Basic English uses approximately 850 words, and produced this communication between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt:
Churchill (so much for automatic text recognition): "When I was with you in the United States last August you expressed to me your interest in Basic English. The Cabinet Committee which I appointed here to consider the possibilities of Basic and means of promoting its wider use have reported and we have adopted the recommendations they have rode. I thought it might be of interest to you to see the Report and am sending you copi
[...]
"If the United States authorities feel able to give their powerful support to the promotion of Basic English as a means of international intercourse, I feel sure that that would ensure its successful development. My conviction is that Basic English will then prove to be a great boon to mankind in the future and a powerful support to the influence of the Anglo-Saxon peoples in world affairs."
FDR: "...Incidentally, I wonder what the course of history would have been if in May 1940 you had been able to offer the British people only "blood, work, eye water and face water", which I understand is the best that Basic English can do with five famous words...."
Of course Basic English cheats by including all the phrasal verbs, without considering that they are usually separate lexical items. "pick on" or "pass for" aren't easily decipherable based purely on their components.
Any language with a small number of "words" will have to do the same thing. At the other end of the spectrum are agglutinative languages, like Turkish and German (?).
Yes, but the combinations in English are somewhat arbitrary. It's obvious in context what flyingmetaltube might refer to. It's not obvious that "pony up" means to settle an account, rather than something about hovering horses.
You inspired me to look into this more and it turns out that George Orwell was inspired to invent Newspeak (from his book 1984) from his experience with Basic English. He was initially a big proponent of it but eventually turn against the idea.
It's a classic test of a computer programming language to see if it can self-host - that is, to write a compiler or interpreter for the language, in the language.
I'd love to see this article translated into Toki Pona to get a sense of the expressiveness of the language.
How much is being left to the listener to figure out what must have been meant ...
I tried translating a couple of paragraphs and found that the article was mostly too abstract and specific to make it practical.
I thought one of the most impressive complete translations is the entire script of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (completed by jan Pije back in 2004). You can read it line-by-line with the English and toki pona texts alternating. I've read most of it and thought the quality of the translation was uniformly excellent.
The creator of toki pona seems to be a fan of the Finnish language. Several of the words are loaned directly (although without umlauts) and keep their original Finnish meaning.
At a glance: älä, kala, -kin, nenä, nimi, sama, sinä are exact Finnish words and "pimeja" is a slight alteration of "pimeä". Kiwen, lipu, linja and walo are probably Finnish inspired as well.
Another common trend seems to be using a simplified and shortened forms of the phonetic spelling of English words such as "ale" (all), "en" (and), "insa" (inside), "jaki" (yucky), "jelo" (yellow), "kama" (come), "ken" (can), "kule" (color), "lukin" (looking), "mani" (money), "mi" (me), "mun" (moon), "nanpa" (number), "pata" (brother), "suwi" (sweet), "tawa" (towards), "toki" (talking), "tu" (two), "wan" (one) and "wile" (will).
Slightly distorted, but still close: "anpa" (under), "kulupu" (sounds like a Japanese transliteration of group, グループ), "pilin" (feeling), "sewi" (ceiling) and "sike" (circle).
This actually helps a lot in memorizing the vocabulary. :)
She deliberately picked a broad sample of roots across human languages so people would find it easy to learn. It's pretty easy to say basic things in Toki Pona, which is all that is possible to say in this language?
In Chinese, the word computer translates directly as electric brain. In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-watcher. In Lakota, horse is literally dog of wonder. These neologisms demonstrate the cumulative quality of language, in which we use the known to describe the unknown.
I think most people would be better served by learning to use the etymology information in a good dictionary than by using the oral equivalent of Brainfuck.
“What is a car?” Lang mused recently via phone from her home in Toronto. “You might say that a car is a space that's used for movement,” she proposed. “That would be tomo tawa. If you’re struck by a car though, it might be a hard object that’s hitting me. That’s kiwen utala.”
