toki! mi jan Misali. kulupu ni pi sitelen tawa la sina ken kama sona e toki pona. ni
li sitelen tawa nanpa wan: “toki pona li seme?”.
this is the first video in a twelve part series about toki pona, a minimalist language created
by jan Sonja, first published in the year 2001. in this series, I will be giving an
overview of how the language works, as described in the two official books.
with a growing community of thousands of speakers, toki pona is one of the most popular constructed
languages out there, and in my opinion, that’s because learning toki pona is a lot of fun.
it’s a language with less than two hundred words. in fact, there are fewer words in toki
pona’s core vocabulary than there are first generation pokémon. this restrictive vocabulary
means that when speaking toki pona, talking about any complex subject involves describing
what that thing is in simpler terms. as jan Sonja has said, “if English is a thick novel,
then toki pona is a haiku”.
the name “toki pona” means “good language”. the first word in the name is “toki”,
which generally means “communicate” or “communication”.
you can also use toki as an interjection. saying “toki!” on its own is a way of
announcing that communication is happening, as a way of starting a conversation. naturally,
this is the most common way to say “hello” in toki pona.
all content words in toki pona have multiple functions like this. this is a very important
part of how the language is able to work with such a small vocabulary. as you learn more
words, you can start to develop more of an intuition for how these functions are related
to each other.
it’s important to remember that these multiple functions are not the same thing as a word
having multiple meanings. all of these ideas encapsulated by toki fall under the large
umbrella of “communication”. it’s one single idea, but it corresponds to a large
number of different English words, because English words are categorically more specific
and precise than toki pona words.
the second word is “pona”, which means “good”.
adjectives go after nouns in toki pona, which is the opposite to how they work in English,
so in a two-word noun phrase like “toki pona”, the first word functions as a noun,
and the second functions as an adjective. so, “toki pona” means “good language”.
you sometimes also see pona translated as “simple”. this is part of the philosophy
of toki pona. in this language, the way to describe any given concept isn’t a question
of knowing what “the word” for the concept is, like it is in most other languages. instead,
figuring out how to talk about something means figuring out what you believe that thing is,
from your own subjective point of view.
because of this, pona doesn’t just mean “good”, it means “good, in my own subjective
opinion”. describing something as pona is a way of saying it’s something you personally
like. so, if you don’t personally think simplicity is one of the concepts that falls
under the “pona” umbrella, then for you, it doesn’t.
but, since toki pona is a language where its simplicity is its main appeal, anyone who
speaks toki pona is pretty likely to personally subjectively enjoy things that are simple.
so that’s why pona can be used to mean “simple”. the word “ike” can be used similarly.
it can mean bad, evil, or wrong, in a moral, emotional, objective or subjective sense.
this type of broad meaning isn’t particularly uncommon (all of this applies just as well
to the English word “bad”), but it’s part of the philosophy of the language that
applies similarly to pretty much every other word.
sorry, right, I’m getting ahead of myself. let’s talk about phonology!
toki pona uses nine consonants and five vowels. due to the small phonemic inventory, each
phoneme has a wide range of acceptable pronunciations. for the most part, these consonants are pronounced
the way they are in English. the exception is the letter ⟨j⟩, which represents a
palatal semivowel, /j/, like the English letter ⟨y⟩. so, this word, which means “person”,
is pronounced like /jan/, with a /j/. this is the value the letter ⟨j⟩ has in the
International Phonetic Alphabet, which is why toki pona uses it this way.
the five vowels in toki pona are the standard five-vowel system: /i u e o a/.
this means vowels are pronounced the way they are in languages like Spanish, Japanese, or
Swahili. like consonants, there is room for variation with how they can be pronounced.
and really that’s pretty much all you need to remember when you’re reading toki pona
text, at least for now. ⟨j⟩ is pronounced like English ⟨y⟩, and the vowels are the
standard five-vowel system. there’s like, two other things you’ll eventually need
to know, but they’re not relevant yet.
oh, right, one other thing. toki pona only uses capital letters for names, and not at
the start of sentences. I generally avoid capitalizing the starts of sentences in English
for aesthetic purposes, but in toki pona that’s normal. the only time toki pona uses capital
letters is for proper names, as in “jan Sonja”, or “jan Misali”.
that’s enough about that for now. I think it’s time to introduce one of the most fundamental
pieces of toki pona grammar: the particle “li”.
“li” is a very important word. you can basically think of it as a “verbifying”
particle. it marks that whatever comes after it is being used as a verb. so for example,
we can make the sentence “jan li toki,” where li is marking that “toki” is a verb!
this sentence means something like “a person talks.”
however, this translation adds extra information that is not present in the original sentence.
