I’m learning Toki Pona. Most people seem to think Toki Pona is a massage technique, some sort of tantric practise, or a musical instrument.
It must be the Polynesian-sounding name, but it’s more exciting than that!
Toki Pona is a constructed language, similar to its more famous relatives such as Esperanto and Interlingua. Anyone who knows me is probably smiling wryly, as I’ve also announced on this blog that I’ve been learning Mandarin, Xhosa and Spanish at various times. The fact that on Wednesday I thought someone speaking Spanish was actually speaking Italian tells you how far those have got.
But Toki Pona looks interesting, and achievable.
I’ve been interested in constructed languages for a while, with Interlingua previously being my favoured choice. The reason was mainly pragmatic, with it being my understanding that learning Interlingua is more useful for picking up other natural languages than the more widely spoken Esperanto.
Interlingua didn’t even get as far as an announcement on my blog.
But Toki Pona is different. It’s not the mind speaking, or the desire to visit Taiwan or Argentina, or have a better understanding of my own city. This is love! Toki Pona is a new language first published in 2001. Its designer is a young linguist and translator who has previously translated the Tao Te Ching into both English and Esperanto.
The well-known Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the language we use affects the way we think about the world. One of the more famous examples provided is the Hopi concept of time. Hopi language apparently treats time as a single process rather than distinct, countable units. It doesn’t therefore have any nouns for units of time, and the theory goes that this language construct is fundamental to all aspects of Hopi culture and explains certain behaviour differences.
Toki Pona is inspired by Taoist thought, and its goal is to shape our thought in a Zen-like fashion. The language is extremely simple (a key point of attraction for me!), and highly ambiguous. There are only 120 root words, so a sentence such as mi moku could mean I eat, I ate (there are no tenses) or I am food (the word could be a verb or a noun), amongst others.
The idea is to focus on the essence rather than the detail, which can be divisive in Zen thought.
Counting is similarly simple. There’s only ala (zero), wan, tu (say them out loud!) and mute (many).
The idea is that higher numbers are abstract and disconnected from reality. Are 978 seeds any different conceptually to 992? Toki Pona is described as embracing the natural flow of the universe and looking at the deeper patterns of reality.
It’s simplicity also helps to clarify certain problematic concepts. Take a bad friend for example. In Toki Pona, a friend is literally a good person, so the concept of bad friend is problematic. We’re forced to re-evaluate and perhaps not become judgemental so easily.
Sounds to me like toki pona li toki pona. Let’s see how it goes.
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