A language that doesn't offer any sort of empirical consistency doesn't strike me as adaptive. Rather, this seems like an attempt to recapture the lost imaginative potential of early childhood by limiting oneself to the limited vocabulary of a toddler.
It seems to me that much of the point of the language is to engender a change in the way the speaker thinks and engages with speaking. So a better analogy than Brainfuck might be functional programming in general. Many people learn a functional language not for purposes of using it in the course of day-to-day software development, but because knowing — really grokking — functional programming makes you a better programmer.
I realize that, but why not just learn another established language? OK, it will take longer because you'll have to master a more complex grammar, vocabulary, and idiom, but on the plus side you'll be able to communicate with millions of people, in many cases. The notion that speaking more than one language improves your overall cognitive ability is already widely accepted.
Because the simplicity of Toki Puna is the very point of it. Even Einstein said, "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."
Using such an (admittedly, over-) simplified language would probably go a long way towards helping you approach your speech in such a way that you could explain things with that kind of simplicity of expression.
Einstein is also alleged to have said 'Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.'
It's not that I don't think you could communicate in TP, but that I'm not sure what advantage it has over competing approaches. As I mentioned elsewhere, facial expressions and gesture already go a long way towards bridging language gaps, even (or maybe especially) with small children.
Exactly, the translation of microscope from Greek is also 'small looker', if we didn't have such a fetish for using Greek and Latin words to make things sound more 'sciencey' English would be equally transparent.
To be fair, this is common of many bilinguals when the other language is not in common use in their lives. I personally know at least 8 bilinguals ranging from Chinese to Zulu that can understand the language, once-upon-a-time spoke it well, are spoken to in the language, but respond in English.
It happens frequently when the only time they ever use the language is with their parents/family and their parents can understand English just fine.
If you managed to spread it so almost anyone knew those 120 words then it would make a very useful and accessible international language. To handle the little things while abroad without having to learn another "starter pack" of words/sentences everywhere your business takes you, that would be great imho.
One of the problems with doing things that way is that you'll still develop locale-specific conventions. You might go somewhere and say "electric brain," but they call it a "fast counting beans." And then you'll be speaking different languages anyway.
Having heard neither phrase before, I'm pretty sure I know what you meant by them. It's not a perfect system but it's better than talking extra-loud English and adding hand signals.
My point is more about how language evolves from common roots, and even if we all start with the same language, it will probably diverge over time we'll be back where we started. Though I suppose it could act as a temporary reprieve, assuming you ignored the costs of teaching it.
She lost me when she got into finding adjectives to describe the experience of interacting with a car. If you're relying on abstractions and adjectives to replace nouns, then it's a dead-end. We already have a universal primitive language in the form of facial expressions and gestures that (almost) everyone has access to, with which we can bootstrap communication quite easily.
While it would be indeed the best scenario that the whole humanity learned a common fully developed language, let's face it, it's highly unrealistic. The good thing about a stripped down, simple language like Toki Pona is that it would make it easier/less expensive to learn and therefore easier to spread. Plus as it is not tied to any country it avoids the classic chauvinism of some people who simply refuse to learn something coming from a "competing" nation.
You can probably meet a stranger and exchange some pleasantries on a hike together. You won't write a physics textbook. But languages can be used in different functional domains, and that's fine.
That is not a textbook. That is people explaining to children what the field is about.
Try translating this, from an actual textbook, to toki pona:
"This section shows how depth-first search can be used to perform a topological sort of a directed acyclic graph, or a 'dag' as it is sometimes called. A topological sort of a dag G = (V,E) is a linear ordering of all its vertices such that if G contains an edge (u,v), then u appears before v in the ordering. (If the graph is not acyclic, then no linear ordering is possible.)"
This one is a little insidious, because presumably you are not allowed to introduce new words into Toki Pona.
Sonja might say that toki pona was designed to make texts like this difficult to express, but an extra challenge is that there are so few words that could be repurposed as technical terms. For example, the existing term wawa means 'force, power, strength, energy' (which are of course all different technical terms in physics, so if we wanted to say "change in energy is the integral of power with respect to time" or "change in energy is the integral of force with respect to distance", we're already kind of out of luck, even ignoring how toki pona doesn't clearly have a way to refer to integration or multiplication).