“jan” could be translated as “a person”, “people”, “the person”, “the people”,
“someone”, “humanity”, and so on. likewise, “li toki” could be translated
as “talks”, “talked”, “is talking”, “has talked”, et cetera.
some would call the amount of ways a simple sentence like this can be translated into
English “ambiguous”, but I’d argue that it isn’t ambiguous: it’s vague. it’s
not that it could mean any of these individual sentences, and there’s no way to figure
out which one it’s supposed to mean; it’s that the one thing this sentence means is
broader than any possible English translation you could give.
like, the English sentence “she hit the man with an umbrella” is ambiguous, because
it could either mean that she used an umbrella to hit the man, or that the man she hit is
the one who has an umbrella. it could mean either of those things separately, and it’s
unclear which one it is without additional context.
however, it’s also unclear what color the umbrella is, or what her age is relative to
the man she hit, or what time of day it was when this happened, or how many people saw
it, and an infinite number of other possible factors. I’d say that this is not ambiguous,
it’s just information that isn’t specified. it’s not ambiguous, it’s just fuzzy.
anyway, toki pona doesn’t have the verb “to be.” to express the idea that something
is something else, you just put it into that verb spot marked with li. for example, to
say “a person is good”, you would say “jan li pona”. don’t forget to include
“li”! without li, “jan pona” on its own just means “a good person”. it’s
a noun phrase rather than a complete sentence.
side note, because pona means “good, in the sense that I personally like it”, “jan
pona” can be more accurately translated as “someone I like”. so, jan pona is the
most common way to say “friend” in toki pona.
another example, “toki pona” means “a good language”, but “toki li pona” is
a full sentence meaning “a language is good”, or possibly “communication is good”. but
remember, “li” isn’t the verb here. li is verbing the word that comes after it.
translated literally, “jan li pona” means something closer to “a person goods” or
“a person is gooding”. but in general, “X li Y” is the way to say “X is Y”
in toki pona. this means that a sentence like “jan li
moku” could mean either “a person eats” or “a person is food”. there are ways
to work around this, but for the most part this is something that can be inferred by
context.
now that we know how verbs work, let’s look at some other examples!
lape means sleep, or rest. this is actually cognate with the English word “sleep”,
fun fact. and olin means love! as you can probably pick
up by now, this is a broad sense of love that includes all the various meanings that the
English word has.
now that we have some more verbs, let’s move on to pronouns. toki pona has only one
third person pronoun, “ona”. unlike English third person pronouns, the
word “ona” does not imply any information about gender, number, or animacy. it’s the
single all-purpose third person pronoun used for all your third person pronoun needs.
of course, you can specify information about number and gender if you want, which will
be covered in future videos, it’s just that that information isn’t baked into the pronoun
itself.
you can use ona as a noun, as in “ona li olin”, or as an adjective, where it works
like an English possessive pronoun, as in “moku ona li pona”.
the first and second person pronouns work very similarly. the first person pronoun is
“mi”. once again, this does not contain any grammatical
number information, so it could be either singular or plural. and again, this can be
used as an adjective, where it has the same function as an English possessive pronoun.
and then the second person pronoun is “sina”. there is an edge case in the grammatical rules
of toki pona for these two words. if the subject of a sentence is either just “mi” or just
“sina”, then the particle “li” is not used. so, rather than say “*sina li
pona” for “you are good”, you just say “sina pona”. similarly, to say “I am
a person”, that’s “mi jan”, not “*mi li jan”.
this exception only applies if the subject is just “mi” or “sina”. if the subject
is something like “moku sina”, “your food”, or “jan pona mi”, “my friend”,
you still need to use “li”.
and you know what, I think that’s enough grammatical concepts for now. there’s a
good amount more ground to cover, but that can wait for future videos.
so alright, let’s practice! first, I’ll give a few sentences for you to translate
into English.
let’s start with a basic one. what does “olin li pona” mean?
[pause]
yes, that’s exactly correct, “love is good”. don’t worry if you didn’t remember
what “olin” means, you’ll get the hang of it soon enough with some practice.
now, what do you think “ona li lape” means? [pause]
right! this sentence could mean “they sleep,” “she is sleeping,” “he slept,” or
any variation of that idea. remember, ona does not specify number or gender, and verbs
don’t mark tense! we’ll learn more about specifying time with verbs in a later lesson.
okay, what about “moku mi li ike”? [pause]
that’s right, this sentence translates to “my food is bad.” remember, you can use
pronouns like mi as adjectives too!
okay, now it’s your turn. how would you say “you love”?
[pause]
did you say “sina olin”? if so, good job! if you said “*sina li olin”, remember,
you don’t use li after mi or sina as subjects. as we saw in the last example, this doesn’t
apply when they’re adjectives like in “moku mi,” since they aren’t the subjects themselves.
okay, let’s try a more complicated one. how would you say “I am your friend”?
[pause]
need a hint? remember, in toki pona, a “friend” is a “good person”!
[pause]
exactly, it’s “mi jan pona sina”! congratulations! just look at how much you’ve learned in
such a short time! with toki pona, as long as you can grasp a few basic concepts, you
have the tools to express an extremely wide range of ideas.
well, that’s all for today’s lesson. I’ll try to put out at least one of these toki
pona lessons a month until this series is over, alternating between these and my other
videos. there’s a lot of fun things to cover in the rest of the series, so needless to
say, I’m a bit excited. mi tawa!