What is a Language?
Toki Pona is a language created in 2001. It favours simplicity and under-specification – the language has 14 letters, and only 123 words!1 A general consensus among Toki Pona speakers is that it takes only about 30 hours to master.2 Speaking Toki Pona, even fluently, is a continual exercise in the use of metaphor, creativity and circumlocution, in much the same way that learners of a second language rely on these strategies.
When speaking a language that one does not know well, one must improvise to find ways to say things with his or her limited knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Sonja Lang, a Toronto-based linguist, intentionally created Toki Pona to be a language based on minimal vocabulary and simple grammar. “If you can express yourself in a simple way, then you really understand what you’re talking about, and that’s good,” Lang claims (ibid).
The language has no tense, gender, or number. All words appear to contain a single morpheme. Most, but not all, words can be either a verb, noun, or modifier, depending on their placement in a sentence.3 Speakers string separate words together, and modify word order, in a subjective and context-dependent form of compounding. For example, “tomo tawa,” a space used for movement, could mean ‘car.’ The language places a heavier than usual onus on the listener to follow a speaker’s logic, as the range of potential ambiguity with neologisms is vast. If I say “telo pimaje wawa,” a ‘powerful dark liquid’ I might mean coffee. I could also mean something else.
[...]
