> The point is simplicity. And in Toki Pona, simple is literally good. Both concepts are combined in a single word: pona.
That's how you end up with words like English "cool", which means low(-ish) temperature, except when it's about people, or "blue", a particular color, except when it's about feelings.
It's anything but simple, and honestly it doesn't sound good to me, either.
I have read the toki pona book. Its interesting but cheaty.
You can't get rid of complexity by squeezing a balloon and pretending the enormous bulging out shared dictionary of nouns is "not really words".
English only has 26 letters, its really simple to learn English! Well, sure, sometimes you have to string together quite a few of those 26 letters in the correct order to get the point across, but its not really hard to learn English.
Likewise toki pona is an exercise in what amounts to stringing together long winded syllables.
It was disappointing, I was interested in the language with the idea of fooling around with natural language processing, which is complex, so a simpler language should allow easier to write simple toys. Perhaps I've found a silver bullet? Yet its actually a very complicated language because of the balloon analogy, you can't squeeze the complexity somewhere else and declare victory. It requires all kinds of memorization and life experience and humor and creativity and judgment calls about stringing together it's sylableWords into what in English would mostly be one word.
Even if its not a silver bullet, its still kind of cool. I ended up having more fun, while continuing to accomplish nothing, with a pidgin englishs. I ended up with a reasonable parser for butler english. I thought it would be funny to write a parser that turned butler english into coq and then replied back to me with what coq thought of my statements. Then I realized I was bored and moved on to something else. For at least awhile recreational natural language processing can be a lot of fun and is a wide open area where whatever you do, its probably a newly trodden path, at least if its weird enough. Here's a strange idea if I get back into the hobby. Can I make a butler english to toki pona automated translator? Hmm.
It's interesting that you're not the only person here who's approached toki pona from a NLP perspective.
toki pona is about the worst case for an NLP language, I would think. It puts all the communication burden on the semantics and pragmatics of the language. It doesn't make human expression, feelings, interests, creativity or community simpler, just the language.
There are other conlangs designed to be unambiguous. toki pona was designed to be the opposite: maximally general.
On the specific point of having to learn a compound lexicon - that is true a little, but not as much as you'd think. Sure there are conventional compounds for saying certain things, but you are very welcome (and aesthetically encouraged) to find other ways of expressing the same thing. You might find 'ilo nanpa' defined as a computer in a compound lexicon, and I use that sometimes, but my 'ilo nanpa' is also my 'ilo musi' and my 'ilo pali' (and sometimes my 'ilo pakala'). The key insight is that the language doesn't have to describe what a thing is, but what it means to you. That changes, it cannot be properly documented, and is almost impossible to parse. I take that as a feature, not a bug. Part of the pleasure of toki pona is the endless poetry of it: the joy of finding curious and evocative ways of expressing yourself.
The language is simple (a few words, even fewer grammar rules) but obviously communicating with it is _very_ complex.
The problem with Toki Pona is it doesn't serve a purpose and journalists often can't convey exactly what it is because... it's nothing. If you try to explain Toki Pona in the context of natural languages, which are meant to communicate somewhat-precisely, of course it seems complex (because concepts are complex, no matter how much you try to simplify the language).
Do you actually use this much, though? I had to double take because I'm not familiar with the phrase and I'm a native speaker. Typically you might use cool to in this way to describer an action or gerund, or with a prepositional phrase, or as an adverb.
Heck, if anything, I'd say a "cool attitude" is a calm attitude—as in, the person played it cool.
Maybe not that exact phrasing but "he gave me a cool look" can mean exact opposites. Depends entirely on dialect / register. The direct metaphorical version ("he gave me an unfriendly look") is reasonably common in English. The other reading of it isn't so much, but is perfectly understandable (probably incorrectly).
> If you are a native speaker, rarely. Otherwise, all the freaking times (for the first ten years or so).
Not a native speaker. Not my experience at all. In fact, from my experience watching people learn English around me (and teaching some of them), reusing concepts like this actually helps them get the meaning because they can relate to words they know.
