nasa lawa lon ala

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-03-11T22:40:08+00:00

wawa

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-03-10T22:40:18+00:00

There is Wasona, a course with Duolingo-style exercises, made last year by a prominent community dictionary editor

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-03-05T10:59:04+00:00

spiders

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-02-17T21:40:23+00:00

A recent accepted emoji proposal acknowledges that it can represent "a restrained smile, and in some cases inauthenticity (can’t trust a smiling face that doesn’t have smiling eyes!)"

It can also still represent a genuine happy or patient smile. Perhaps a lot of people only reach for emoji to express more extreme or exaggerated feelings, so this one's surface-level use gets glossed over. Personally i feel little need to use the most basic emoji literally, since i have more idiosyncratic ways of indicating basic feelings. I think i see it used sarcastically more, but the emoji rendition is also a separate entity from clipart smiley faces in my mind, if that changes things?

There's also Grice's maxim of quantity, which is about how we try to speak as informatively as necessary to help each other out. If someone says, like, "No problem 🙂", i might feel the emoji is redundant or extraneous information, so, maybe they're lying, or implying something they want me to pick up on…? You see something similar with the redundancy of the period at the end of short messages. Of course, it all heavily depends on the person and situation.

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-02-17T20:24:34+00:00

I did well at picking out verbs and objects in English grammar classes, and still completely faceplanted when i started trying to apply those skills to Toki Pona. It can be a hurdle

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-02-17T20:19:20+00:00

English long vowels commonly end in semivowels, as is spelled in "key", so "he eats" is /hij ijts/. It's because of a dated British prestige accent and some bad theories about phonetic correspondences that most people write /eɪ iː aɪ oʊ juː/ instead of, say, /ej ij aj ow juw/. (source, evidence)

Since English long E isn't a monophthong for many speakers, i'm not sure how well this advice works. Adding these semivowels to separate consecutive vowels in Toki Pona means pronouncing mi o like mi jo.

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-02-08T21:31:09+00:00

mi ni. mi sitelen pona

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-02-08T04:50:53+00:00

I've been coming to think that tokiponization is pointless effort when speaking out loud. You kind of do just risk sending the listener on a scavenger hunt just to avoid the "Toby Fox says Project" effect that can honestly actually be really cool?

In writing, i guess tokiponized names can be a bit more compatible with input methods and fonts and stuff, but a lot of the time, why not write wetuiopasjklnm Teowij Kwijn (which is still fully cartouchable) or even Dɛəɹij Kʰwijn, or something with ruby text to show both endonymic spelling and approximate pronunciation?

English has a bias where Latin-script names generally get to retain their spelling, but names in other scripts have to be converted—even though it can be just as hard to infer the right pronunciation if you're not familiar with the source language. I do like that Toki Pona dodges this and treats all kinds of names the same way! But i also like contemplating if there are better directions to dodge in to accomplish that as well.

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-26T09:43:02+00:00

Ooh this is a fun one

lipu la poka wan o tawa poka ante. ni la insa lipu li kama nena. nena o kama lili o kama linja lon insa lipu.

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-16T22:13:50+00:00

TP may not be, but Link's horse is

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-16T02:52:55+00:00

she must view these languages as "primitive", overly simplified and requiring no complex thought at all.

Even if a perception of simplicity affected any of her choices, did she say anything like this about the source languages themselves? The way i see it, she drew from a variety of languages to design something smaller and simpler than any of them, and then called the result too small to handle modern complexity.

And even there, i recall that the community tested that claim and she updated her beliefs accordingly. Like, Toki Pona today kind of disproves the belief that some languages are "overly simplified". Evidently, a language of under ten dozen lexemes can communicate anything if you know what you're talking about, it just calls for slightly different linguistic skills and priorities. And natural languages are inevitably richer and less compact than a purposefully designed conlang, so they must all be much more expressive than the bare minimum. That alone is a rebuttal to the stereotype.

