ijokasijo

[ijokasijo]

So I've been learning French for a while and 'faire' is actually an incredible word. Like what a fucking breakthrough in economy of language.

Faire is a verb that is usually translated into English as "to do/to make," but it covers way more actions than that, which is very confusing for new speakers. because (I have realized) that's not really what faire means.

Faire is actually a word that just gestures vaguely in the direction of the object of the sentence and goes "you know." "Je fais du velo." "Je fais du courses." "Je fais mes valises." I'm biking. I go grocery shopping. I'm packing my bags. You're just sort of pointing at a bike and going "you know, the obvious thing you'd do with it."

English: "You mean RIDE it??"

French: "Sure whatever."

Like idk I just really enjoy the concept of a catch-all verb that you can just slap onto almost anything because who fucking gives a shit, you get the idea. There's a bike. what do you think I'm going to do with it.

[ijokasijo]

nnnn , sina ante e "Dream" tawa "sona lape musi" la ni li nasa a tawa mi - nimi "Dream SMP" li tan jan Dream , tan ala nimi "Dream" pi toki Inli . ken la mi toki e "musi Sijesenpi" anu "kulupu Sijesenpi" ?

I need to join more Dream SMP Discord servers <-lethe is in three Dream SMP Discord servers

[ijokasijo]

My favourite thing from jan Misali's toki pona tutorial series is when they spent a whole episode going through all the guidelines for tokiponising people's names, and concluded that ultimately people's names in toki pona should be whatever they prefer, and followed that up with "this is also true in english btw". I think about that all the time.

[ijokasijo]

nn , soweli li pona li suwi tawa jan ale - taso kijetesantakalu li musi tawa jan pi toki pona taso

soweli li ijo suli lon ilo Tumblr? ni li lon la tan seme? ilo Discord la kijetesantakalu li ijo nanpa wan. ilo Tumblr la mi pilin e ni. mi lukin mute e soweli la mi lukin lili e kijetesantakalu.

[ijokasijo]

ˈsɑri, bʌt wi kənˈvɜrtɪd jʊər ˈbɔɪˌfrɛnd ˈɪntu aɪ-pi-eɪ. jæ, ði ˌɪntərˈnæʃənəl fəˈnɛtɪk ˈælfəˌbɛt. ɪnˈstɛd ʌv ˈbiɪŋ meɪd ʌv wɜrdz naʊ hiz ə ˈstændərˌdaɪzd ˌrɛprəzɛnˈteɪʃən ʌv spiʧ saʊndz ɪn ˈrɪtən fɔrm. jæ, ˈprɪti mʌʧ ˈɛniˌwʌn ˈspikɪŋ ˈɛni ˈlæŋɡwəʤ kʊd ˈfɪɡjər aʊt haʊ tu seɪ hɪm. ˈsɑri

[ijokasijo]

hi, i hope u dont mind a response from someone whos involved in the toki pona community

1. i find the paragraph abt minimalism here a strange choice - you acknowledge that its just an association & not an actual criticism , but it feels bad for you to be going out of your way to sort of imply that toki pona is classist-by-association. the linguistic minimalism of toki pona & aesthetic minimalism share a name , but their underlying reasons are very different - fwik aesthetic / material minimalism is about intentionally reducing material attachments , while toki pona's minimalism is , how i see it , in service to the goal of making communication more direct , & therefore more honest - avoiding hiding behind flowery language to obscure your point, and the like. its a minimalism that challenges you to not do away with the extraneous , but to see it for what it is. this is an entirely different conversation than aesthetic / material minimalism

2. "The word 'pona' represents all facets of goodness and simplicity [...] Complexity is declared to be ontologically not just bad, but the same thing as badness."

heres a poll from a few weeks ago that i run in the community hub, ma pona pi toki pona - there is overwhelming community consensus that no, simple is not inherently/always pona , and no, complexity is not inherently/always ike.

simple is listed as a definition for pona in official books , because (as she has stated and will state, repeatedly), they are snapshots of the creators personal usage of the language, and not always a summary of how it is commonly spoken. a vast majority of the community do not hold simplicity as a concept thats core to pona - pona means good, & simplicity being associated with that just stems from that most people who choose to learn toki pona have an appreciation for simple things . so, yes - complexity can be pona if it is good, and simplicity can be ike if it is bad, and very few speakers have issues with this.

