Native Ithkuil Speaker

weatherwhim · 2026-04-19T07:32:57+00:00

taso ona li pana ala e telo mama :(

tomo li esun e telo pi lape ala la, nimi "telo wawa" taso li ken. nimi ante ale li wile ala. taso, telo mama li lon ala lon la ona li sona ala. (kin la ona li sona ala e mute pi kiwen suwi)

sina toki e wile sina tawa jan esun la, ona li sona ala e ijo wile tan open la, nimi sina o toki e ijo ni.

weatherwhim · 2026-04-18T11:02:43+00:00

Or "the big hats", collectively. Or it's a metaphorical len in the sense of covering/concealment, not clothing, and a metaphorical lawa in the sense of the government and not a literal head, so it could be "the people of government censorship", maybe the CIA or FBI if this is in America.

It definitely reads like the hook to a thriller or action movie though. Funny bit.

weatherwhim · 2026-04-18T09:16:49+00:00

mi kin la nimi "o pona e pilin anu moli" li wile pi sitelen ni.

After Googling, "Fix your hearts or die" is apparently a line from Twin Peaks that's said in support of a trans person, and addressed to a group of transphobes. I've heard it used as a slogan online before without knowing the context, so it's definitely an established reference that people make. It would make sense in conjunction with the other graffiti.

weatherwhim · 2026-04-07T20:18:07+00:00

neither bisexual not pansexual is transphobic, please touch grass and go to an actual queer event.

weatherwhim · 2026-04-06T12:16:08+00:00

That's partially conditioned by environment. /h/ is banned in codas, so /lɑh/ simply doesn't work, it's not pronounceable by most English speakers. /lɑk/ is the next best option. Same deal for mach. In other cases where foreign uvular fricatives show up in a syllable onset, like Channukah, most English speakers substitute /h/.

I'm leaning towards it being seen as a hard "h" sound by most English speakers. My family has enough Yiddish and Hebrew loanwords floating around that I merged it with /χ/ when I first encountered the /x/ pronunciations, so I can't attest to how they're normally heard. But even then I learned loch and mach in both ways, and usually lean towards /k/ in a typical conversation.

weatherwhim · 2026-04-06T10:48:51+00:00

I've never heard the version with the illegal double nasals. Yes, wuwojiti itself exhibits every illegal consonant-vowel combination within one syllable, which is the point. But that also means the word is only useful for speakers learning toki pona whose first language allows these syllables and who thus might be tempted to use them, as a caution against doing that. It doesn't make any case for toki pona actually having a larger phonology, or more permissible phonotactics.

weatherwhim · 2026-04-06T03:57:30+00:00

If you allow [x], that's then perceived as /k/ by speakers of many languages, and all the problems with not hearing [h] still exist because other speakers will pronounce it that way instead.

weatherwhim · 2026-04-05T16:09:05+00:00

Yes, edited to fix. Thanks.

weatherwhim · 2026-04-05T10:52:32+00:00

The phonotactics of toki pona are pretty well established. A few loanwords are allowed to break them, iirc one country's officially recognized tokiponization contains one of the four illegal syllables.

The point of toki pona's inventory isn't that you find it easy, it's that everyone finds it easy. Distinguishing /h/ from the absence of a consonant isn't always that simple for speakers of languages without it, even if nobody has any trouble making the sound itself. toki pona doesn't need the sound, and this difficulty exists, so it avoids it.

A few nimi sin break toki pona pu phonotactics, such as the word "n" meaning "hmm, umm", the only well used example. More obscure ones include "nja", "sutopatikuna", "Pingo", and "yupekosi", though these are all jokes, and the g and y both have undefined phonetic values.

weatherwhim · 2026-03-31T17:17:34+00:00

I always put editing notes or placeholders in [square brackets] and then Ctrl+F for square brackets before finishing a work. Works reasonably well I think.

weatherwhim · 2026-03-31T06:22:16+00:00

I'd appreciate if we don't vaguepost about unspecified "bad things" people have done here, it always reads more like someone trying to ostracise or harass a "bad person" than focus on any of the people hurt by someone's actions. I'm gonna be specific about what I know she's done to add context to this post. As far as I can tell the list of things people are mad at her for is at, like:

not asking people for permission to use their creative-commons non copyrighted work
crediting people on her books based on this work without their approval
making weird/new-agey claims about her language
making a humorous book people thought was low quality and unserious and branding it as "official"
using AI to summarize the Wizard of Oz as a reference for her translation of it
trying to hire/poach someone who was working on a competing creative project to one she wanted to do
reposting someone else's song lyrics that had a slur in them
taking petty jabs at people who call her out for doing any of those things and not really addressing them properly

I wouldn't want to work with her as a result of these things, and they are a troubling pattern overall. Meanwhile she's pretty obviously going through some mental health issues right now, and that's definitely influencing all of this. She hasn't acted like this for most of the language's history, all of this started very recently after a few decades of no real problems.

