Category Archives: toki pona

In Hinduism, there was the idea that words said in a prestige language were magic. People at has some pre-Sassurian ideas about sound and meaning, namely that there was something doggy about the sounds d-o-g and something catty about c-a-t. … Continue reading →

Some American Indian languages “don’t have” comparatives. All American Indian languages are small community languages (well, were) and those typically are mindbendingly complicated. There are so many mechanisms for expression that some familiar mechanism in European languages might be missing. … Continue reading →

This is about conlexing, not conlanging. In a conlex (article on definition forthcoming), there is a community of users and they don’t take well to deep reforms that you might see in independent conlanging or collaborative conlanging. In a collaborative … Continue reading →

Wikipedia has for a long time said this nonsense: This goal, together with Toki Pona’s deliberately restricted vocabulary, has led some to feel that the language, whose name literally means “simple language”, “good language”, or “goodspeak”, resembles George Orwell’s fictional … Continue reading →

A long while ago I got excited about a new language called toki pona. It had already been created and there was even a small community of fans and some national press. I joined the rabble not as a conlanger, … Continue reading →

N.B. Sign languages, like ASL, are real, complete languages. Manually signed English, finger spell, lip reading, and the other various systems forced upon the deaf community are fake. Now that we got that out of the way… [And if you … Continue reading →