I’m assuming most people who are watching this are already familiar with the language
toki pona. there’s a substantial overlap between people in my audience and people in
the toki pona community, because my old poorly made lesson course is one of the most common
ways people learn to speak toki pona.
uh, just in case you don’t already know, toki pona is a minimalist constructed language
initially created by Sonja Lang about twenty years ago.
it’s an engineered language, designed around the principle that in order to talk about
anything in the language, you need to explain in simple terms what the thing is.
I really like it, and think it’s both fun to use and easy to learn.
it has an active community with thousands of speakers, making it one of the most popular
conlangs online, with more speakers per word than any other constructed language.
right, so I’ll get to the point.
I was recently given an exclusive preview copy of Sonja Lang’s Toki Pona Dictionary.
it’s available, uh, today! you can get it now.
I’m not being paid to say any of this, beyond having been given the book for free.
I have completely voluntarily decided to create a commercial for this dictionary, solely because
I genuinely believe that this is a valuable resource for any toki pona speaker, and I
think the large number of tokiponists in my audience need to be made aware that it exists.
now, if you’ve heard one thing about toki pona before, it’s probably that its vocabulary
only contains 120 words.
you might reasonably ask how you could possibly fill a whole 400 page dictionary with such
a small lexicon.
the book is a two-way English-toki pona dictionary, with half of it dedicated to toki pona translations
of English words, and the other half dedicated to English translations of toki pona words
and phrases.
jan Sonja makes it very clear that this is a descriptive documentation of the toki pona
language as it exists and is used by the current speaking community, and not a prescriptive
guide for how toki pona “should” be spoken.
for example, “radio” is given four toki pona translations: ilo kalama, ilo pi kalama
weka, ilo pi kalama kon, and ilo toki. none of these translations are more correct than
the others, and there’s nothing that would be incorrect about someone deciding to translate
“radio” in a way completely different from any of these.
rather, these represent the most common ways of saying “radio” in toki pona, which
can serve as inspiration for someone trying to think of how they want to say it.
the most common translation, ilo kalama, means “sound-tool”, which is intentionally very
broad.
if you look up “ilo kalama” in the second half of the Dictionary, you can see that while
ilo kalama is commonly used for “radio”, it can also mean “bell”, “horn”, “instrument”,
“drum”, “piano”, “guitar”, or “speaker”. and just like how the list
of toki pona translations given for “radio” only represented the most common translations,
ilo kalama could be translated into English in any number of ways, beyond the translations
included in the Dictionary.
an ilo kalama could be any sort of sound-tool.
as another example, the translations given for “computer” are ilo sona, ilo, ilo
nanpa, and ilo pi sitelen soweli, all of which are great ways to say “computer” in toki
pona, and none of which are the way I personally say computer, poki nanpa.
oh, right, also, the little numbers you can see next to each translation represent their
relative frequency.
specifically, they represent what percentage of the toki pona community would use a given
translation, as determined by data collected through a survey.
now, all of this is very interesting, and is the main reason the Dictionary is a valuable
resource for tokiponists.
but what’s really exciting, I think, is the newly semi-canonized nimi sin.
in the years since the release of jan Sonja’s previous book, Toki Pona: The Language of
Good, toki pona has grown alongside its community.
because of this, it’s no longer accurate to say that the language has exactly one hundred
twenty words.
it wasn’t really accurate when The Language of Good was released either, but the ten dozen
words defined in The Language of Good, often referred to as the nimi pu, have served as
the closest thing toki pona has to a “canon” lexicon.
however, jan Sonja has said many times that the language belongs to its community, not
to her, and there are several words not included in pu that are commonly used by the community.
and so, the Toki Pona Dictionary documents these words.
by my count, the Dictionary includes sixty toki pona words that are not given definitions
in The Language of Good, but which are still used and recognized by at least some of the
toki pona community.
in addition, a completely new word was coined for the Dictionary. as a parallel to pu, meaning
“interact with Toki Pona: The Language of Good”, the brand new word ku means “interact
with Toki Pona Dictionary”. and so, the total number of toki pona words included in
the Dictionary, the nimi ku, is 181.
that said, the majority of these nimi pi pu ala are only used by a very small portion
of the toki pona community.
half of the sixty established non-pu words documented are given a frequency index of
one or lower, meaning they’re used by 20% or less of the community.
and even that’s a little misleading; of those thirty rare words, twenty three of them
have a frequency score of one half, meaning they’re used by 10% or less of the community.
while these rare words are a lot of fun, and it’s great that the Dictionary documents
them, it wouldn’t really be accurate to consider them to be a core part of toki pona’s
vocabulary.
so, jan Sonja has drawn a line between these rarely used words and the nimi pi pu ala which
have established themselves as an almost fully accepted part of the language.
