names for places and people.

[jan musi pi len noka]

Produce plentiful instructive material- e.g. the book, updating the wiki to contain definitions for all the official words.

Well, there is the toki pona corpus project. Reading that is probably the best thing anyone could do to improve their skills.

The wikipedia article is written. The wiki book is not started. Na'vi's wiki book I think is a good model for conlang wiki books. It would be entirely legit of the community to do a summary of toki pona the same as any field linguist would do after encountering a lost tribe of feral children living in an abandoned mall in Albany, New York. It would not be legit to add any normative guidelines to such a book, at least, there wouldn't be any reason to believe it would catch on.

Allow tp users to coin their own unofficial words, and give them the ability to create personal dictionaries on the public wiki to which they can link when they use their new words so other people can easily figure out what they're saying.

New base words is probably a bad idea, new phrases is already happening (If I remember correctly, the technical word is periphrasis, the equivalent to compound words in highly isolating languages that don't really compound the words), new proper modifiers has always been a sanctioned way of expanding the vocabulary. jan Kipo's dictionary is probably the closest we have to a community usage based dictionary. If there was a wiki, the first day there would be a revert war over part of speech. The community hasn't really decided if words can be freely converted from one lexical category to another or not. Usage says yes, the classic word list says no.

Set some sort of working group to manage the language and adopt coined words into the official dictionary should they catch on among tp speakers, and to tweak definitions when it becomes necessary.

There are conlangs that are clearly abandoned-- say Volapuk. The inventor is dead. If a self selected community of Volapuk fans put together a language governance committee it would be a good thing and people would probably respect it, all 3 or 4 of them.

Toki pona isn't abandoned yet, it's just suffering from a high employment rate. There used to be a jan sona mailing list where jan Sonja solicited language design advice from the community, so it's in the realm of possibility that she'd delegate some governance tasks to the community. I would guess that a governance committee would have to have buy in from the language designer to work well, lest they be working at cross purposes.

Personally I'm thinking about creating some learning material of my own, partly for my own benefit... partly because it would make an interesting project and partly because I think that sort of thing would be useful to have more of.

By all means! You mentioned wiki's, so if you're interested in collaborating, lemme (and others here) know.

[Logomachist]

This one I'm for, but the unofficial words? I hope you only mean proper names for places and people.

No I'm actually in favor of slowing expanding the vocabulary to enable us to talk about things that we want to talk about but don't have the words for. It is the nature of constructed languages that they start out with a vocabulary selected by fiat, but when a language catches on IMHO it should adapt to the needs of the community using it. Words the community finds useful will be passed on, words that are that are superfluous will go unused and be forgotten. Because unofficial words are already set off by capitalization it will be easy to tell which is which.

I also think it would be useful to have second-tier words that are official and necessary for discussing certain subjects, but which aren't required for general conversation. Just knowing the first tier words would be adjacent for fluency, the second tier words need only to be introduced and learned as needed.

I would guess that a governance committee would have to have buy in from the language designer to work well, lest they be working at cross purposes.

I agree.

[janMato]

No I'm actually in favor of slowing expanding the vocabulary to enable us to talk about things that we want to talk about but don't have the words for. It is the nature of constructed languages that they start out with a vocabulary selected by fiat, but when a language catches on IMHO it should adapt to the needs of the community using it. Words the community finds useful will be passed on, words that are that are superfluous will go unused and be forgotten. Because unofficial words are already set off by capitalization it will be easy to tell which is which.

To touch and use a language is to subtly change it, so some change is not worth worrying about. But to intentionally, significantly expand toki pona's vocab is a radical departure from the original design goals. It's like if we decided that Esperanto should only have new apriori words and stop adding loan words, or if lojban should be extended to explicitly support multi-meaning sentences, or if Klingon was extended to have a full set of vocabulary to describe Tolkien Hobbits. In all of these cases, it would be better to fork (create a new language without any intention of being compatible with the previous, or aimed at the existing community). Toki pona has prolly a dozen reasonably worked out derivatives and I think that is a good thing.

Proper modifiers are capitalized, not loan words or content words verbs, nouns, etc. Also, proper modifiers are supposed to just be names of specific things. They are somewhat of a loophole in my opinion, especially things like, moku Soja (Soybean food), or nimi Insonja pi toki Inli (Insomnia)-- two patterns that I don't really like. Eponyms aren't as bad, linja lawa pi jan Te (Mr. T hair for mohawk), pan pi ma Italija, is probably better than trying to identify other salient characteristics.