The toki pona census (which is far from perfect in many ways) doesn't survey race. However, it's undeniable that toki pona is a predominantly white language. Especially in some of the larger spaces, there are very few black, brown, east asian, or indigenous speakers. I personally know quite a few people in these demographics, but most of them aren't in the largest online spaces due to microagressions and other racist things that make participation cumbersome. One of my toki ponist friends who is half white and half central asian has remarked on how weird it is that it is considered among the least white toki pona speakers when it is usually racialized as white both online and in person. It kind of shows how white the community skews.

If you're not white and you're reading this, I wrote it for you. I want to be clear that the toki pona community at large has had a racism problem for nearly a decade, if not since it first got traction. You can see the lack of diversity in Sonja Lang's list of Qualified Freelancers on her website. To my knowledge, (and I do know every person on this list personally to varying degrees), every member of the list is white. This doesn't mean they're bad at what they do, but it does mean that the community is unfortunately not committed to lifting up nonwhite voices and promoting racial diversity. If you have toki pona things that you have worked on that you'd like me to promote on my website, just let me know. I'm committed to using my website to platform nonwhite toki pona creators.

If you're white and you're reading this, I wrote it for you too. This isn't Sonja Lang's fault, and this isn't any one white person's fault. This is the fault of colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, and how they've been able to permiate our community. This is a call to action for experienced white speakers, learners, and people who are learning about toki pona for the first time: make your presence in toki pona spaces as antiracist as possible. Use any power or popularity you gain in toki pona to lift up the voices of nonwhite toki ponists. A tip for learning about antiracism: people have made really well made resources for you, and googling "antiracism" or "examples of microagressions" and stuff like that will give you VERY high quality resources. Go look at them!

A - Yes! In fact, from almost all definitions of a language, toki pona qualifies. Unless you also don’t consider Esperanto and Dothraki languages, the constructed nature of toki pona doesn’t prevent it from being a language. And, unless you don’t consider Ancient Egyptian and Medieval Galician to be languages, toki pona’s lack of native speakers doesn’t prevent it from being a language. (linguistics jargon ahead!!) toki pona fits each and every one of Hockett’s design features of langauge, which linguists around the world use as a basis for the defintion of language. The small vocabulary, while unique, doesn’t prevent it from communicating anything that a communication system needs in order to be considered a language. Even though it has recursion via some analyses, that doesn’t really matter. Despite some linguists beleiving that all language needs embedded recursion, toki pona is able to use solely anaphora to acomplish the same thing, which if anything suggests that the theory of universal grammar needs a rework. toki pona is not a natural language, but it is still a language, and it’s real.

toki pona also has an ISO code, which means it is OFFICIALLY RECOGNIZED by the International Organization for Standardization as a real language. Take that, HATERS!!

A - Nope! It does get harder though. Do not base the capabilities of toki pona on your own abilities a week in. If you can’t think of a way to say something, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Proficiency isn’t knowing a lot of words—it’s being able to describe a large range of concepts, and that can take months. I learned what a derivative was in toki pona. I’ve witnessed people criticize code written on a walk using only toki pona. Often people will use jargon as a gotcha—-can’t describe a higgs boson in toki pona! And while I probably couldn’t do it justice, I’m sure there is a quantum physisit out there who is able to describe it properly. You just gotta know what something is from the ground up. Describing something complex is easy if you turn it into a lot of simple things.

If you want examples of ways to talk about complex concepts, I do so here.

A - Why would it? You can still speak other languages. toki pona doesn't restrict what you are able to think about, it just offers a new, interesting perspective. You also can't quantify dumbness. (Well. You can try. The people who came up with IQ certainly tried. But IQ is extremely flawed and so is the concept of a single intelligence.)

A - You're right, actually. toki pona hasn't been around for a very long time, and the speakers of toki pona are not professional doctors who spent years learning how to do their job in toki pona. Doctors usually learn how to do what they do while communicating in a specific language. They train for at least a decade usually before they start working. Being a doctor doesn't just require proficiency in a language and a separate proficiency in doctoring. It requires a mixture of both in which a doctor is capable of doctoring in a specific language. If a doctor spent a decade studying toki pona doctoring, they could probably do it pretty well, but there aren't centuries of resources on doctoring in toki pona, and the way toki pona would talk about the human body would differ a lot from the majority of languages that doctoring is done it, so it would take significant effort. So yes, toki pona doesn't work in a doctor's office, but that doesn't mean it never could, just that it doesn't now and it probably never will. Please visit a doctor who speaks whatever language you are most proficient in.

A - Well that's not exactly a question but I'll give you a point there, toki pona is a language for woke people with blue hair and pronouns! Do you have a problem with that? Please dm me @ lipamanka on discord if you have a problem with that. I'd be very curious to see what you have to say. Do it you won't.

