[ghayes]

I guess my question is: as you invent new phrases to describe more complex words, aren’t you effectively expanding the size of the language, even if this is “implicit”? Snowman in English is counted as a word, for instance. The advantage here of compound words is that you can easily get a gist without knowing exactly the meaning, similar to characters in Chinese that have a phonetic and meaning radical both present.

[florianist]

There are common forms for certains words of course, but no lexicalisation. In Toki Pona, you're not adding words, set phrases, to the language's lexicon. So there are no compound words that would be set in stone and things can and do change depending on the situation. Let's take an example: coffee. The word "telo" is some form liquid or water, so coffee could simply be just telo (if you're in context where it's clear), but you may just add it's the dark/black liquid ("telo pimeja"), or the strong hot drink ("telo wawa seli"), or the liquid of no sleep ("telo pi lape ala"), or there are many other possibilities depending on what's the important aspect you emphasize and how brief or precise you want/need to be (if you need a lot of precision, you'll end up doing several sentences, but you'll get there).

[jprete]

Set phrases aren’t consciously created, they’re the accumulated contextual/cultural meaning that people remember for the phrase, until people no longer use it to point at the literal meaning. If some group always drinks coffee and never tea, then eventually “strong hot drink” means “coffee”, and an outsider who asks for their own group’s “strong hot drink” (always meaning tea) is going to get a bitter surprise.

[tgv]

Same goes for accents. Any group will develop an accent, and it will be dominated by the group's native accent. Toki Pona won't be able to escape those, not even at small scale. I also predict the inclusion of loan words, should the language ever go beyond purists.

[Brian_K_White]

I don't think they would be surprised, since anyone having used the language enough to get to that point would know how it works, and they would know that they are not in their usual context.

It's like leaving out units of measure. We sometimes omit them, but we practically never lose track of when it makes sense to or have to consciously think about it.

[baq]

The first time my ~3 yo daughter saw the sea she exclaimed 'POOL!' Make of this what you wish ;)

[Brian_K_White]

I have a convertible. My nephew in law? (Wife's brothers son, now I wonder how you express that in Toki, you don't bother, he's just young relative maybe?) had seen that car when I visit several times over the course of a few years, and it just happened that in his entire short life up to then, he had never seen it with the top up.

One day we show up with the top up.

We're inside and he comes in to tell his parents my car has "a cover or shield"

I don't know why but we all love this.

[argiopetech]

That's just a newphew, in the same way that my brother in law is my daughter's uncle.

[esperent]

How would you differentiate between black tea and coffee in toki pona?

[Brian_K_White]

I think the idea is you don't bother to unless it actually matters in a given situation, and when it does, you just add more words.

Probably writers get this more easily. I think they are trained and edited constantly to avoid unnecessary fluff, and identify what is pointful atmospheric detail and what it pointless detail.

Does the story actually change depending on what drink dad enjoyed with his morning paper? Maybe if it was spiked, or if it was a pointed aspect of his character that he drank chocolate which others find childish, and he knows it and doesn't care. So it could, but in 99% of scenes I don't think it does matter, it only matters that it's a common thing that people do, and a common setting prop. If the language were not English and the standard way to say "morning coffee" was something else instead of specifically coffee, the scenes and stories all function exactly the same.

[aidenn0]

Reminds me of the old meme that a Vanilla Soy Latte is a 3-bean stew.

[esperent]

> I think the idea is you don't bother to unless it actually matters in a given situation, and when it does, you just add more words

Yes I understand that. Vietnamese works a bit like this although with a far less limited vocabulary.

I was asking about the specific case where it does matter. How complicated is it to differentiate between these two similar drinks when the difference is important?

[traverseda]

No word for beans but "kasi" means (leaf, herb, wood, plant), or maybe you have a green tea, "jelo" mean (yellow, light green).

[reverius42]

Not a Toki Pona speaker (yet), but I'd guess some variation/inclusion of "liquid from leaf" vs. "liquid from bean".

[esperent]

There's no specific word or term for either leaf or bean though.

[worldsayshi]

Could you add a phrase for beans in there?

[brabel]

When you ask for "a cup of coffee" in different countries, you may also get pretty surprised at what you get (it may be a tiny cup, or a large glass, sugary or bitter, with milk or without...).

[Xorakios]

not even just countries - my family from California visited NYC and kept getting frustrated when they said just wanted a "regular coffee," until someone finally realized they meant "black coffee" and it was racist to say black, so they had to order "plain coffee, no milk or sugar"

[kwhitefoot]

But you probably will get coffee.

