2018-03-10
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I don't know exaclty how I got introduced to toki pona[0] -- the 'simple
language'.  I think I can blame Alex Schroeder for it on mastodon. It
has been some time in February and since my work days have been a bit
slow I decided to have a look. The idea was intriguing: Learning a
small -- well tiny -- language[1] with ~120 words[2] and very little
grammar, no tenses.

That should be doable even for me with the little spare time I have.
And so I sat down and learned those 120 something words within a
couple of days. After the first day I have been able to read texts.
Getting able to express myself is a still ongoing task though.

Now the reason for this is toki pona's simplicity. Complexity needs
to be reduced greatly, often only understandable through context or
customs of the community. Both I am still learning.

For example coffee (or tea!) could be 'telo wawa' (strong liquid) or
'telo lape ala' (liquid of no sleep).

Albeit it being really really simple it works reasonably well for
everyday conversations. Thankfully I have found some fellow toki pona
talkers on mastodon as the #tokipona chat channel seems a bit
quiet... And I dislike being part of a facebook group.

Next on my list for toki pona is getting more fluent and maybe learn
one of the scripts. The one I like best is 'sitelen sitelen'[3] which
has a bit of a mayan style to it and it really looks beautiful.

mi tawa!

___References________________________________________________________

[0]: http://tokipona.org
[1]: http://tokipona.net/tp/default.aspx
[2]: http://tokipona.net/tp/ClassicWordList.aspx
[3]: http://jonathangabel.com/archive/2012/projects_t47.html