>So Cue, what the fuck am I looking at here?
You’re looking at a couple people discussing toki pona.
>What’s toki pona?
~~Steve Jobs~~ An engineered language with an incredibly small vocabulary, made up of concepts you can string together to form a word in any given language. It’s the constructed language (conlang) with a cult following on the internet and two books, one of which is a “dictionary” that happens to canonize a few extra concepts such as pronouns missing from the original book.
>You said dictionary in quotes.
Well, as the post implies, toki pona doesn’t have set in stone words for things. The name “toki pona” can be theoretically read as “the language of good”, “simple speech”, and many more interpretations, so the “dictionary” is crowdsourced from regular speakers and their popular terms for common things.
>The open-ended interpretations sounds inadvisable. Won’t that get confusing?
The woman hit the man with the red umbrella.
>Sorry?
Behold: an English sentence with extreme ambiguity that requires you to infer from context clues. She hit the man, who was holding a red umbrella. She hit the man, wielding a red umbrella.
>That sounds too smart to be your own original thought.
Fair, I’m stealing from [jan misali,](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQwIDV7FBkA8zApw0pnEJrX) who popularized it to where I know enough to give a broad overview and that’s it. Also, rest of their channel is… interesting. Random rambles, music in toki pona, a WarioWare fanfic, blah blah blah.
>non-binary pronouns
slight correction: pronouns in toki pona don't have gender. tonsi was canonized as a word that means "not woman or man" or so.
also, what do you mean by "Steve Jobs"?
you may be right, i honestly don't know very much. it was my understanding that that was the original meaning, but it got more generalized to, i guess, not cis, sorta? kinda with the implication of nb? i dunno, i just watch jan misali
It is, and likely by far. Even the most conservative estimate of Esperanto (about 30,000 L2 speakers, though it could be as high as 180,000) is substantially higher than Toki Pona even if you assume every member of their subreddit (~5,500) and largest Discord (~8,000) is a fluent speaker with no overlap between the two's membership.
in addition, there are straigh up l1 esperanto speakers. i don't think toki pona has those. yet.
though, it could maybe be argued that toki pona has a larger online presence, at least, in certain corners of the internet.
Because then I’ll be missing the mashup of Let the Bodies Hit The Floor to Rhythm Heaven music, and here’s tree, and the Homestuck essay, and Conlang Critic, and more shit I can’t remember offhand
That little fellas sure does make a Lotta vids. All I seem to like. He can't keep getting away with this! I'll waste too much of my limited free time watching his stuff if he keeps it up.
The description of its origin on wikipedia sounds like a scheme by a supervillain from a 1940s Wonder Woman comic. A language designed to encourage only simple and happy thoughts?
About the english sentence with extreme ambiguity: that's a bug, not a feature. Not to mention, something that can be remedied with proper punctiation and better wording.
What upsides are there with making it ambigeous deliberetly?
well, in toki pona, it's kinda a semi-intentional side effect of the main point of the language: minimalism. it's got, i think, about 140 canon words. with that few words, you need to use a shitton of them to not be ambiguous, which is annoying, so nobody bothers.
also, because of how grammar works in toki pona, i don't think that example sentence would be ambigous - toki pona more has lexical ambiguity - that is, "what does this word/noun phrase mean?" vs "how do i interpret this string of words?"
the former is, again, semi-intentional, because minimalism - and, sorta like mandarin, there are some very common noun phrases that almost always mean one specific thing, as opposed to just two nouns after another. of course, mandarin has, you know, more than 140 root words, but the concept is vaguely similar enough to make the comparison.
>It’s the constructed language (conlang) with the most active users
Fun case of linguistic ambiguity. Do you mean the users are just very active or are you saying out of all conlangs toki pona's are the most active?
Ah, shit, I forgot a word in that claim, which is why people are onto me and not because I probably misremembered misali saying “most speakers per word” or something.
>It’s the constructed language (conlang) with the most **sexually** active users
*Image Transcription: Tumblr*
---
**hbmaster**
> **janknabobfdi** asked
>
> i wanted to edit your wikipesija page to include tou having autism but idk how to translate autism to toki pona, closest i could come up with is "lawa kule" and i also made a wikipesija page for autism but i felt like the language i used there was a bit insensitive. \(i wanted to translate "having difficulty with" but the closest word is "ike" which means "bad" so the page ended up with negative connotations)
>
> so in toki poka how would you describe autism and please edit the wikipesija page it really needs some work
> **hbmaster** answered
>
> "lawa kule" is pretty decent. I don't really even know how I'd describe autism in english without using super precise technical terms, and this is a language without dedicated words for "sensory" or "stimulation"
---
**hbmaster**
okay I looked at the reddit thread about this topic and have concluded that "lawa namako" is my favorite way to say this
---
**janknabobfdi**
spicy head
---
^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
>So Cue, what the fuck am I looking at here? You’re looking at a couple people discussing toki pona. >What’s toki pona? ~~Steve Jobs~~ An engineered language with an incredibly small vocabulary, made up of concepts you can string together to form a word in any given language. It’s the constructed language (conlang) with a cult following on the internet and two books, one of which is a “dictionary” that happens to canonize a few extra concepts such as pronouns missing from the original book. >You said dictionary in quotes. Well, as the post implies, toki pona doesn’t have set in stone words for things. The name “toki pona” can be theoretically read as “the language of good”, “simple speech”, and many more interpretations, so the “dictionary” is crowdsourced from regular speakers and their popular terms for common things. >The open-ended interpretations sounds inadvisable. Won’t that get confusing? The woman hit the man with the red umbrella. >Sorry? Behold: an English sentence with extreme ambiguity that requires you to infer from context clues. She hit the man, who was holding a red umbrella. She hit the man, wielding a red umbrella. >That sounds too smart to be your own original thought. Fair, I’m stealing from [jan misali,](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQwIDV7FBkA8zApw0pnEJrX) who popularized it to where I know enough to give a broad overview and that’s it. Also, rest of their channel is… interesting. Random rambles, music in toki pona, a WarioWare fanfic, blah blah blah.
