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ONLY 120 WORDS? ONE ENTIRE LANGUAGE? HOW?

toki pona is, put simply, a human language, just like any other! It has a small vocabulary and a very simple grammar. In fact, the grammar is so simple that you can fit the whole thing on one sheet of paper.

Now I bet you’re wondering. Only 120 words? How can you even talk about anything?? This is where the complexity of the language lies. There are a few codependent methods.

• big semantic spaces: A semantic space is the range of possible meanings of a word. For example, the semantic space of English word “chair” contains lots of different chairs in all shapes and sizes, and potentially anything that isn’t usually a chair but is being used as one, like if I sit on a person and call them a chair as a joke. In English, most words have smaller semantic spaces, such as “complain” and “generocity,” which both talk about relatively specific concepts. But some words have much larger semantic spaces, like “bird” and “liquid” and “hidden.” English uses words with small semantic spaces to narrow down meaning. Is “bird” too ambiguous? Just say peacock! Boom. disambiguated. EASY. but by design, toki pona lacks words with smaller semantic spaces. That’s right, all toki pona words have giant semantic spaces. So how do you disambiguate if that’s all you’ve got?
• CONTEXT! If you’ve spent any time around toki pona speakers, you’ve probably heard this thrown around a lot. But what does it mean?? There’s this, which is a video that explains it in depth, but my take is that context is information that you get that isn’t inside the sentence. For example, what can you presuppose based on the sentence? What do you already know about the person who said it? Where was the sentence said? How was the sentence said? All of these tools can be used to help disambiguate. But the most powerful tool to add context to what you’re saying is:
• extra sentences: make YOUR OWN context!! See, it’s a really simple answer that takes a lot of people a really long time to figure out. “But how will I know if the bird is red or blue?” You can say what color it is. “But how will they know that when i say “telo” I mean ‘water’ and not ‘deadly acid’?” Tell them that your “telo” won’t kill people or burn open their flesh. It can really be this easy if you know what you’re doing! But what if conversations get too long?
• Some things aren’t as important as you think. In English, it’s common to say “cat,” “rat,” pig,” or “dog” instead of pet. This makes sense! It puts a clearer picture in your head and it’s the same exact number of syllables. But toki pona doesn’t have words for these! toki pona asks you: why do need to specify? If it feels cumbersome to explain what you mean in more detail, maybe you don’t even want to. Maybe it’s not important if it’s a dog or a cat. Of course there are ways to disambiguate between dogs and cats in toki pona, like describing behaivor, size, or doing an impression of the noises they make. But sometimes that info is not important.

So using these tools, a toki pona speaker can master the art of talking around specific concepts they don’t have words for. It isn’t easy! But learning a language never is easy. toki pona just shifts the effort along to a different part of language. Figuring out how to say things is less of “oh what’s that word again” and more like a puzzle, which a lot of people love!

What will YOU do with toki pona?

vocabulary word list!

(this is a great learning the vocabulary! if you're neurodivergent I promise you could stare at this for hours)

Dictionary! (This is a great tool to get to KNOW the semantic spaces of each word!)

Limited ediction picture #2!

click on the button to reveal the picture!

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