We might try to describe the dag in this way.
mi mute li lukin e ijo mute e linja mute. linja ale li kama tan ijo wan li tawa ijo ante. sike ala li lon.
('we see many objects and lines. all lines come from one object and go to another object. no round thing is present.')
However, it is still ambiguous whether "wan" refers to an arbitrary node or a specific node (because toki pona has no term for "each" vs. "any"). We could try to get around this with a process-oriented approach ("choose an object"), but I've never found a clear way to say "choose". And of course a reader might interpret "sike ala li lon" as saying that the nodes aren't circular or that the edges aren't curved, as opposed to that no cycles are present in the graph structure.
As an update, I think a lot of speakers would guess the right interpretation of
nasin sike li lon ala ('round paths are not present')
for the cycle-free condition. We could also try to say
nasin li kama tan ijo wan li tawa ijo sama la nasin ni li lon ala ('when a path comes from one object and goes to the same object, this path doesn't exist')
This kind of abstraction -- referring to conditions based on hypothetical individuals -- is very rare in toki pona. (There isn't even a grammatical way to directly form relative clauses.)
So you would use "mi mute li lukin e ijo mute e linja mute. linja ale li kama tan ijo wan li tawa ijo ante. nasin sike li lon ala" whenever you want to say dag. In a section where dag is mentioned ten times, that would be kind of painful.
It gets even worse because there are no relative clauses! I guess you could refer to the entire dag as a "sitelen" (here 'image, picture') and then say "mi mute li lukin e sitelen ni. ona li jo e ijo mute e linja mute..." and then refer to the dag as "sitelen" on every subsequent reference.
I'm definitely not going to defend toki pona's convenience or utility for talking about math. :-)
What you get in Toki Pona is a series of lexicalized phrases from word compounds.
In a natural language, you would get these along with the borrowings or coinages, to a greater or lesser extent based on the culture's attitude toward lexical borrowing.
Toki Pona has a strong cultural bias against borrowing, and probably (perhaps somewhat like Pirahã) a strong cultural bias against discussing complex, abstract concepts precisely.
I've got to wonder to what degree this approach is really hiding the "real" language in a higher-level encoding.
E.g. you can write english in morse code, but the combination of those dots and dashes is where the "real" language is, instead of the dots and dashes themselves...
> hiding the "real" language in a higher-level encoding
Exactly. In the middle of the article they discuss coming up with an expression to mean "car". Of the many word combinations one might choose (they go with "tomo tawa"), one of them would have to emerge as the standard way to say "car", otherwise effective communication would not really be possible. But at that point you've just created a new word. "Tomo tawa" no longer means anything that combination of words might possibly mean - it means car.
I'd suggest there's a certain irreducible vocabulary, and its size is going to be the same no matter how many base words are used to compose it.
Basically, exactly what happens with compounds like <black> + <bird> => <blackbird> -- blackbirds are a specific sub-category of "black birds", not just any bird with black feathers.
And it's completely analogous to every other language where we come up with words by combining "auto" and "mobile". It would be challenging to determine what an automobile was from just the word and it would be almost impossible to recreate the word had you just been given the object and asked to come up with one. Might as well say that English is a language with 26 words.
Though I imagine this makes spelling and pronunciation easier to remember.
It's not really the same thing. Morse code is basically a different way to write or say letters. If you reverse the morse code, you get letters, then you have a message written in English, German, Spanish, Esperanto... (or even in Arabic or Korean, if you transliterate the original message in latin alphabet).
Very cool. The grammatical basics seem a lot like Chinese, with similar word order, and a couple Japanese-esque particles thrown in (li ≈ が, e ≈ を). Lacking tense, conjugation / declension, subject / verb agreement, grammatical gender, etc., I've always felt the basics of Chinese make a pretty good foundation for a simple language.
