The World's TINIEST Language? (TOKI PONA)

hello everyone welcome to the Laing focus Channel and my name is Paul what should I talk about today maybe I should talk about a language spoken by tens of millions of people maybe I should talk about one of the world's major language families or a country with stunning linguistic diversity mmm no I think today I'll talk about something a little different today's topic is Toki Epona Toki poni what's that Toki poni is a constructed language meaning that it did not arise naturally but it was created by someone in order to fulfill certain criteria or a certain vision the most well-known constructed language might be Esperanto which I made a video about a couple of years ago Toki poni is another constructed language that I thought was unique and interesting enough to make a video about it's not spoken by very many people but it's well known amongst fans of constructed languages the name Toki ponent means the language of good and as a minimalist language the idea behind it is extreme simplicity especially in its core vocabulary the purpose of Toki poni is not just to simplify communication but to simplify your own thinking to force yourself to eliminate unnecessary information and ideas and focus on what's really important Toki poni has a core vocabulary of only 123 words yes you heard that right 123 words you can learn those hundred and twenty-three words in just a couple of hours using an app like memorize or unki I should point out that in its original form Toki poni had just 120 words but it seems that since then a few new words have come into common use amongst the Toki Puna community Toki Puna draws its vocabulary from a number of languages including English Tok piscine Finnish Georgian Dutch Acadian French Esperanto Croatian and Mandarin and Cantonese and it's intended to be equally as easy to learn for people from all cultures and linguistic backgrounds the languages phonology is also very simple there are just nine consonants and there are five vowels there are no diphthong and there are no consonant clusters and every syllable ends in a vowel or in a nasal sound if we look at one Toki poni word we can see how the simple phonology determines how the words were formed the word for sweet is Suey the consonant cluster SW schwa is not allowed so while vowel is inserted between the two consonants and the final T consonant 2 is also not allowed this might seem kind of strange but having these limitations makes toki poni words simple to pronounce now the big question on everyone's mind is probably how the heck do you communicate using only 123 words well those 123 words usually cover a range of related meanings so there's ambiguity context helps you understand which meaning is being used for example the word coûte means ear but it also means to hear listen pay attention to or obey Makuta a Kalama mu c the sentence means on listening to music here we know coûte is a verb because it comes after a pronoun which seems like the subject and it's followed by a direct object marker a which itself is one of the 123 words of Toki Bona and out of the several possible meanings for this verb listen makes the most sense in this context as for the word meaning music we'll come back to that in a minute another example the word moku means food or eat or drink I guess eat and drink can together be thought of as consumed sina moku Otello sina means you in the singular Tayloe means water and we know moku as a verb because it would be weird to say you are food and also we see the direct object marker yeah so does the verb mean eat or drink well you don't eat water so obviously it means drink so the sentence means you are drinking water or you drink water another example the word Celie means warm as an adjective but also warmth or heat as a noun and also warm or heat as a verb Sally sue no Lisa Lea Tomomi the warmth of the Sun heats my home word for word this sentences warmth son subject marker heats direct object marker house my in the first case here Celie is a noun because it comes before another noun you can imagine the word of between them if Sally came after the suno then it would be the adjective warm this word Li is a subject marker and I'll talk more about that in a minute here Celie is a verb because it's followed by the direct object marker this word Tomo is used for house but also has the more general meaning of structure and can mean building etc so the subject marker Li is placed after subjects aside from me meaning I and Sina the singular form of you without that word Li to clearly mark the subject sentences could get confusing like in this case the verb cellie might be heard as an adjective if it comes directly after the word Sunol so you can see that context both in situation and in syntax helps us to deal with ambiguity and understand which meaning is intended second another way that we communicate using only 123 words is that words are combined to form compound words and phrases that represent more specific meanings for example there's no individual word for music but before we saw this phrase Kalama mu c which is used to mean music Kalama means sound or noise as a noun or to produce a sound to recite or to utter aloud as a verb mu c is an adjective meaning artistic entertaining frivolous playful or recreational so the phrase Kalama mu c means something like entertaining sound which seems to describe music quite nicely there's no separate word for friend in tokyo poni but we can say yan pona literally good person or friendly person to mean friend there's no individual word for God either but Yong say we represents that meaning literally divine person or maybe we could say being instead of person and notice all the shades of meaning for the word say we the core meaning uniting them all is perhaps high or up there's also no individual word for car but we can say Tomo tawa Tomo is the same word used for house and building as well as room and you could think of it as a structure so car is something like a moving room there's no individual word for telephone but you can say Allah Toki which literally means something like talking tool or communication device there's no individual word meaning thirsty you can say we lay moku Otello want to drink water and the word Taillow is also flexible enough to include other types of liquids not only water this type of formation of compound words is common in many languages around the world so it's really not that strange it reminds me of some pidgin and Creole languages but it also reminds me of the way compound words are formed using kanji in Japanese but tokeep onna takes it to an extreme going back to taillow the word for water for a second how can you specify a different kind of drink a different kind of liquid there's no word for alcohol but Taillow NASA literally silly water is used to mean alcohol if you want to say juice you can say Taillow Kili which means fruit water or vegetable water so how could we get more specific and say orange juice well here it starts to get a little complicated there's no word for orange in Tokyo poni either the fruit or the color we can create the color by combining red and yellow low yellow something like reddish yellow so we could say tell Akili below a yellow fruit water that's yellowish red yeah maybe that would work of course that could also describe mango juice or carrot juice or some other orange colored juice from mango maybe I could just be descriptive and say something like Keeley Pinot a yellow Pima Tawi fruit that is yellowish red of Thailand hey in context maybe that would make sense but remember that part of the idea behind Toki Puna is to avoid too much complexity in too much detail and to simplify your own thoughts and only focus on basic information some other features of Toki poni there's basically no gender distinction in Tokyo poni but if you want to specify the gender of a noun you can attach the word medley for female or me a for male ona Mele leap ona tawa me this sentence means I like her literally it's more like she is good for me here we see the word ona which means he she or it but here I want to specify female so I added Mele if I took away Mellie this sentence could mean I like it or even I like him depending on what the listener thought I was referring to another interesting thing to note here is the way like is expressed there's no word for like in Toki Bona so it's paraphrased by saying good for me Bona tawa me another example there's no individual word for mother or father there is one word mama which means mother or father in other words parent so if I want to say my father is a teacher and clearly specify father rather than mother I can say mama mia me lianca panettone long Tomo Sona mama mia me means my father then young peope an asana literally means person of giving knowledge this is the phrase used to mean teacher loan means in on or at and Tomo Sona means school literally house of knowledge okay so we've seen that there's no gender and there's also no need to specify singular or plural but if necessary you can use the word Mutai as an adjective meaning many young li comma can mean a person is coming or people are coming but if you need to specify plural you can say young Mutiny comma which is like saying multiple people are coming how about verb tenses as you may have guessed there are no actual verb tenses in Tokyo poni this sentence yanli poly can mean a person is working a person worked or a person will work but if you want a time phrase can be added tempo nila yung lee poly a person is working or more literally in this time a person works la is a word that's used to mark one part of the sentence as context for the rest of the sentence so it can be used for a time clause like above or an if or when clause tempo P nila yung lee poly a person worked more literally in the finished time a person works tempo Kamala Yan Li poly a person will work more literally in the coming time a person works let's check out one or two more tokeep ona sentences and see what we find malate Mutola maple in pune this sentence means when I sleep a lot I feel good which is definitely true for me word for word it's I sleep much when I feel good we can see that within each clause the basic word order is SVO or rather SVC subject verb complement since there's no object here the most notable thing is that la is placed at the end of the time clause rather than at the beginning of it were as an English when comes at the beginning another sentence Ken la Yan Li Li Li Panna Attila Oh Co tan Leona Li will a moku Otello this means maybe the baby is crying because it's thirsty word for word it may be baby subject marker cries because it subject marker thirsty but some of those words can be broken down further into their components first we have Ken la which means maybe and is a combination of ken which means can and the contextual particle la then we have young Lily which means little person here we have the phrase Panna it a loco meaning to cry Panna means to release or to emit taillow is water and OCO is i so more literally it's like emit water of the eye and tani meaning because can be broken down into from and this again here we see will a moku Otello meaning thirsty literally wants to drink water remember that taillow can be used for liquids in general so I guess it can be understood as milk in this context so as you can see tokeep ona is very simple at its core but expressing more specific or complex ideas might present more of a challenge than you would expect or at least require some practice like any language but this brings us back to the purpose of tokeep ona which is to avoid indulging in overly complex and detailed thought and to allow yourself to focus on the most basic information it's sort of a way to avoid the mental hamster wheel of modern life and it can be fun to see just how much you can communicate using such a simple set of core vocabulary and grammatical rules the flip side is that tokeep ona is obviously limited in its application communicating in detail on topics like science technology politics and so on is probably impossible to do at least without a lot of ambiguity but as a language of daily communication that chat or just for fun it's an interesting language to experiment with and try out be sure to follow Lange focus on Facebook Twitter and Instagram and once again thank you to all of my amazing patreon supporters especially these ones because they are my top tier patreon supporters so many thanks to them thank you for watching and have a nice stay [Music]