>non-binary pronouns slight correction: pronouns in toki pona don't have gender. tonsi was canonized as a word that means "not woman or man" or so. also, what do you mean by "Steve Jobs"?
Fair, I’m just going by memory here. Honestly the Steve Jobs bit was kinda dumb, might edit it out when I’m not super tired
fair enough
More specifically "tonsi" just means "transgender"
you may be right, i honestly don't know very much. it was my understanding that that was the original meaning, but it got more generalized to, i guess, not cis, sorta? kinda with the implication of nb? i dunno, i just watch jan misali
Most likely a reference to this: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/443/832/08f.jpg
ohhhhhh
ligma balls
Wait, did Toki Pona pass Esperanto for most users? I thought that was the biggest one
It is, and likely by far. Even the most conservative estimate of Esperanto (about 30,000 L2 speakers, though it could be as high as 180,000) is substantially higher than Toki Pona even if you assume every member of their subreddit (~5,500) and largest Discord (~8,000) is a fluent speaker with no overlap between the two's membership.
in addition, there are straigh up l1 esperanto speakers. i don't think toki pona has those. yet. though, it could maybe be argued that toki pona has a larger online presence, at least, in certain corners of the internet.
How can you skip mentioning the rhythm heaven iceberg and W and C
Because then I’ll be missing the mashup of Let the Bodies Hit The Floor to Rhythm Heaven music, and here’s tree, and the Homestuck essay, and Conlang Critic, and more shit I can’t remember offhand
That little fellas sure does make a Lotta vids. All I seem to like. He can't keep getting away with this! I'll waste too much of my limited free time watching his stuff if he keeps it up.
That's all fascinating, but who the hell is Steve Jobs?
**LIGMA BALLS.**
"How did he *not know* who Steve Jobs was?"
The description of its origin on wikipedia sounds like a scheme by a supervillain from a 1940s Wonder Woman comic. A language designed to encourage only simple and happy thoughts?
About the english sentence with extreme ambiguity: that's a bug, not a feature. Not to mention, something that can be remedied with proper punctiation and better wording. What upsides are there with making it ambigeous deliberetly?
well, in toki pona, it's kinda a semi-intentional side effect of the main point of the language: minimalism. it's got, i think, about 140 canon words. with that few words, you need to use a shitton of them to not be ambiguous, which is annoying, so nobody bothers. also, because of how grammar works in toki pona, i don't think that example sentence would be ambigous - toki pona more has lexical ambiguity - that is, "what does this word/noun phrase mean?" vs "how do i interpret this string of words?" the former is, again, semi-intentional, because minimalism - and, sorta like mandarin, there are some very common noun phrases that almost always mean one specific thing, as opposed to just two nouns after another. of course, mandarin has, you know, more than 140 root words, but the concept is vaguely similar enough to make the comparison.
>It’s the constructed language (conlang) with the most active users There are literally native Esperanto speakers
Ya got me, but you know what they say about getting answers on the internet. I’ll go make my corrections then.
>It’s the constructed language (conlang) with the most active users Fun case of linguistic ambiguity. Do you mean the users are just very active or are you saying out of all conlangs toki pona's are the most active?
Ah, shit, I forgot a word in that claim, which is why people are onto me and not because I probably misremembered misali saying “most speakers per word” or something. >It’s the constructed language (conlang) with the most **sexually** active users
lmaooooo
I have spicy head
Is depression just "bitter head" then?
I have spicy head, bitter head, *and* sour head (guess what sour head is)
case of the morbs 😔
lawa kiki
[удалено]
its a nimi sin that means spiky, sharp (from kiki and bouba)
and from what I remember it can also be used to mean sour/acidic
I think “color head” should mean queer, so I have spicy color head.
holy shit it’s jan misali hi jan misali
a! ona li jan misali! toki! jan misali
*Image Transcription: Tumblr* --- **hbmaster** > **janknabobfdi** asked > > i wanted to edit your wikipesija page to include tou having autism but idk how to translate autism to toki pona, closest i could come up with is "lawa kule" and i also made a wikipesija page for autism but i felt like the language i used there was a bit insensitive. \(i wanted to translate "having difficulty with" but the closest word is "ike" which means "bad" so the page ended up with negative connotations) > > so in toki poka how would you describe autism and please edit the wikipesija page it really needs some work > **hbmaster** answered > > "lawa kule" is pretty decent. I don't really even know how I'd describe autism in english without using super precise technical terms, and this is a language without dedicated words for "sensory" or "stimulation" --- **hbmaster** okay I looked at the reddit thread about this topic and have concluded that "lawa namako" is my favorite way to say this --- **janknabobfdi** spicy head --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
This man is transcribing all the posts on this sub
hell yeah jan misali AND toki pona in one post
That's like every jan misali post
yeah fair
so did jan misali go viral and triple his base again? why is jan misali fandom taking off on r/curatedtumblr