[alyandon]

  liquid of no sleep

I shall now never be able to think of coffee and also not immediately think of this discussion and that particular phrase. Thanks. :)

[tomcam]

Plus we can ask Björk to come out of retirement and make that her next album title

[ben_w]

"Strong dark liquid of no sleep dreams furiously" just popped into my head :)

[tomcam]

Time for us to write that album

[troupo]

That... is exactly how a language is expanded, "set phrases" are established and dialects are born.

If Toki Pona was used as an actual language in an everyday setting in a community, it would quickly get set, established terms and phrases for things, and essentially expand the vocabulary.

[bobboies]

Yeah folks should probably be looking at something like Latin for comparison.

Latin vs English, Italian, French, etc.

And a good thought experiment—if one spoke Latin only, how would modern concepts or words be constructed as Latin and not one of its descendants.

[kwhitefoot]

The Roman Catholic church uses Latin for official definitive documents so they presumably have ways of expressing at least some modern concepts.

"Reginald Foster, a former plumber’s apprentice from Milwaukee who, in four decades as an official Latinist of the Vatican, dreamed in Latin, cursed in Latin, banked in Latin and ultimately tweeted in Latin, died on Friday at a nursing home in Milwaukee. He was LXXXI. "

https://web.archive.org/web/20201227172007/https://www.nytim...

[masklinn]

Or the community would literally just expand the vocabulary directly, unless toki pona has mechanisms to preempt this which doesn’t seem to be the case. Except for the scripts, which both seem to be ideographic, but even then nothing precludes creating new ideographs.

[troupo]

And inevitably at one point something like "hot brown water" will become a single term for coffee. And then it will be contracted into something like "hobrow" because the original term was too long :)

[MagicMoonlight]

You say that because you’re 1st gen. If this language went anywhere then the people in the 2nd gen will start adding complex words and structures that you never taught them.

This has all been observed before and is inevitable. You want them to call it “telo pi lape ala” but that’s shit so they’ll call it tala or lapela or something. That will then become the word for it.

[ithkuil]

There are real languages that kinda sorta work that way already.

For example in Tok Pisin helicopter is called "mixmaster bilong Jesus Christ" (Jesus Christ's food blender) or piano: bigpela bokis he got whitepela teeth hegot blackpela teeth sappos you hittim him he cry out (big box with white and black keys that cries out when you hit it)

[lproven]

Emi fulup gud dei.

Emi fulup gud dei, yumi 2 fela, tekim sol-water 1-eye fela, put im long postofis letahol blong praya-fela pasta-man, tel im:

"Sky islan twinky-twink planty-fela ia!"

This is from Ken Campbell, the UK's greatest populariser of what he called "wol wontok". https://ianlouisharris.com/tag/piotr-baumann/

It's a Ken Dodd joke, in pidgin. Original:

https://twitter.com/profdanslater/status/973184442566172678

[dalore]

This is rubbish. We had a piano and it was never called that, neither were helicopters.

Tok pisin was my first language, left with the babysitter when growing up.

[ithkuil]

Sure piano is piano and helicopter is helicopta and its been like that for years, but these expressions are documented and widely known as the initial words people came up with to describe things for which they didn't yet have words for.

The more those objects got in daily lives, the more incentives was to find proper words.

The point of my comment was to find an example of a _natural_ language where people came up with ways to refer to new objects by using simple vocabulary (As opposed to a conlang like toki pona)

[dalore]

tok long yu trupela

I want to know how/where the word for plane came from? balus

But also remember the tok pisin is a recent language, created from the colonisation efforts so it's not strange to find that modern words will have a translatation. Helicopters and piano's were around at the time.

[ithkuil]

it's possible the word comes from some substrate language, possibly the name of some flying animal.

The thing with pidgins is that when they start out, they are everybody's foreign language and are used as lingua franca. Generally people have their own native language where they may or may not have words for a given concept but then when they talk with other people from another language group they may or may not be able to just sneak in such a word and be understood. That's why sometimes long turn of phrases are used to describe stuff; not because the speaker doesn't have a word but because the speaker and the listener don't have a common word.

[leeoniya]

you're not John Quijada, by chance, are you?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8180493

[ithkuil]

no, I'm just a fan

[bitcharmer]

If I need to use 16 words to say "piano" then it's not a very practical language, IMO

[petters]

Seems it could take some explanation to ask a guest whether they wanted coffee or tea.

But a language with 200 words necessarily becomes verbose I suppose

[josu]

>Seems it could take some explanation to ask a guest whether they wanted coffee or tea.