Channel: Langfocus

Views: 1,071,039

Keywords: language study, polyglot, foreign language, phrases, linguist, linguistics, phonology, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, verb tense, compound words, Toki Pona vocabulary, How many words are there in Toki Pona, How to speak Toki Pona, Toki Pona sentences, Constructed language, Esperanto

Id: E4y7tf3VJAM

Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 23 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/garaile64]

The guy from Conlang Critic would be amused.

[u/Askadia]

I happened to see the vid yesterday, and I liked.
However, I don't think that relying on a long chain of descriptive words can be considered as something "simple", not even "good". I mean, I think "mango" is easier than "fruit of red yellow of country Thai". If the language aims to avoid nowadays complexity, then I'd go for a two-syllable word like 'mango', instead of those long chains. I see in that a sort of contradiction in the way Toki Pona pursue its goal.

Something that came to mind when watching the vid is that, all the Romance languages made most of their adverbs from Latin 'mente, mens' ('mind'), and English -ly adverbs from 'like'. So, I wonder how long a pair such as 'loje jelo' would take to simply become 'lojelo'.

I think that an interesting idea for a daughter conlang could be to enrich Toki Pona's lexicon by 'condensing' those common pairs (such as 'loje jelo' = red-yellow = orange) into actual words.

😊

[u/SoaringMoon]

I had no clue how much toki pona and my language, kyrete were similar in functionality.

[u/[deleted]]

I really don't like toki pona. My morning alphabet cereal is a better conlang with better expressability than it.

[u/13chaggit]

He mispronounced "toki pona" and then went on to capitalise official toki pona words. It was a nice video but he should have done a bit more research.

[u/[deleted]]

Succi Pona
The language of succ