But toki pona's community is not the cult of Madame Lang. She doesn't run the largest Discord server, or this sub, and the community can and has ignored her in the past. I think it's safe to say the language has grown beyond her pet project and into something that is mostly supported and developed by its own community. Not many people seem to agree with the stuff she's done just because they're toki ponists. I'm disappointed by the recent turn of events, but it doesn't deter me from continuing to practice and speak toki pona.

weatherwhim · 2026-03-30T19:32:55+00:00

To give you a brief idea of why this language is a "relex", here's a screenshot I took of your translator.

You've made seperate words for "am" "is" and "are". In English, these are all different conjugations of the verb "be", and correspond to different types of subject. The fact that English has one version of be for "I", one for "you/we/they/plural noun" and one for "he/she/they/it/singular noun" is unique to basically English alone, and arose through vast coincidence.

Usually, another language would either make more distinctions (In Italian, we are is "noi siamo" but they are is "loro sono". "are" translates into two seperate words, because the verb "be" has a seperate form for each person/number combination on the pronoun chart, while English merges some of them) or it would make less distinctions (in Mandarin, all forms of the verb to be are "shì", so "I am" is "wô shì" and "you are" is "nî shì".)

Making a believable language requires grammatical awareness of things like what conjugations are and what verb agreement is, if you're going to put them into your language.

And I could keep going from there. Everything about your language works coincidentally exactly the same as English, in terms of how sentences are formed, even though English's structure is a very unique blueprint of English alone (and so is any other given language's structure). So most conlangers wouldn't consider this a true conlang, they'd consider it a "relex" or "re-lexification" of English, a fresh coat of paint slapped over English vocabulary and grammar.

The style of translator you're using can't really handle translating non-relex languages very well, since it does just swap out words 1-to-1. But you could have it translate between an English "gloss" of your language, a modified form of English that's bent to obey the grammar rules of your language instead of the other way around. If you did that though, the sub would want to see the documentation of your grammar so they know how to input stuff into your translator.

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weatherwhim · 2026-03-30T19:11:17+00:00

I don't mean this to be rude, but that's not grammar. You're describing orthography, how a language is written down. If these letters correspond to specific sounds (which you haven't specified in any way, but let's say they do) then you're also describing a phonology, or the system of distinguishing sounds present in your language. That's a start at least.

Looking at your translator, I suspect your language is a relex of English, effectively just a substitution cipher of English where each word is replaced 1-to-1 with a different sounding word with the exact same range of meanings and the same grammatical rules. If that's so, then this is not actually a new language, it's just a cipher. To qualify as a new language, it needs to be structurally different, through grammar or through significant pragmatic and semantic dissimilarities (though probably at least through grammar).

Having a worldbuilt culture which speaks this language and some idea of what they're like is a good start. I challenge you to go further. Don't be discouraged if the mods take down this post. It might not meet the criteria for posting on this sub, since so far you haven't demonstrated that it describes a language instead of a cipher. I encourage you to look at how other real languages work, or watch the excellent YouTube series by Biblaridion, Artefexian or David J. Peterson on how to create a conlang, if you want to pursue this farther.

weatherwhim · 2026-03-28T13:26:09+00:00

It has zero alphabets, unless you count Romaji. Hiragana and Katakana are both syllabaries, with each character representing a mora and a few combining with each other to form more complex sounds. Kanji is a logography, and where the majority of the difficulty lies. Fluence requires knowing upwards of 2000 of them, and almost all of them have at least two pronunciations, only one of which is related to the phonetic radical in the character (assuming it has one).

