![]() ![]() “You have millions of shades that are slightly different from one another, and at some point someone says, ‘Well, from here to here is blue, and from here to here is green.’ There are these arbitrary lines that people agree on.” “I think colors are a good example,” she offered. She began by reducing and consolidating the specific into the general. To create her new language, Lang worked backwards-against the trend of a natural lexicon. “For that reason, I think it has great potential for bringing people together.” “You have to consider your interlocutor’s way of understanding the world, or situation,” the Polish citizen Marta Krzeminska stated. The language’s dependence on subjectivity and context is also an exercise in perspective-taking. “We wear many hats in life,” Lang continued, “One moment I might be a sister, the next moment a worker, or a writer. The real question is: What is a car to you?Īs with most things in Toki Pona, the answer is relative. If you’re struck by a car though, it might be a hard object that’s hitting me. “You might say that a car is a space that's used for movement,” she proposed. “What is a car?” Lang mused recently via phone from her home in Toronto. The result, according to Lang, is to immerse the speaker in the moment, in a state reminiscent of what Zen Buddhists call mindfulness. ![]() An avoidance of set phrases keeps the process fluid. The paucity of terms provokes a kind of creative circumlocution that requires careful attention to detail. In addition to making Toki Pona simple to learn, the language’s minimalist approach is also designed to change how its speakers think. Toki Pona serves that function already for hundreds of enthusiasts connected via online communities in countries as diverse as Japan, Belgium, New Zealand, and Argentina. That ease of acquisition, many of them believe, makes it an ideal international auxiliary language-the realization of an ancient dream to return humanity to a pre-Babel unity. In contrast to the hundreds or thousands of study hours required to attain fluency in other languages, a general consensus among Toki Pona speakers is that it takes about 30 hours to master. This economy of form is accomplished by reducing symbolic thought to its most basic elements, merging related concepts, and having single words perform multiple functions of speech. Yet, as the creator Sonja Lang and many other Toki Pona speakers insist, it is enough to express almost any idea. While the Oxford English Dictionary contains a quarter of a million entries, and even Koko the gorilla communicates with over 1,000 gestures in American Sign Language, the total vocabulary of Toki Pona is a mere 123 words. That metaphorical process is at the heart of Toki Pona, the world’s smallest language. “The common reply to the question ‘What is it?’ is, when the reply is difficult or the experience unique, ‘Well, it is like -.’” “It is by metaphor that language grows,” writes the psychologist Julian Jaynes. These neologisms demonstrate the cumulative quality of language, in which we use the known to describe the unknown. In Lakota, horse is literally dog of wonder. In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-watcher. ![]() In Chinese, the word computer translates directly as electric brain. ![]()
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