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Hobbies in everything
Is this a Mengerian spontaneous order story, or not?:
Kisa, 28, a student and translator in Toronto, decided to create her own language, something simple that would help clarify her thinking. She called it Toki Pona -- "good language" -- and gave it just 120 words.
"Ale li pona," she told herself. "Everything will be OK."
Kisa eventually sorted through her thoughts and, to her great surprise, her little language took off, with more than 100 speakers today, singing Toki Pona songs, writing Toki Pona poems and chatting with Toki Pona words.
It's all part of a weirdly Babel-esque boom of new languages. Once the private arena of J.R.R. Tolkien, Esperanto speakers and grunting Klingon fanatics, invented languages have flourished on the Internet and begun creeping into the public domain.
The website Langmaker.com lists more than 1,000 language inventors and 1,902 made-up languages, from `Ayvárith to Zyem.
The language inventors have, of course, created a word to describe what they do -- "conlang," short for constructed languages.
Here is the full story. Here is a word list for Toki Pona. Here are general resources. The language has only a few dozen proverbs but one of them is nasin mami li ike, or "capitalism is negative." There are by far more words about sex than anything else ("Kisa created Toki Pona as an exercise in minimalism, looking for the core vocabulary that is necessary to communicate"), and here is how the countries have been renamed.
Sadly: "Some want to express complicated thoughts in Toki Pona, running counter to its design."
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 13, 2007 at 11:05 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink
Comments
Oh no, I wish I'd thought of Toki Pona first ... pakala!
Posted by: Peter at Sep 13, 2007 11:28:58 AM
It is amazing that there are this many languages being created while hundreds of older languages are dying out.
Posted by: jake at Sep 13, 2007 11:36:44 AM
There are a zillion programming languages too. Once in a while some obscure language invented by an amateur booms. That's what happened with Ruby, a programming language invented by a Japanese student in the early 90s, and now one of the most important programming languages. It's what Twitter is programmed in, for example.
Posted by: Brent at Sep 13, 2007 11:41:26 AM
Is it really accurate to say the language has "proverbs?"
It seems to me that a phrase or sentence becomes a proverb over time, as people who speak the language find it a useful and clever way to express a common idea. In other words, proverbs are a product of society, not of a few people.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Sep 13, 2007 11:56:28 AM
"Some want to express complicated thoughts in Toki Pona, running counter to its design."
So, it's the perfect language for Airstrip One. I think George Orwell already said all that needs to be said about that.
Posted by: Franklin Harris at Sep 13, 2007 12:16:37 PM
Nasin mami li ike? O nasin kulupu li pakala!
Posted by: Mike Giberson at Sep 13, 2007 12:55:52 PM
I think Franklin hit it. This particular concept (as opposed to invented languages in general) sounds disturbing. Simplification is not costless.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at Sep 13, 2007 12:56:46 PM
The LA Times article mentions that there are about a thousand native speakers of Esperanto, who learned it from birth. According to his Wikipedia article, George Soros is one of them.
Arguably, though, the most successful conlang is not Esperanto but modern Hebrew.
Posted by: at Sep 13, 2007 1:03:14 PM
Sadly: "Some want to express complicated thoughts in Toki Pona, running counter to its design."
What's Toki Pona for "Math is hard!"?
Posted by: Joshua Holmes at Sep 13, 2007 1:18:45 PM
[The Navajo language] is clearly dying and will likely be extinct by 2010," MLA president Frederick Toback said. "Fortunately, though, the sad, steady decline of this once-proud Native American tongue has been more than offset by a rising interest in Klingon culture."
Posted by: mobile at Sep 13, 2007 1:26:28 PM
I wonder if Roald Dahl knew "unpa lupa" really meant "sexual door"
Posted by: Nat Almirall at Sep 13, 2007 1:26:31 PM
One interesting conlang that the article didn't mention is Lojban, designed to be an unambiguous "logical language".
From the Wikipedia article:
Q: How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light bulb?A: Two: one to decide what to change it into, and one to figure out what kind of bulb emits broken light.
Maybe they should rebrand themselves as "Vulcan" and go after the Star Trek demographic. It worked for Klingon...
Posted by: at Sep 13, 2007 1:42:56 PM
This particular concept (as opposed to invented languages in general) sounds disturbing. Simplification is not costless.
http://stronsay.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/wc072.gif
Posted by: QM at Sep 13, 2007 2:17:30 PM
I find it difficult to believe that the world needs another language in which to say "capitalism is negative".
Posted by: Tim of Angle at Sep 13, 2007 3:11:12 PM
This really does look silly.
nasin - n way, manner, custom, road, path, doctrine, system, method
ike - mod bad, negative, wrong, evil, overly complex, (figuratively) unhealthy
interj oh dear! woe! alas!
n negativity, badness, evil
vt to make bad, to worsen, to have a negative effect upon
vi to be bad, to suck
mani - n money, material wealth, currency, dollar, capital
So nasin mami li ike could mean:
A) The growth path sucks.