Maybe it's because such metaphors are pervasive in my native language too?
> E.g., consider the difference between a "cool guy" and a "cool attitude". If you think about it, they describe almost totally opposite situations.
I don't see how they're opposite. Hot-headed people (see how the metaphor is still at play?) aren't considered cool at all.
> Or consider "No, it's cool." After all, "it's hot" means the temperature is high.
What do you mean? "It's cool" = "the situation isn't hot". You don't have to worry about being burnt (again, same metaphor) by the situation.
Maybe your native language has metaphors similar to English, or maybe your friends are better at learning English than my friends. :P
But my point is that many metaphors look "natural" only after you learn it: you have to memorize them, and you think it's natural only because you've been doing it all your life.
E.g., "hot-headed" is a decidedly English metaphor. In Korean, "his head is getting hot" would mean he's getting annoyed/angry at the present situation, not that he has a propensity for getting annoyed in general (which is what English "hot-headed" means).
Similarly, English "cool" doesn't just mean "the situation isn't hot."; it also implies a positive situation. In contrast, you can say "The show only received a lukewarm reception.", but you can't say "It's OK, he was lukewarm about the mishap."
As another example, in Korean, you "turn blue" when you're shocked/aghast, not when you're gloomy. All this stuff is basically a minefield of subtle misunderstandings.
Yeah but, once you memorize them, the metaphors are pervasive and follow common patterns. I think having a similarly-metaphorical language helps taking cues from context. I haven't seen it taking ten years or so to memorize them.
Phrasal verbs on the other hand? A nightmare! I've been speaking English "fluently" for more than 15 years and I still struggle with them.
There's definitely some overlap of metaphors in western languages though, and English culture influence over western media helps establishing those metaphors too (we don't use "blue" as "sad" in our language, but it's not hard for us to relate to it since it's in so many songs).
> consider the difference between a "cool guy" and a "cool attitude"
I always thought the ideas were conflated. That to be 'cool' originally meant to be unflappable in the face of adversity which was akin to having a cool attitude.
If context is missing (paper is torn, parts of conversation are missed) then "overloaded words" can easily be misinterpreted. People have various techniques for correcting these communication errors: make an assumption based on one's own knowledge of speaker, make an assumption based on one's own knowledge of the topic or beliefs or reconfirm the meaning with the speaker. I am sure there are a lot more.
For non-native speakers overloaded words can be challenging to deal with. Overloaded words and close sounding words are also a common source of language games and art. All human languages have ambiguity at some level.
What about the word "mai" in Thai? Depending on tone, it has at least five different meanings.
"/Mai \mai ^mai vmai mai" (tone marks added) is literally a meaningful sentence in Thai — and not one that's obviously constructed for lulz like "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo".
To a Thai speaker, "/Mai" and "\Mai" sound as different as English "sit" and "seat", although much of the world would insist that the two in English sound nearly the same, just as English speakers insist that "/Mai" and "\Mai" sound nearly the same.
You don't think there are differences in tone between many homonyms in English? No, it's not a "tonal" language, but that absolutely doesn't mean they don't exist, or aren't widely used.
Or is your assertion that "Buffalo buffalo..." is pronounced by repeating the exact same pattern of sound eight times?
I think if you say the phrase "to buffalo" and "a buffalo", you'll pronounce those words in the same way. It's only when putting a sentence together that you'll stress them differently to indicate their usage in that sentence.
In tonal languages, you always say the word with the given tone, regardless of context.
British English (and American English?) sometimes uses stress to distinguish between nouns and verbs written the same way, eg. "record a record", "permit a permit", "present a present". It's possible that "buffalo a buffalo" should ideally have this difference, but buffalo is so rare as a verb that the difference has been lost.
That's how you end up with words like English "cool", which means low(-ish) temperature, except when it's about people, or "blue", a particular color, except when it's about feelings.
It's anything but simple, and honestly it doesn't sound good to me, either.