this has created a class of words between the 120 nimi pu and the 181 nimi ku: the 137
nimi ku suli.
the set of nimi ku suli includes every word with a frequency index of three or higher:
the words which are used by more than 40% of toki pona speakers.
this semi-canonizes seventeen nimi pi pu ala, most of which are nimi sin. and you know what,
let’s just go through all of them!
three of the nimi ku suli are words that were technically included in pu, but were defined
as “synonyms” of other words.
these are:
namako, meaning “spice” or “extra”, classified in pu as a synonym of sin, meaning
“new” or “fresh”, kin, meaning “too” or “also”, classified
in pu as a synonym of a, a grammatical particle used for emphasis, but also often used as
an interjection, and oko, meaning “eye”, classified in
pu as a synonym of lukin, meaning “see” or “observe”.
all of these words predate pu, but were included as “synonyms” as their meanings overlap
somewhat with other, more common words.
ever since The Language of Good was released, these three words have been in an awkward
state of being only semi-canon, being featured in pu, but not counted as part of the 120
nimi pu.
there are other words included as nimi ku suli that predate pu, but were excluded from
The Language of Good entirely.
nonetheless, many still find these words to be useful, so they’ve stuck around.
there’s kipisi, meaning “cut” or part”, leko, meaning “square” or “block”,
monsuta, meaning “fear” or “monster”, and misikeke, meaning “medication” or
“cure”.
most of the remaining nimi ku suli are true nimi sin, words which were coined by various
members of the toki pona community.
eight nimi sin have been made semi-canon with ku, and are acknowledged by jan Sonja as now
being a core part of the language.
these are:
tonsi, the best nimi sin, a term used by those who do not identify with the words meli or
mije alone, including non-binary and gender non-conforming people, also sometimes used
more broadly to refer to trans people in general, jasima, meaning “reflect” or “opposite”,
soko, meaning “mushroom” or “fungus”, meso, meaning “average” or “medium”,
epiku, meaning “epic”, kokosila, meaning “speak another language
in a toki pona only environment”, lanpan, meaning “seize” or “steal”,
and n, a filler word meaning “um” or “hmm”.
n is an interesting case, because it technically violates toki pona’s very restrictive phonotactics.
but since it just means “um”, I think it’s fine, and it doesn’t really break
anything.
there are two more words included in the Dictionary which have a frequency index of three.
these are not words which were at one point part of jan Sonja’s idea of what she wanted
the language to be, and they also are not words which were coined and then accepted
by the toki pona speaking community.
these two words are a special case, being words which were coined by jan Sonja, but
as a joke, not intended to be actually used by people as part of the language.
and yet, they are part of the language nonetheless!
the first of these joke words is kijetesantakalu, an unwieldy heptasyllabic word meaning “procyonid”
or “Musteloidea”.
kijetesantakalu is my second-favorite of the nimi ku suli pi pu ala, right after tonsi.
the other is, this word, meaning “change a creative work and unintentionally make it
worse”, which is a very good joke.
this word begins with the letter y, which is not part of the toki pona alphabet, so
nobody knows for sure how this word should be pronounced.
this unpronounceable word, despite being commonly used enough for the cutoff set by jan Sonja
for determining which non-pu words to count as nimi ku suli, is not listed with the other
nimi ku suli.
so, we’re actually one word short of 137.
the final one is, of course, the word ku itself, coined specifically for the Dictionary.
it’s reasonable to predict that ku will come to be used similarly to how the word
pu is used now.
personally, I think this set of 137 words is a good one, and when I eventually remake
my old toki pona lessons later this year, I’m absolutely going to be using this as
the vocabulary list for those videos.
oh, and I almost forgot, in addition to the dictionary itself, Toki Pona Dictionary opens
with a number of corrections and clarifications for The Language of Good.
I won’t go over all of these, but some highlights include acknowledgements of some changes to
toki pona grammar, amendments to the problematic definitions of nasa and akesi, and, very excitingly,
a correction of my personal favorite mistake in pu, the fact that seli is defined as an
adjective that means “fire”.
also also, the Dictionary closes with a few creative works made by different authors,
including a very silly and very good proposal for a seximal numbering system based around
the word kijetesantakalu, which I absolutely love.
so, that’s the Toki Pona Dictionary.
I personally found it to be a phenomenal resource.
jan Sonja did a great job compiling this information, and presenting it in an easy to digest way.
I wouldn’t really recommend this for absolute beginners, but if you have any baseline knowledge
of how to speak toki pona, the Dictionary serves as a perfect companion text to The
Language of Good. and for those absolute beginners to toki pona, I’d recommend reading pu first.
anyway, thanks for watching, and a huge thanks to jan Sonja for sending me an exclusive preview
of this book.
the twenty-year anniversary of toki pona is coming up pretty soon, and I’ve got something
planned to put out for that, so.
stay tuned!