real quick before the episode itself
starts, I'd like to make a correction. in
the previous episode, by which I mean the
FluidLang episode, I said that FluidLang
wasn't a good international language,
which is true, but as it
turns out, that's because FluidLang
isn't supposed to be an international
language. my apoligies to
AndrewTheConlanger. so, I will now
officially say, ahem, all in all,
I'd say that I like FluidLang more than I
like Láadan, but not as much as Ithkuil,
making it the fourth best artlang reviewed so far.
with that out of the way, thank you to
thelabyrynthmaker, nothinolife, Riley Smith,
I Call Him Gerald, Naturenerd1000,
ItalianBayoThing,
MillionEyeStalker, Andrew Indomenico,
jan Morphimus, Stuart Thomas,
and Thomas Faulhaber for
requesting this episode. o kama pona tawa
sitelen tawa Conlang Critic, tawa kulupu
sitelen tawa ni: ona li sona
ike e toki sin ni:
ona li pona tawa SINA! mi
jan Misali. a, sitelen tawa ni la mi
lukin e toki ni: toki pona.
I'm gonna be completely
honest with you; I'm a little biased
favor of this one. it's no Secretsh [note to translators: this is a portmanteau of "secret shh"]
that Toki Pona is my favorite language.
I first said that in the aUI episode.
I've started every episode introducing myself
as "jan Misali", and on the
Discord server, I've taken every opportunity
to tell people that Toki Pona
absolutely is worth learning. that's
probably why so many of you
wanted to know my exact opinion. there were
actually more people who wanted this episode
than there were people who wanted a ;) episode.
what exactly is it about
Toki Pona that makes me like it so much?
Toki Pona is an engineered language
that was created in 2001 by
Sonja Lang. everything about it was designed
around the concept of minimalism, from its
fourteen phonemes to its hundred twentyish
words. this makes it unreasonably
easy to learn. personally, it took me like
a week to learn it, and only a couple months
later, I was confident enough in my abilities to
try to start teaching others. learnability is
something that conlangs designed to be used internationally
tend to struggle with. the thing is,
Toki Pona isn't even primarily
designed as an international language, but it
absolutely nails this.
for that reason, I'll be reviewing Toki Pona
as an interlang, not as an artlang.
its consonants are:
"is that it?" you say. "where's the voiced plosives?
where's the fricatives?
where's the Rhontics?" believe it or not,
these are all nine of Toki Pona's
consonants. all of them are clearly
distinct from one another, and all of them are
extremely common cross linguistically. the
overwhelming majority of natural languages
have every single one of these sounds,
every single natural language has the overwhelming
majority of these sounds.
Toki Pona's vowels are:
ah, yes, the five
vowel system. now, I've said before
that I prefer the three vowel system,
but the five vowel system works fine
here. after all, languages that have less than
five vowels tend to have other features
that Toki Pona doesn't have,
like length, diphthongs, and/or
an absurd number of consonants. plus, in
addition to there being a small number of phonemes,
there's also a small number of total syllables,
which are shown here. this is a syllable structure
called (C)V(N), or consonant vowel nasal.
it's in some major languages, like
Mandarin and Japanese. on top of that, you
can't have consecutive vowels or consecutive
nasals. all this together means that
Toki Pona's phonology maximizes
pronounceability for everyone regardless of their
first language. as far as I can tell, there isn't a
single natural language with monolingual
speakers that has fewer syllables than Toki Pona.
the orthography just
IS the IPA, except that
loanwords are capitalized and there's punctuation.
so the name of the language is spelled
like this and pronounced like this. well,
technically, I pronounce it more like this, but as
is it was mentioned before, Toki Pona's
phonology is so small, it doesn't even matter
how you pronounce its words. anyway, due to its
minimal phonology, Toki Pona can be written with
literally any writing system, though
some adaptation is needed for writing it with
abjads. still, it can be easily written
with Cyrillic, the Greek Alphabet,
Hiragana, Devanagari,
Hangul, Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics,
Cherokee, you name it! there also
have been several original writing systems for
Toki Pona that have been made by the Toki Pona community,
one of which is included in Toki Pona:
The Language of Good, along with a logography made by
Sonja Lang herself. Toki Pona's grammar
appears to be missing a few things at first glance.
instead of saying, "fruit tastes better
than bugs," you say, "fruit
tastes good and bugs taste bad."
actually, you say that as two separate
sentences. "fruit tastes good.
bugs taste bad." actually, there isn't
really a word for taste so you need to
rephrase it as "fruit is good food.
bugs are bad food." actually, you
can't express plurals without saying something like
"fruit is good food. many bug is
bad food." you might think that this is really
inconvenient, but this sort of workaround helps
minimize the amount of grammar you need to
learn. as it stands, Toki Pona can be described
in full on a single sheet of paper with
the vocabulary on one side, and the grammar and
phonology on the other side, an accomplishment that many
other supposedly easy conlangs
could only dream of. the vocabulary
is the main thing people usually bring up
when they talk about Toki Pona. Toki Pona has
between a hundred twenty and a hundred twenty five
words, depending on who you ask. this means that
you could easily memorize the entire thing in
one month, and if you try hard enough, you could
memorize the entire thing over a single weekend.
and unlike the other languages with
absurdly tiny vocabularies we've seen on
this show, the way you combine words in Toki Pona
actually makes sense! remember
one quantity above life towards from the
aUI episode? the Toki Pona word for banana
is kili palisa, or
stick shaped fruit. remember good foam food
from the Ygyde episode? the
Toki Pona word for pie is pan suwi,
or sweet grain. a friend is
jan pona, a good person,
and alcohol is telo nasa,
a weird liquid. the only problem
I have with the vocabulary is the
number system, which is next to nonexistent,
but that can be justified by saying that
specifying exact amounts of things
isn't important most of the time. the
idea of a distinction being unimportant
is the source of pretty much all
of Toki Pona's apparent lexical gaps.
good and simple are the same word because
why are you speaking Toki Pona if you don't think simplicity
makes things good? want and need
are the same word because why would you ever want something
that you don't also need? all in all, I'd
say that I like Toki Pona more than I like Lojban,
making it the bast interlang reviewed so far.
thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time,
where I'll be reviewing