lon ma pi toki pona
The last few days I’ve been getting back into toki pona. Toki pona is a constructed language, like Esperanto, but its goal and its philosophy are very different. Conlang people love taxonomies, and each have their own, but to avoid jargon I’ll describe it this way: Esperanto’s goal is to be a means of international communication, and its ethos and ambiance (in Esperanto the word etoso sort of captures the idea of the intangible feeling in the air that defines a place) are oriented towards this purpose; toki pona (lower case, as is the style of the language) is a philsophical or art language. Its goal isn’t directly to serve as a neutral means of international communication, but to enable people to “speak well” (one of many possible translations of the language’s name). It’s most spoken of for its hyper-minimalism: depending on who’s counting, the language only has between 120 and 150 words. Incredibly, this restricted vocabulary increases rather than decreases its ability to express meaning, since each word takes on different meanings based on context.
I first learned toki pona in 2015 or thereabouts: I spoke toki pona well before I spoke Esperanto at all. During the next year or so I used the language fairly seriously by myself. At that time I wasn’t really in touch with the (small) community of speakers, but I used the language extensively by myself to write and think well (another possible interpretation of “toki”). When I went to university, I lost interest, or at least, didn’t use the language any more.
In the last several days I started playing around with it again. While I was away, the language blew up exponentially: the number of speakers is now in the hundreds, and many people are enthusiastically learning the language; last time I spoke it only a few score knew the language. This is unambiguously a good thing for the community, but it puts me in this odd position: to the kulupu (community, group, gathering) I am a jan sin (new person, particularly in the context “new to the language”), but I learned toki pona for the first time before most of the current high-level speakers did. Their toki pona is certainly better than mine, though, because they’ve exercized more.
The only way I can interact with other toki pona speakers is via the internet, so I am in several Discord servers dedicated to the language (Discord is an instant messaging platform). But the dynamics in these groups are a little odd. It is very easy to become sucking in to and over invested in the words of strangers. I don’t know how to begin to examine the phenomenon except to note that it is very easy to stay up all night chatting away without any desire to sleep. On the other hand, the “administrators” of the server can be very harsh and enforce their rules strictly: topics must be kept in their proper areas, certain things must not be spoken about, and so on. Of course, it is difficult to become aware of all of the rules, and it is very easy for those in power to shame and even eject you from the group. So I have retreated from the large toki pona server to a smaller one with many of the same people but in which the only rule is that you must speak only toki pona. I’m much more comfortable in the small space than the main landing zone for all newcomers.
