This Language Has Almost No Words
25th June 2024
Read it. And watch the video.
I think languages are really interesting but I’m also really bad at them. I cannot hack the memorization. I’ve mostly avoided conlangs (that’s Constructed Languages, like Esperanto or Klingon) because like, oh no, now there’s even more languages for me to fail at memorizing. So like, a language so minimal you can almost learn it by accident, suddenly my ears perk up.
Toki pona is really interesting, on a lot of different axes. It’s a thought experiment in Taoist philosophy that turns out to be actually, practically useful. It’s Esperanto But It Might Actually Work This Time¹. It has NLP implications— it’s a human language which feels natural to speak yet has such a deeply logical structure it seems nearly custom-designed for simple computer programs to read and write it². Beyond all this it’s simply beautiful as an intellectual object— nearly every decision it makes feels deeply right. It solves a seemingly insoluble problem³ and does it with a sense of effortlessness and an implied “LOL” at every step.
So what toki pona is. Toki pona is a language designed around the idea of being as simple as it is possible for a language to be. It has 120 words in its original form (now, at the twenty year mark, up to 123), but you can form a lot of interesting sentences with only around twenty or thirty (I know this because this is roughly the size of my current tok vocabulary).