(2023-12-11) There is something special about Toki Pona, isn't it?
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As a wise man once said, "you can learn anything in about 30 minutes, and
then spend a lifetime learning the details about it". This saying is more
than true for any artificial language, especially for Toki Pona. Yes, I
capitalize it although the name in the language itself is not capitalized as
it's not a proper noun and just means "a good language" or "a simple
language" or, as its author, Sonja Lang, named her first book, "the language
of good". The first version of the language appeared in 2001 and it has been
developed by the author _alongside the community_ since then, and in January
2022 it finally got an ISO 639-3 code, "tok". Also, Gemini network users may
be familiar with the "moku pona" phrase, which is the name of an open-source
news and phlog feed aggregator. This name means "good food" in TP, but
"moku" also can mean other forms of consumption, so the name fits perfectly
here. See, this is the main thing with this language: each core word, except
special particles, has multiple meanings. This is what is called "semantic
space". And TP speakers operate with semantic spaces instead of exact
definitions, like, all the time. And this is the most interesting feature of
this language that became the primary reason I've continued learning it. For
real this time.

This post is going to be rather short as I'm not going to turn it into a
basic TP guidebook (I guess Anglosphere has enough official, unofficial and
not-even-remotely-close-to-official materials on it already), I want to
share my own impressions about this language and some thoughts on its
real-life usage perspectives in the nearest future. Because right now, TP is
in its active growth phase, as well as the online community around it. It's
only a matter of time when serious players get interested in it as well. But
let's talk one thing at a time, okay?

So, onto my impressions. Well... Remember my stories about 58mm Victorinoxes
I carry around? Classic SD, Classic Alox, Rambler... Well, Toki Pona is the
Classic SD/Rambler of languages. It's extremely small, lightweight and
somewhat cute yet extremely functional and reliable to get you throughout
the day. The smallness of its core vocabulary (right now, the "essential"
wordlist has 137 words but again, it's up to the community to expand it if
necessary) is fully compensated by the flexibility of the grammar and
ability to use almost any word as almost any part of speech and any part of
sentence. Yes, some types of compound sentences can't be expressed in TP and
you have to split them into individual sentences, but the other and most
substantial part of compound sentences is totally possible using the
ni-clauses and la-clauses. The latter ones, used to specify the context for
the main sentence, are a very powerful feature on its own that eliminates
the need in multiple tenses, adverbs, "if", "when" etc. All it takes is
just... adopting another way of thinking.

Yes, there's that. Not only was the language developed to test the idea of
linguistic relativity aka the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that says that the
structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, but
it also forces _everyone_ who speaks it to bind their mind to think in
semantic spaces and flexible vocabulary usage. Unlike e.g. Esperanto which
is pretty much eurocentric, Toki Pona puts everyone in equal conditions. Its
simplistic phonology was designed to be universally understandable across
the globe, and the graphics is even better: besides the Latin alphabet
(sitelen Lasina), there's another, fully independent official hieroglyphic
script called sitelen pona which has been already defined for all 137
"essential" words and some extended vocabulary as well, and also has a
unique way of writing proper names inside cartouches. Given that we
currently have some fonts that can properly render all sitelen pona glyphs
and there also is a standing UCSUR proposal to include them into Unicode, I
guess this writing system has a bright future, at least it will be better
than the unofficial and kinda cringey "sitelen Emosi" spec for encoding all
the glyphs as existing emoji characters.

Speaking of future, I think TP has one. Its community is now more vibrant
than ever, its media coverage and the amount of speakers grow year by year,
it got an ISO code and some popular things like Minecraft translated into
it, it began growing its own unique cultural layer and, most importantly,
its demographics began reaching beyond the first-world countries and conlang
enthusiasts per se, giving it the potential to become (if not already) the
second most popular constructed language in the world after Esperanto. On
the contrary, other conlangs seem to be stagnating at best, only living in
small conlang-related online groups and committees. Because, let's face it,
there's no real demand for another eurocentric Esperanto replacement as of
now, and as for non-eurocentric conlangs, which one is more appealing to the
general public outside those groups — Lojban or Toki Pona? Especially if we
consider they are pretty much opposite in almost every aspect, simplicity
included: Lojban's official grammar textbook is a 584-page PDF, while the
TP's grammar can fit into just one page ([1]), if we omit sitelen pona. Yes,
you can learn Lojban if you're a conlang enthusiast, maybe even in a
relatively short period of time, but can you get a 5-year-old child or even
any adult who's not a conlang enthusiast to learn Lojban in a short period
of time? My overall point is simple: languages don't exist in a vacuum, they
exist to serve a purpose of communication. So, if two people who don't know
each other's languages want to talk, the total time they both need to spend
on learning the third one (that would allow them to understand each other)
must be drastically less than any one of them spends the time on learning
the other person's language. And in terms of the least time spent on this,
Toki Pona may be the absolute leader and can be a real lingua franca for
those who didn't or couldn't even learn English well enough, because,
newsflash, English actually is pretty hard to learn, both by time and effort.

And like I said, it's a matter of time before interested parties recognize
this potential in Toki Pona and try making some profit out of it. I hope the
community won't let it happen and won't cede the control over the language
to anyone in particular. Because the language of good must only belong to
the people.

mi tawa.

--- Luxferre ---

[1]:
https://jansa-tp.github.io/tpcheatsheet/Toki%20Pona%20Cheat%20Sheet%20v2.pdf