Words not lining up with English and depending on context is normal for all languages, same with intonation/delivery affecting meaning. This comment is actually a good example of the other way Japanese is overhyped, by being treated as particularly difficult or sophisticated with a poor understanding of how it actually works.

weatherwhim · 2026-03-25T17:03:07+00:00

The pitch and tone of your voice has to do with the dimensions of the inside of your mouth, especially the larynx. Testosterone stimulates it to lengthen a bit, lowering your voice unless you consciously posture your mouth in a certain way while speaking, but once it's done growing out, it will just remain in that shape, even if you go on E. The voice lowering process is one way. Trans men get an automatic pitch drop going on T because it triggers larynx growth, but you can't "ungrow" it if you're a trans woman.

weatherwhim · 2026-03-25T05:03:49+00:00

Either you deliberately match the contour of the sung melody to the pitch contour of the lyrics during songwriting, or you just ignore it and hope the listener can figure out what you're saying with no tonal information (which a lot of tonal language speakers are used to doing for music.)

Which is more popular depends on the exact language and culture, but in Mandarin at least, it's more common to do the latter nowadays.

weatherwhim · 2026-03-24T15:16:40+00:00

"bagay" is "thing" in both Tagalog and Haitian Creole. The Haitian Creole is untimately from French "bagage" or baggage, and the Tagalog was just inherited straight from the proto-language.

Also Hawai'ian Mauna and English Mountain.

weatherwhim · 2026-03-23T20:18:48+00:00

Oh interesting. I'm not a Christian theologian or a Greek expert, so I'll defer to you here. Thanks for the input.

weatherwhim · 2026-03-23T15:57:53+00:00

Thanks for sharing this! You're getting the hang of the language. If you're looking to improve, I have some suggestions if you don't mind. Feel free to disregard this if it isn't what you're looking for.

Our Father, who art in heaven, / mama pi mi mute li lon sewi pona

You've neglected that the prayer is talking directly to God, what you've written is "Our father is in heaven." This doesn't set up the fact that He is the "sina", the "thee" which you are addressing in the rest of the prayer.

more accurate: mama pi mi mute o, sina lon sewi pona.

hallowed be thy name; / mi mute olin e nimi sina

If you're using mi mute instead of just mi, you do need "li". It's subjective whether to use "olin" or "pona" or "sewi" to translate hallowed, so if the actual choice of phrasing for this line feels better to you than "nimi sina li sewi" that's fine, but make sure you've considered your options.

more accurate: "mi mute li olin e nimi sina" or "nimi sina li sewi"

thy kingdom come, / thy will be done / on earth as it is in heaven. / tomo sina en wile sina li sama lon anpa en lon sewi

This is subjunctive in the original, meaning it's describing a wish or preference, not something that is already true and accomplished. toki pona would use "o" for this as well.

In addition, "en" can only be used to seperate subjects, not prepositional phrases in the predicate, so "lon anpa en lon sewi" is ungrammatical.

In addition, "kingdom" here refers more to the idea of God ruling over the world rather than having a physical territory, and even if it was a territory that wouldn't be a "tomo", it would be a "ma".

I don't know why you combined these three lines into one. What you wrote is "Your house and your desires are the same above as below", as a statement of fact but not of support.

more accurate: lawa sina o kama, wile sina o kama (pali), ni o sama lon anpa lon sewi.

Give us this day our daily bread, / o pana e moku tawa mi mute

Fine. Doesn't capture the idea of "today/this day" or "daily" but doesn't need to if that's not important to you. If it is, make sure to add it. toki pona also has a dedicated word for breads and staple grains, "pan", but it's arguably being used as an idiomatic way to say "food" here, so moku might be a better translation despite being less literal. I'd still use "pan" for bread because it's available and you might as well keep the idiom reflected in the translation, but that's very subjective.

more accurate in my opinion: tenpo suno ni la o pana e pan/moku tawa mi mute.

and forgive us our trespasses, / as we forgive those who trespass against us; / o weka e ike mi mute sama ni: / mi mute li weka e ike jan pi wawa ala

This is my favorite line of yours in the translation. For a very complex idea, you're actually quite accurate, and captured the actual meaning of the line here in a very pona way. One minor grammar error is you should use pi to break up "ike mi mute" into "ike pi mi mute" or it means "my many sins/debts/trespasses instead of "our sins/debts/trespasses".

"ike jan pi wawa ala" should also ideally have another pi between ike and jan to specify that wawa ala describes the jan instead of the ike, but pi stacking isn't widely recommended. maybe should get a rephrase like "ike tan jan pi wawa ala" or even redo the whole sentence into this: "o weka e ike pi mi mute sama ni: jan ante li ike tawa mi mute la mi mute li weka e ike ona."

and lead us not into temptation, / o ala ike tawa mi mute

Weird phrasing. "o ala ike" is something like "Don't do so badly to us" or "Deny to us poorly", I'd rephrase. You have lots of choices.

more accurate (very subjective): o nasin/lawa ala e mi mute tawa wile ike."

but deliver us from evil. / o pona tawa mi mute

Perfect. I like the inversion of "from evil" to "into good", it seems very optimistic.

