[poutinepapi]

Conlangs(Constructed languages) are fascinating! Apart from Toki Pona, I can recommend checking out Esperanto and Solresol, two other attempts at international languages.

I wonder how fast a community could learn Toki Pona if that was the only way of communicating and nothing else was allowed? It'd be interesting to see who has less and more difficulty sectioned by age, culture, education level, etc...

Also worth mentioning that Toki Pona was created by Sonja Lang(a fellow Canadian <3) during a period of depression. Here's her main website where you can see more of her work: https://www.lang.sg/

[jstarfish]

All of these are glorified Swadesh lists. The concept dates back to the 1950s.

Semdom.org (and/or rapidwords.net) has some useful checklists if you're looking to create a comprehensive vocabulary or map concepts across existing ones.

[OfSanguineFire]

[name redacted] created Toki Pona after some years of activity in the Esperanto movement, so the two languages have a shared history. This is also why people miss the point when they complain on these HN threads about Toki Pona apparently not being a full, usable language: there was already Esperanto for that, Toki Pona was intentionally created as an experiment, a sort of conlang Oulipo.

[ShannonLimiter]

Don’t you mean Sonja Lang?

[OfSanguineFire]

Apparently the creator now goes by that name. I was writing out of my own memories of knowing the person under a previous name in the Esperanto and general conlang community over two decades ago.