I'm curious about the decision to include the grammatical particles, and why it seemed necessary...anyone have a full enough understanding of the grammar to know why the decision was made to allow dropping the "li" particle with "mi" and "sina", but not getting rid of it in general? Chinese similarly lacks a 'to be' copula, and gets by quite well without a subject marker.
c.f.
EN: I (am) good
TP: mi pona
ZH: 我好
EN: Water is good
TP: telo >li< pona
ZH: 水好
Japanese explicitly demarcates the subject / topic, but seems to allow a bit more variety at the beginning of the sentence + uses that demarcation to add a connotation of emphasis or contrast with a previous topic + isn't a conlang. Anyone have a feeling for what it adds here?
I think it's to distinguish between adjectives. Perhaps telo pona means good water so "telo pona li lete" is clear that "good water is cold". I don't know I'm totally guessing here :D
Your interpretation is right. There's an example somewhere in one of the official tutorials that shows how moving the li can change the meaning for this reason (although "pi", which means something like "of", was also added for a similar reason: I think Sonja's example was distinguishing two ways of grouping "tomo telo nasa", where "(tomo telo) nasa" would mean "crazy bathroom" and "tomo (telo nasa)" would mean "bar, liquor store" -- so Sonja said the second case would be expressed by "tomo pi telo nasa").
It isn't permitted in a lot of contexts where it would be used in English, but it's still the copula. Here are the examples of copula use that wikipedia gives which require 是 in Chinese:
Mary and John are my friends.
The Morning Star is the Evening Star.
She was a nurse.
Dogs are carnivorous mammals.
I am your boss.
I'd be very surprised to see a Chinese person come out with 水好 for "water is good".
One other grammatical feature borrowed from Chinese is the way of asking and answering yes-no questions.
For example:
sina wile ala wile e moku?
you want not want OBJ food?
Answer can be "mi wile" or "mi wile ala" (I want / I don't want). One can also go even more Chinese-like and drop the subject pronoun in this context.
Or:
sina kute ala kute?
you hear not hear?
Sonja did provide an alternative way of asking yes-no questions, which is making a statement and appending "anu seme?" (literally 'or what?'), kind of like German "nicht wahr?" and Portuguese "não é?", among others. I think the Chinese style is more standard and pervasive today, though.
Well, I wouldn't regard toki pona as pro-drop in general -- subject pronouns are normally required (in part because verbs don't inflect for person and number). But there is a special case for answering a yes-no question:
I can tell you right now you're going to have some trouble with those colours. They reduced the colours to five:
> Toki Pona has a five-color palette: loje (red), laso (blue), jelo (yellow), pimeja (black), and walo (white). Like a painter, the speaker can combine them to achieve any hue on the spectrum. Loje walo for pink. Laso jelo for green.
So, what's Toki Pona for cyan, which two colours would you combine to create that colour? (Blue = cyan + magenta)
Or how would you describe 'magenta' in Toki Pona? (Red = magenta + cyan)
See the problem with using Red, Yellow, Blue + Black, White is that Red and Blue are pre-mixed! You're cutting out two of the true primary colours (magenta, cyan) which means you're significantly reducing the amount of colours you can accurately describe.
On the other hand, still using just five words: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, and White CAN describe nearly all of the colours we would need to communicate with language.
I wonder if the rest of the language is as well thought out as the colours...
Once you get past the basic colors, there's only referential colors... So instead of <single word for a specific type of pink> you would say 'salmon'. In the Latin languages (French), pink is just 'rose'. You could also glue different concepts. For example, in (unofficial) Dutch, a word for cyan/turquoise is 'appelblauwzeegroen', or 'apple-blue-sea-green'.
'appelblauwzeegroen'? Never heard of it, in my 42 years of being a native speaker of Dutch. Not too many references on the web either, except for a hint that it might mean 'ugly, undefinable color' (so, not referential).
Even splitting it up, 'apple blue; sea green' does not make any sense to me. Well sea green, maybe a bit, but not really in combination with the rest. Since it's a composite word* you can't find it in a dictionary, so I can't really check whether it really exists.