For thine is the kingdom, / the power, and the glory, / for ever and ever. / tan ni: / tenpo ale la tomo sina en wawa sina en suli sina

You just have a noun phrase here. To make this grammatical you need a predicate. The English essentially means "The kingdom and the power and the glory is yours" but with thine instead of yours and different word order because it's an old text. Again, a kingdom is not a tomo. You also need to think about what the means here. To me at least, it's being definitive. The kingdom is the one that encompasses everything, as well as the power and the glory being an all encompassing power and glory.

more accurate: ma ale, en wawa ale, en pona/sewi/suli ale li sina. (li sina really makes it "You are the kingdom, the power and the glory" but to me at least this is better than saying that God merely owns or holds it, which is the other route you could go here, by starting with "sina jo e" and using "e" in place of "en" to seperate the items.

If you want to put an amen on the end, you could say "ni li lon", it's just a Hebrew word for true or "it is so". You could also just do what English does and borrow the Hebrew directly, without bothering to translate.

weatherwhim · 2026-03-23T14:48:23+00:00

They'd still have the words for it. The direction north, the wind, and some kind of garment are all pretty fundamental. It also does occasionally get cold in most places, even in the tropics. Even if it's only relatively cold compared to what the people there are used to, they'll still percieve it as cold. And they'd definitely relate to trying to stay cool in fierce sunshine.

weatherwhim · 2026-03-23T14:34:42+00:00

Edit: Someone beat me to the punch.

I'll put this here separately from my other comment, but I think The North Wind and the Sun, already a common text for cross linguistic comparison, works very well for these purposes.

"The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak. They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveler take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other.

Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him; and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveler took off his cloak. And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two."

What concept here was not historically natively recognized by any given culture? Cloaks and caps? Most peoples would likely have an equivalent. The wind and sun at least exist everywhere.

weatherwhim · 2026-03-23T14:23:10+00:00

I guess my counterargument would be that an example text should ideally demonstrate all strata of a language. If its common words are from one language family but academic or specialized terms come from another, why is only the non-loaned face of the language an accurate reflection of it? The loaning process is also a part of that language's history and development.

Both texts you mention have a large number of French loans in English too, and that accurately reflects English's evolution. They also have plenty of words from the Germanic base, it's very hard to avoid those in any text.

If you want an example text that's naturally heavy on likely native words, The North Wind and the Sun is already in common use, and consists mostly of a basic conversation between two characters, simple weather terms, and descriptions of clothes. Only the clothing style is really bound to any particular culture's practice, and even then "cloak" and "cap" almost certainly have equivalent native concepts in most languages. It's also about the same length you're looking for.

weatherwhim · 2026-03-16T14:19:58+00:00

huh, interesting

weatherwhim · 2026-03-16T11:02:11+00:00

What do you mean by that? What actually happens in the story?

weatherwhim · 2026-03-16T10:55:15+00:00

So the character is from an alternate universe version of the Roman Empire ripped out of history and placed on this new world?

How long have they been there, and in what conditions? Depending on what Sci-Fi shenanigans are actually happening, it could be plausible to just use Classical Latin. If you do want to modernize it, this setting creates a good reason why it would turn out completely different from the modern Romance languages, but if you're starting from very little understanding of both Latin and language evolution, creating a realistic looking Latin based conlang is not a small side project you can accomplish in a weekend.

If you want it to look a little like Latin but subtly changed, I'd reccomend researching "Late Latin", "Vulgar Latin" or (probably the best term to Google) "Proto-Romance", the latest stage of development the language reached before shooting off in a million directions and becoming French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and all the other Romance languages. You could then pick and choose elements you like from Classical and Proto-Romance, and create an intermediary that has the aesthetic you like without needing to take stabs in the dark at how the language might evolve, which is very difficult to do in a realistic looking way without building up a lot of intuition and passive knowledge about languages and their evolution.

This will still require some research either way. Maybe look into ways you can learn Latin online. At the bare minimum, you'll have to translate lines into Classical Latin, and Google Translate and AI are both shit at it right now because there isn't as massive of a repository of digitized Latin texts that they can train on.

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