B) Material wealth is wrong.
C) Monetary policy is too complex.
D) Marxism is evil. (I imagine he'd have objected if you said his philosophy didn't have anything to do with material wealth.)
E) There should be multiple reserve currencies. ["Dollar system is bad"]
F) I'm a Gold Bug! ["Dollar road is unhealthy"]
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at Sep 13, 2007 3:42:29 PM
@Joshua Holmes, Math is hard: ike la mi pali e sona nanpa (well, toki pona grammar turns out to be hard, too)
Posted by: Matthew Martin at Sep 13, 2007 5:16:49 PM
How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light bulb?Having amused myself over several years debating with the President of the Logical Language Group--levels of self-unawareness rarely found outside the Angry Bear--I think the question would be how many Lojbanists would it take to figure out the lightbulb IS broken?
Posted by: Patrick R. Sullivan at Sep 13, 2007 5:29:40 PM
Bernard Guerrero, the same ambiguity problem occur in Chinese or Japanese. It's an issue whenever you try have a small number of "core" concepts. Chinese language only has about 600 "words": everything else is built via compounds or borrowings.
Posted by: ni hao at Sep 13, 2007 6:14:31 PM
Hen hao, yourself? :^)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Chinese dialects in particular are tonal in nature. You can goof up the tone you use, of course, but in theory there is no ambiguity. I don't think that's the case, here. She talks about using "context" to connect with your surroundings, but that sounds like a recipe for misunderstanding anything but the most trivial of conversations.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at Sep 13, 2007 6:30:49 PM
A lot of people are into "conlanging" and I would say the large majority have no aspirations of international language with it. There are plenty of existing languages with little ambiguity, fairly simple phonology (sound systems) and simple, logical grammar.
I point to Turkish in particular. I took one semester and it felt like i'd accomplished as much language-learning as in two years of Japanese.
Conlangs are really fun. Go to www.zompist.com and look at Mark Rosenfelder's "Virtual Verduria" for an example of conlanging with a pretty rigorous attention to detail and linguistic realism.
Posted by: Neal at Sep 13, 2007 7:58:47 PM
thanks to capitalism people have time to do stupid things like that.Since they dont have to grow their own food.
Posted by: juancarlos at Sep 13, 2007 10:57:02 PM
Speaking of simplified languages, I'm still waiting for my first edition Newspeak dictionary.
Posted by: Matt Tievsky at Sep 13, 2007 11:01:06 PM
Chinese language only has about 600 "words": everything else is built via compounds or borrowings.
This is utter nonsense. Pick up a Chinese dictionary or a Chinese-English dictionary, and you will find many tens of thousands of dictionary entries, not much different than English. Nearly all of those dictionary entries are words, a small percentage are four-character phrases (chengyu).
Two-syllable words (as most of them are) are not "compounds", they are words. Even if you are using some weird idiosyncratic definition of "word" that only includes one-character words, there are hardly only 600.
Although Chinese text is written without spaces between characters to delimit words, in practice this makes no difference. If desired for pedagogical purposes, spaces can be put in.
Posted by: at Sep 13, 2007 11:33:57 PM
How useful or interesting can a language be if you can not make pointed comments such as "Your neighbor's chicken is a duck"
Posted by: iam at Sep 14, 2007 1:38:56 AM
Three points and a recommendation:
1.) "Math is hard." = "nasin nanpa li ike."
(Number-method is complicated.) I don't know what that other commenter was doing with "ike la...". That's just, well, "ike mute".
2.) There are *NOT* a lot of words about sex in Toki Pona. There is only one, single word about it: "unpa". All the Toki Pona phrases listed on the "Sex" word-list page are just illustrations of how one might express those concepts. The fact that Sonja came up with more examples of how to say things about sex may only indicate that it was an area of particular interest for her at the time.
3.) The simplification and generalization of the Toki Pona mindset is not intended to be a substitute for complex thought. It's meant to be a tool for gaining insight by taking a step back from the complexity. Like the first astronauts who looked back at the earth from the moon and had the epiphany that all our quarreling peoples are living on a little blue ball in a big black space, just so rendering one's thoughts into Toki Pona can bring you to see the obvious thing you've been missing.
For example, "jan pona" is "friend and "jan ike" is "enemy" ... but you can't say either one in Toki Pona without saying "jan"; which is "person". Compare that to the dehumanizing words that are used for promoting war, like "terrorists".
Recommendation:
Try learning Toki Pona. (jan Pije's lessons are good.)
Then try translating some of the things you're thinking about... news, problems, wishes, etc. Breaking things down into their basic elements can help you to see what things really are instead of being distracted by complicated modifiers.
Posted by: RIck Miller at Sep 14, 2007 6:40:55 AM
