Jan KoAla wrote:jan-ante wrote: it is a toy language or a linguistic toy.
I would be very curious to see what jan Mato and jan Kipo think about this.
It is a toy in the sense of it being small, limited functionality, and a mostly closed system. It isn't a toy in the derogatory sense, I rather like the language and I think most people on this thread do as well, else they wouldn't have invested so much time into it.
The acid test of a language is if it can be use for any purpose that a natural language can and if it has native speakers. As for the first, that is pretty subjective, I'd guess most people think toki pona is pretty limited in the areas where it can be used-- diary writing, meditation, amusement, doing little linguistic thought experiments.
If a language has native speakers, even professional linguists typically will grant it some degree of respect. I would guess that if an eccentric family did raise their child to speak toki pona, the child would innovate so much to fill out the missing parts of toki pona, that it would be hardly recognizable. This kind-of sort-of was observed by Arika Okrent in her book when she met a native Esperantist and noticed his speech was hard to follow (faster/more complex speech), but the other Esperantists-as-a-second-language speakers were reasonably easy to follow.