Green or black liquid?

[agnosticmantis]

Now we have a word for green too? /s

Looking it up, it seems like there are only five words for colors:

pimeja (black), walo (white), loje (red), jelo (yellow), and laso (blue and green)

[josu]

Interesting. I asked GPT4 if it can translate and it responded a very confident Yes. Below is the translation.

In Toki Pona, the translation for "Would you like coffee or tea?" would be:

"sina wile e kafe anu telo nasa?"

Here's a breakdown:

"sina" = you

"wile" = want/need

"e" = direct object marker

"kafe" = coffee (borrowed word)

"anu" = or

"telo nasa" = literally "intoxicating liquid", often used to mean "tea" or "alcohol" (there's no specific word for "tea" in Toki Pona, but in some contexts, "telo nasa" can be used to mean tea)

It's worth noting that because Toki Pona has such a limited vocabulary, some words and concepts may be represented differently than in other languages.

[MagicMoonlight]

Lmao that is awful. Do you want a laso dress or a laso dress?

[saaaaaam]

No, easy! Laso or jelo laso.

Loje laso walo = mauve I guess.

[agnosticmantis]

Yes please.

[jahnu]

The equi-complexity hypothesis states that all languages are equally complex and just trade off complexity in one area for simplicity in another. However, it is not yet accepted and highly disputed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_complexity

[worldsayshi]

Languages seem to often have a lot of accidental complexity though, that doesn't seem to add anything and just makes it harder to learn. Like irregularities. Seem to come from a lack of design.

[chris_st]

Just like in English: "Show up" is, ostensibly, two words, but it's a phrase with a different meaning that either "show" or "up". So yes, pretty much. But "Blue Sky" is two words indicating a single thing, but that thing is both "blue" and "sky", so no, you're not really expanding the language.

That said, I don't speak Tiki Pona, so I don't know how the language is used by the various communities that actually speak it.

[brabel]

This kind of phrase usually has a historical origin.

I tried to find out what it is for "show up" but apparently, this is a very recent one and originally meant something else entirely:

"verbal phrase, by 1826 as "to disgrace through exposure;"

It then changed to the current meaning only in around 1888, just ~135 years ago:

"The meaning "to put in an appearance, be (merely) present" is by 1888."

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any explanation based on historical use of the phrase (phrasal verb, to be accurate), but given it's a quite recent one, it probably originated from people just trying to emphasize "completion" of the "show" action by adding "up", like with most other phrasal verbs.

Source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/show%20up

[chris_st]

Thanks! Yes, I remember reading older novels (Austen, maybe?) where the "disgrace through exposure" sense was used... it was obvious what was meant, but surprising.

[IIsi50MHz]

"disgrace through superior performance" is a current meaning. AA does a thing, and then (especially if AA appears to be getting praise for it or appears proud of it), BB either does it better or does something more difficult (usually accompanied by a derisive remark about AA or AA's work).

[asoneth]

> aren’t you effectively expanding the size of the language, even if this is “implicit”?

Yes, this is how Toki Pona dictionaries work. For example, there is a surprisingly thick two-way English - Toki Pona dictionary, "ku", which includes more than 11k entries such as "tomo tawa" for "car" or "ilo kalama" for a radio. See https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51n8JCdFlQL.jpg or other images from https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978292367/

Note that as it is descriptive rather than proscriptive, each translation has a superscript indicating what fraction of English-speaking Toki Pona speakers used that particular translation when the book was written. I don't have my copy on hand but I recall that there was a community survey and Sonia Lang used some kind of scale such as 4 for a universally accepted meaning down to 1 or 1/2 as a highly idiosyncratic/fanciful translation only used by a small number of people.

I suspect if the language evolves some people may compress these further so that "tomo tawa" becomes "tomo-tawa" becomes "tomotawa" which may help with parsing written text. Perhaps fluent speakers do not have this problem, but I typically have to read a sentence more than once to parse it correctly.

[isykt]

> Snowman in English is counted as a word, for instance.

Note that for linguists, the definition of “word” is so slippery as to not have much use. It boils down to “because it’s written that way,” and even that is a stretch, because this definition is different for other languages. And of course, not every language is written.

To use your Chinese / Mandarin example, Mandarin does something very similar to Toki Pona in terms of inventing new phrases to describe more complex concepts (here I avoid using “words” in this context because it’s not a useful concept for our use): chéngyǔ are four character idiom phrases that are not words, but references to much longer cultural stories. They have a distinct meaning, but they are not considered words.