3. "This attitude results in Toki Pona enthusiasts being very convinced that [...] anything difficult to express in their language wasn't worth expressing anyway. It's a combination of intellectual elitism with anti-intellectualism. [...] any concept not easily translated must not be worth dealing with."

heres an video explaining non-euclidean geometry entirely in toki pona

what i think youre getting at is the addage that "some concepts cant be easily expressed/arent fit to be expressed in toki pona" , so thats what im adressing - its not that certain concepts are inexpressable in toki pona , or shouldnt be , but a matter of practicality - explaining complex things like advanced chemistry or rocket science or what have you just typically involves a lot of field-specific terminology that toki pona just doesnt have, so translating things involves building understanding up from the absolute ground-level concepts , which can be hard!! its not that complex fields shouldnt be spoken of in toki pona, just a matter of it being really inefficient to, because thats not what toki pona was designed for, & you lack the specific lexicon - but by all means , i do love to hear people do it anyways

4. "It's a combination of intellectual elitism with anti-intellectualism. The former manifests as an attitude that anyone who can't express what they want to say in a way the Toki Pona speaker deems "simple" (usually meaning "easily translated to Toki Pona") is somehow inadequate, and the latter as the idea that any concept not easily translated must not be worth dealing with."

this is the point that i have to recognize that either youre doing weird catastrophic extrapolation or youve just been around 1 or 2 really toxic tokiponists, which im sorry about. i dont - and i dont really think any toki pona speakers do - judge peoples other-language communication by the standards of toki pona. i admire toki pona for the way it tries to get past the obscuration of language by big flowery words & such , but my language in this post has gotten ornate at times - because im speaking English right now !! i do think speaking toki pona has personally helped me in learning to say what i mean in English without relying on buzzwords , but im not demanding that english speakers in general should be expressing themselves more like they would in toki pona, just like im not saying that English speakers should express themselves more like they would in Portugese - because theyre different languages with different linguistic cultures and best-practices, and it would be weird to do that, so no one does. honest and direct communication is good, and i like when people do that , but i think saying that toki pona speakers find it inadequate when people dont is a strawman argument.

i also disagree with the characterization of tokiponists as anti-intellectuals , because this is of course an intellectual field. we are having discussions about linguistics and philosophy & communications constantly, and a TON of toki pona speakers are also in cs & programming (which leads to a good amount of discussion about cs & programming in toki pona!) an admission that toki pona is a language with a use-case thats not designed for legal documents or chemistry textbooks or what-have-you doesnt mean that these are bad topics that should be avoided , or not things that speakers engage with - just that speakers largely use a different language when they do interact with them.

im open to talking more or answering further questions if you have more youd like to say - thank you , pona tawa sina

Hello hello! I saw you said something about Toki Pona being built on a poisonous philosophy and I was wondering if you could explain what you mean? You don't have to of course but I don't know anything about Toki Pona and the tag caught my interest. Have a nice day!

Okay so some context, both for you since you say you don't know anything about it and for my followers:

Toki Pona is a constructed language. It was originally designed to have a grand total of 120 words, and while the current word-count depends how you count them and who you ask, it's still below 150, the most common count of "essential" ones being 137. The creator, Sonja Lang, describes it as "an attempt to understand the meaning of life in 120 words".

As you can probably imagine, having only 137 words means each word has to do a lot of work — has to carry a lot of possible meanings. There are only five colour words (black, white, red, yellow, and bluegreen). There are only five number words (none/zero, one, two, many, all/infinite/manymany), and some of them also carry meanings that in English are not numbers (for example, the word for none or zero is also the word for not, and the word for all is also the word for life). One word means all kinds of grains, and also bread. You get the idea. This is, explicitly, not ambiguity but a declaration that each of these words represents a single underlying concept that can be translated into English in multiple ways. It's a claim that "life" and "everything" and "all of them" are in some way the same concept, and therefore get one word. Put a pin in that; we'll come back to it later.

Unfortunately, the underlying philosophy of Toki Pona is, as the word-count might suggest, minimalism. Minimalism as an ideology for life already had some serious issues in my book, notably in that the common version of it that leads to empty white rooms with one or two objects as "accents" is classist as all get out. It also encourages disposability culture, which ties into that — to live a "minimalist" life in that sense you have to (for example) not keep a jar of pens on your desk, because you can buy a disposable one when you need it so you shouldn't clutter your space with them when you don't. But that's just an association, not what can be poisonous about Toki Pona.

The name "Toki Pona" literally translates to "the language of good", but also "simple speech". The word "pona" represents all facets of goodness and simplicity. In Toki Pona, "simple" and "good" and indeed "useful" and "peace" are the same concept. "Okay," you might ask, "what's so bad about that?" I'll tell you what's so bad about it: in the same way, their antitheses are declared to be the same concept. Complexity (and all the shades of meaning it can give the world, all the understanding we can derive from it) is declared to be ontologically not just bad, but the same thing as badness. Specifically, that word — "ike" — is defined in the translation dictionary as "bad, negative; non-essential, irrelevant".