* One word made out of multiple, like the English "car mechanic" would become "automonteur". Though automonteur is an example common enough to have its own entry: http://www.woorden.org/woord/automonteur
Edit: as per this comment[1], I've ran it past a Belgian guy: the word seems to be Flemish indeed. He knows it as "a color between green and blue".
The original reply is actually correct. From Wikipedia:
"For a subtractive combination of colors, as in mixing of pigments or dyes, such as in printing, the primaries normally used are magenta, yellow, and cyan,[1] though the set of red, yellow, and blue is popular among artists."
I also learned the RYB colors as primary colors, and find it much easier to reason about than CMY. That's probably also the reason why artists use it.
For the 'simple' language, I agree that RYB + white and black are enough.
Does your printer print with light? I'm able to print out a full rainbow from my printer and it uses Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow, with Black for added punch and printing text.
My proposed list: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, and White was no longer than their list, it was no more difficult to understand than their list, and it is scientifically sound.
We have known for two centuries that the true primaries are Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (for pigment), why continue to propagate false primaries (red, yellow, blue) that omit the ability to describe entire sections of the spectrum? The language is no less specific.
Is there a difference between cyan and light blue? How about light cyan?
Cyan = cyan
light blue = (cyan + magenta) + white
light cyan = cyan + white
If you're starting with blue (cyan + magenta) you can't end up with only cyan and white by adding white to that. You have to remove the magenta.
Yellow is a true primary, but both Red and Blue are already mixes between primaries
While Yellow + Blue = Green, it's not as pure as the green made by cyan + yellow, because the blue + yellow green also includes magenta from the blue.
When it's easy to see that the true primaries are CMY, why continue to propagate a centuries-old colour model that doesn't adequately describe the colours we see around us.
I thought the point of this language was to break things down to their core, and combine ideas to come up with combintations. Yellow is fine, but both Blue and Red can be broken down further. There's still work to be done!
The CMYK color space is a color space that works well for printing technology, but there's no reason that has to have anything to do with language.
Most languages do not have a native word for "magenta" or "cyan". In fact, "cyan" is an unfamiliar word to most English speakers.
Also, if you made a language where all the colors were described in CMYK, how would you describe colors that are unprintable in CMYK such as lime green?
Plenty of human languages get by with a palette of dark/black, light/white, and red. It's likely that the only we have such a large palette of basic color terms is that we have a large dying/painting industry and can thus compare specific shades easily. Guy Deutscher has a great chapter on this in "Through the Language Glass".
http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/
This strikes me as a more interesting project than the one in the article. If you're going to put some silly restriction on yourself and then try to work around it, you might as well go all the way!
Knowing that this is a work in progress, do you have a dictionary? I'd be interested in it.
No working language has that few words. All that happens if you try, is you get a whole lot of "words" that have spaces in them (or if you're German, no spaces).
If you push it to the extreme, a language only needs 2 words: 0 and 1.
It seems to me that there is a lot more than 120 distinct concepts you need to handle the modern world, even basically - so if you are using only 120 word, you must must have to combine some in a specific fixed fashion that will always represent that concept. At that point, shouldn´t that be considered a word ?
Well, actually I should probably read the article and see what people with degree on the subject have to say.
There are some sequences of toki pona words that have a fixed or conventional meaning that you might not be able to be confident of just by knowing the meaning of the component parts, like telo nasa 'alcoholic drink' (lit. 'crazy water'), jan pona 'friend' (lit. 'good person'), jan lawa 'ruler, government official' (lit. 'head person'), nasin sewi 'religion' (lit. 'noble path'), meli olin 'girlfriend, wife' (lit. 'love woman').
You can see some official glossaries of these phrases as of 2010 at
I have been wondering about ways to allow communication in internet communities (games and other social spaces) that are safe (not allowing personally identifiable information) and cross-lingual. I'd love to see an online game attempt to adopt a symbolic language such as this. The lexicon is small enough that you might not even have to type - just select the word you want from a nested menu.