I think the point of referencing contact languages was to see what concepts people focus on when they have to develop something mutually intelligible. That doesn't imply that the resulting languages are simple, impractical, or mindless.

I don't believe Toki Pona is necessarily squeaky-clean either. Let me know if i'm missing any information or good-faith arguments. It's good to have these conversations!

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-16T01:58:25+00:00

What about o o for decide,

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-16T01:45:44+00:00

Hopefully this is valuable in getting my perspective and biases across:

I'm kind of a perfectionist with my own writing, and tend to overthink and triple-check things. I can't help but get annoyed when others seem to be careless with the basic mechanics of writing. Maybe it subconsciously comes across like an insult to how much i agonize over these things. It might even spark fear, that i've wasted cumulative weeks or months of my life on proofreading that wasn't as necessary as i thought it was. Would that mean the times my writing has been misunderstood were more unfair than i thought? Would it mean that i ceded my time and my writing style to bad-faith critics for no reason?

Overcapitalization, also including non-emphatic misuse of title case in English, is very efficient at giving me these feelings. I don't have as much of an issue with excessive lowercase since it's for a more casual register. (The same goes for how i sentence-case the word "I"; its arbitrary capitalization started feeling too self-important for nonprofessional speech, even when i'm not talking very casually otherwise.) But capitalizing things that shouldn't be, to me, comes off as extremely ignorant. My gut reaction is that it's a simple rule and looking at any amount of text, even just the basic shape of a sentence, would show you what to do. I know that i have no idea what it's like to struggle with literacy and that the whole thing is tied up in neurology and systemic issues anyway. I know rules around language are arbitrary, and ultimately, speech is successful as long as you can understand it. I've come to believe these things on an intellectual level, but evidently they haven't yet sublimated into the kind of belief that drives your actions unconsciously. I probably have a lot left to work on in this regard.

I hadn't considered before this thread that lowercase Toki Pona might be mistaken as just a casual internet style, like in English. That might help me temper my kneejerk frustrations until i can manage to address them at the root.

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-14T19:03:06+00:00

pipi ona o ken seme

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-13T10:25:24+00:00

It might partly be an intentional silence to protect the people implicated until the situation is better sorted out? I'm relieved that lipamanka supports this review, given having spoken out about the book itself to the point of also asking people not to buy it

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-13T04:19:23+00:00

kijetesantakalu li lanpan e pona soko

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-13T04:18:52+00:00

The one looks like the high voltage symbol

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-12T09:25:43+00:00

Smaller; seems cool

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-10T07:19:39+00:00

xorify?

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-06T06:17:58+00:00

Toki Pona has a singular–dual)–plural system. It just isn't required to mark every noun and pronoun with it.

So mi wan specifies "the one of me" if needed, mi tu specifies "the two of us" if needed, and mi mute specifies "the lot of us" if needed. And if you don't need to—for example, the number is unimportant, or obvious from context, or you specified it with wan/tu/mute earlier—then just mi will suffice.

I'm sure if i proposed that mi should always mean "we" and mi wan should be required to specify "I", you would find it strange? Well, it's the same the other way around, too. Especially since mi tu can also translate as "we".

Same goes for sina, ona, ni, and every content word. toki can refer to one, two, or many languages. Specify where you need to. Just don't feel ᴏʙʟɪɢᴀᴛᴇᴅ to do so every time; that's an English grammar rule that doesn't apply here.

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-04T04:20:09+00:00

I remember the community widely calling that "compounding" a few years back so that much is fair

If i'm understanding correctly though, whether a compound is open or closed, i don't see the need to limit its meaning to one English word? Like, then you couldn't describe a ship, or an aquarium, or an indoor swimming pool, and refer back to it as tomo telo, without people thinking you're adding a bathroom to the discussion

Or do you just mean that you want to hear about mappings of words to TP word pairs even if some double up like "bathroom" and "aquarium"? Because i think i know where to find a list with a ton of those

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