The 2002 Home Page of Toki Pona

From: "Viktoro" vixcafe@yahoo.ca Date: Tue Sep 17, 2002 0:20pm Subject: Re: Some initial thoughts / Toki Pona vixcafe Offline Offline Send Email Send Email

--- In eurocreole@y..., "James Chandler" <idojc@h...> wrote:

1. That the grammar be completely isolating, ie. morphology-free.

I just would like to call attention to what I consider a good pidgin design, that of Toki Pona: See http://www.tokipona.org/

Quoted from the website:

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Simple and Natural

Modern languages are cluttered with complex methods to express the simplest things.

What is a geologist but a person who studies the earth? Is there any useful difference between the words talk, speak, and say? Toki Pona breaks down all advanced ideas to their most basic elements. If you are hungry, you want eat. To teach is give knowledge.

This allows us to drastically reduce the vocabulary and grammatical structures needed to say what we have to say. Less is more.

Philosophy

A number of philosophies or principles have inspired me to create a language such as Toki Pona.

Toki Pona is semantically, lexically, and phonetically minimal. The simplest and fewest elements are used to create the maximum effect.

In many ways, Toki Pona resembles a pidgin. When people from different cultures need to communicate, they must focus on the concrete, simple things that are most universal to humanity.

Toki Pona follows the principles of Taoism, which advocates a simple, honest life and noninterference with the course of natural events.

I have also been inspired by anthropological primitivists such as Sahlins and John Zerzan, whose writings critique the totality of modern civilization, recognising the superiority of natural, primitive cultures.

Toki Pona can lead to an interesting game of semantic decomposition. Just as one can decompose a mathematical fraction such as 4/8 to 1/2, we can break down language to its most basic and tangible units of meaning and discover what things really mean.

According to reductionism, complex ideas and systems can be completely understood in terms of their simpler parts or components.

Since Toki Pona expresses things in their most natural and simple way, an inherent idea of goodness is transparent throughout the language. Health is good body. Happiness is feel good. Toki Pona itself means good language.

Above all, Toki Pona must be fun and cute. As everything seems to be oversimplified and ideas focus on the good, one could almost imagine a race of little cartoon creatures speaking in Toki Pona.

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http://interlanguages.net/eurocreole1.html