Some people have started cross-linguistic communication with the huge sets of emoji that are now out there in Unicode (including telling stories!).
There are really no communication systems that are "safe" in the way you mean if their users can adopt codes that give new meanings to old symbols. For example,
I know I can't keep people from inventing their own compound terms for "loser noob", I just want to make it extremely difficult to for predators to get personal information.
Yeah. Faxinating, but sounds like a feelgood Newspeak. The apathy and digs at technology and numbers are hilariously perverse. I think I would try to learn some for fun though. The contrast with the other language made me lol hard...
But to only understand 10% of a programming language's syntax seems a very limited understanding.
To only know 10% of the standard library or whatever is one thing... but 10% of syntax?
Either you don't know the language well at all, or else it must have a very complex syntax, with a lot of edge cases.
That's one of the nice things about (say) scheme, or lua, say. There's very little syntax to learn. Go, JS, Ruby and Python, more... but still, not that much syntax, really.
Even Ruby doesn't really have that much syntax to learn. Ruby, Python and Go all have pretty huge std libs, but not that much syntax.
Ruby presents a very simple, understandable surface, but trust me, as you go deeper it gets very, very strange. I've used the thing for fifteen years and there still things that make me go "Huh, I didn't know that" but they're obscure quirks that you can go an entire career without encountering.
Any non-trivial language will have an ugly layer that the language designers couldn't quite get rid of.
Plus, unless your language is dead, it will continue to evolve and add new features that you will have no knowledge of unless you make an effort to absorb them.
Really? Do you really need to know what the comma operator does in C?
Do you really need to know the difference between `void foobar(void)` and `void foobar()`?
There are a lot of things in a language even as simple as C that's useless syntactic trivia. I imagine someone could think of really evil things in C++
Hm. Maybe I made myself unclear - I was meaning to be specifically in response to the parent post, who said that only knowing 10% made him feel empowered.
I was meaning, in a sense, that it's better to have a language which doesn't have such a complex history, undefined behaviour, and weird syntactic trivia.
The simpler the language, the less unexpectedness occurs, and the more you can concentrate on the actual logic and meaning.
For instance, in English, "homosexual" = attracted sexually to those who are the same ("homo") gender as yourself. But "homophobic" does not mean hating/fearing those the same gender as yourself. The rules are complex, with history, weirdness, and are confusing.
The same with programming languages, I feel. Take JS, for instance.
There is no reason on earth I want to know that stuff or operator precedence rules. I can never remember those if I need to do a `x * y + 2 z --` and so always write in brackets explicitly. But the language can accept such things, and make an order from them.
Going back to C (sorry for jumping around), yes, it's simple compared to C++, or many other languages, but it does have a lot of history, undefined behaviour, and stuff you simply need to be aware of. And it's that stuff that makes life complex for C beginners (and allows bugs for C of all experience levels). There's a reason I didn't list C as a simple language. :-)
"'What is a car?' Lang mused recently via phone from her home in Toronto.
"'You might say that a car is a space that's used for movement,' she proposed. “That would be tomo tawa. If you’re struck by a car though, it might be a hard object that’s hitting me. That’s kiwen utala.'"
Churchill (so much for automatic text recognition): "When I was with you in the United States last August you expressed to me your interest in Basic English. The Cabinet Committee which I appointed here to consider the possibilities of Basic and means of promoting its wider use have reported and we have adopted the recommendations they have rode. I thought it might be of interest to you to see the Report and am sending you copi
[...]
"If the United States authorities feel able to give their powerful support to the promotion of Basic English as a means of international intercourse, I feel sure that that would ensure its successful development. My conviction is that Basic English will then prove to be a great boon to mankind in the future and a powerful support to the influence of the Anglo-Saxon peoples in world affairs."
FDR: "...Incidentally, I wonder what the course of history would have been if in May 1940 you had been able to offer the British people only "blood, work, eye water and face water", which I understand is the best that Basic English can do with five famous words...."
http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box37/t335k01.html