This attitude, in my experience, results in Toki Pona enthusiasts being very convinced that Toki Pona is inherently correct, and that anything that's difficult to express in that language wasn't worth expressing anyway. It's a combination of intellectual elitism with anti-intellectualism. The former manifests as an attitude that anyone who can't express what they want to say in a way the Toki Pona speaker deems "simple" (usually meaning "easily translated to Toki Pona") is somehow inadequate, and the latter as the idea that any concept not easily translated must not be worth dealing with.

This was kinda rambly but I hope it gave you a general idea of why, while I find it interesting as an experiment and an intellectual exercise, I despise Toki Pona as a philosophy.

[ijokasijo]

i love translations i love the act of translation i love it so so much

[ijokasijo]

아, 다서 미 겐 :] 시나 서나 아라 에 서나 미 아!!

미 겐 싣엘엔 에 독이 본아 겝엑엔 싣엘엔 항울 라 신아 겐 알아 손아 에 니. 니 라 신아 본아 알아

[ijokasijo]

And a world with fewer languages isn’t only a world with more limited means of communication. It’s also a world with fewer stories and folk tales, fewer hagiographies, fewer poems, myths, and recipes, fewer remedies, fewer memories.

Fennelly, Beth Ann. “Fruits We’ll Never Taste, Languages We’ll Never Hear: The Need for Needless Complexity”

[ijokasijo]

nn ! pilin mi li ni - sijelo mi li mi. mi tonsi - tan ni la, sijelo mi li tonsi kin. tenpo pini la, mi meli - taso tenpo ni la, ni li lili tawa mi. taso, pilin sina li pona (nasin pi jan tonsi ale li pona) - jan ante la, pilin tonsi li ante ❤️

mijetesantakalu o - toki "nimi meli li ante tawa nimi woman" li musi tawa lawa mi - (sina wile e ni la,) o toki suli e ni? mi wile sona e nasin sina a :] (kepeken toki Inli anu toki pona!)

jan tonsi la, nimi pi "mije tawa meli" en nimi pi "meli tawa mije" li ike tawa mi. mi meli lon tenpo ale. tenpo ala la mi mije. pilin mi en lawa mi en kon mi li ante ala a! mi ante e selo mi taso. ni la, mi toki ala e nimi pi "mije tawa meli", li toki e nimi pi "meli tonsi" anu nimi "meli" taso.

[ijokasijo]

the UK consists of 4 separate countries ("countries within a country" is phrasing used on several UK government websites) under the banner of one nation. all 4 are majority english-speaking (due to colonialism), but scotland and wales have their own indigenous languages, with welsh being official in wales, taught in schools, and spoken by around a third of the population.

switzerland and belgium are (singular) countries that have broad linguistic diversity, but save for romansh in switzerland, all of their official languages are native & official to other nations they border, and already represented on the map - whereas wales and scotland are again, their own countries with their own indigenous languages (largely) not spoken elsewhere. having scottish gaelic & welsh on the map doesn't hurt the data, & helps bring recognition to endangered languages (that the english government would very much like you to forget are spoken at all.)

Basic Order of Adjective and Noun in Europe.

by languages.eu

[ijokasijo]

People learning multiple languages will be like “I’m sorry I’m not fluent I’ve been learning this for months but my level is that of a six year old”

My brother in Christ how long do you think it took the six year old

[ijokasijo]

I love you phonetics I love you descriptivism I love you minority languages I love you dialects I love you accents I love you suffixes and prefixes I love you fossil words I love you outdated letters and pronouns I love you etymology I love you preservation of endangered languages I love you visible remnants of the way a language used to be I love you linguistics

[ijokasijo]

writing in a notebook with a glitter gel pen.....im kicking my feet n giggling but when u look at what im writing its ipa phonemic inventory charts

[ijokasijo]

fun fact about languages: a linguist who was studying aboriginal languages of Australia finally managed to track down a native speaker of the Mbabaram language in the 60s for his research. they talked a bit and he started by asking for the Mbabaram word for basic nouns. They went back and forth before he asked for the word for “dog” The man replied “dog” They had a bit of a “who’s on first” moment before realizing that, by complete coincidence,  Mbabaram and English both have the exact same word for dog.

[ijokasijo]

they should invent a language that is a direct channelling of reality rather than a self-contained system of arbitrary signifiers (words) that can only approximate but never reach the signified (the concept) itself

[ijokasijo]

aa mi wile sona e toki Epelanto .. taso kulupu Epelanto li ike tawa miiii😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