If you don't want to learn a language with lots of queer people and leftists, then you won't have fun with toki pona. You should have more luck with Esperanto idk.

A - I personally haven't read the whole book, but I understand what newspeak is, and its goals are completely different from toki pona's. Newspeak was designed to opress by limiting what people are able to think about. This is actually impossible to do anyway, because language cannot limit what you are able to think about. It can only influence what you do end up thinking about. For example, the words you use when talking to someone in Korean change depending on their age, marital status, and other factors, so a Korean speaker will probably remember if you're married better than an english speaker (unless the english speaker needs to call you "Ms." vs "Mrs.") That doesn't mean that English speakers aren't able to think or talk about marriage. Quite the contrary! Some Anglophones won't shut up about it. And that's beautiful.

toki pona, on the other hand, was designed for fun and exploration! Thinking in toki pona doesn't limit what I'm able to think about. It may limit what you can think about while you're still learning, but that's hardly unique to toki pona. When I think in tok pisin, I can't think about complicated linguistics terms or plant taxonomy. But that's an issue of proficiency, not of the language itself.

A - Once again, not a question. But why is this true? Pirahã doesn't have a robust number system beyond words for "a few" and "a lot." Lots of natural languages avoid precise numbers for things above a certain threshold. I talk more about how the lack of a robust number system factors into the philosophy of toki pona here if you're curious. But the most convincing reasoning is that in no defenition of a language is a number system mentioned. For example, hockett's design features doesn't include anything about numbers. Not even Noam Chomsky mentions number systems as a factor into what is and isn't a language. This proposed universal, "all full languages have number systems," is not suggested anywhere in linguistics.

A - This isn't a question, but Sonja Lang and I worked on an answer together. Sonja Lang speaks Esperanto and has been an Esperantist for longer than toki pona has existed, so it may be natural to think that Sonja's conlang was created to build upon and improve Esperanto.

But it's important to understand that toki pona is trying to acieve something completely different. Esperanto was created to be an International Auxiliary Language, meant to facilitate communication across different native languages on a global scale. On the other hand, toki pona was designed as a minimalist language with a focus on simplicity and philosophical reflection.

Today, toki pona has grown beyond its original design and is used by a small global community, functioning as a "small world language." However, its purpose remains distinct from that of Esperanto. While Esperanto aims for widespread international communication, toki pona emphasizes a personal relationship with language and the distillation of complex ideas into basic concepts.

You don't have to like toki pona—it's a language with a specific purpose, and it might not appeal to everyone. If it doesn't resonate with you, that's completely fine! There are many other constructed languages out there, and you might find one that suits your interests better, or you could even try creating your own. Every constructed language has its unique purpose and audience. Natural languages are fun too.

A - If I'm wording these questions myself why do I keep making them statements?

The answer here is, you totally could! It would just be a lot of work! Especially if the book is particularly long. Translating it into any language would be difficult. But there are lots of translations of very complicated books into toki pona.

A - toki pona words don’t usually have a lot of meanings. The range of ideas they can refer to, also known as their “semantic space,” is usually a really big set of objects with a few shared traits, just like in other languages. The big difference in toki pona is that those ranges are much bigger. It’s not like each toki pona word has eighteen different seperate meanings. toki pona isn’t like the golden compass from His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman.

A - This is a pretty common misconception that may be slightly harmful. There is no evidence that toki pona has a positive effect on depression or any other mental illness. Annecdotally, many people have shared that the community helped them with real human connection. Dispite speculation, toki pona has never served sucessfully as an assisted communication tool for mute and nonverbal people. This doesn't mean that toki pona for sure doesn't do any of these things, but there's no reason why it would be uniquely equipped when compared with other hobbies that can bring community to someone. This should go without saying but please seek professional help if you are struggling with depression. toki pona is absolutely not a replacement for modern medicine and should never be treated as such.

A - If that happened, then yes. Because toki pona is built upon a small vocabulary, speakers want it to stay that way, and avoid creating compounds like this. You can still modify one word with another, but as soon as there’s extra meaning not given by the two words alone or context, it’s become lexicalized. Despite the effort of speakers, this can happen sometimes. Fortunately, it’s pretty rare, and most speakers avoid it. So toki pona still has about 120 words.

A - Okay let me work quickly here. Calling some cultures simpler than others, no matter the context, is racist. It has been used to justify colonialism. “Look at these simple people! We need to take control of them and their land so we can bring them the joys of Complex European Culture.” If you think this is overly dramatic, it’s not. These are real justifications used by real people, and they are used today. Now that that’s out of the way, similarly to how it’s difficult to put all people on a single sliding scale of general intelligence, it’s very difficult to put all languages on a sliding scale of general complexity. It is possible to compare aspects of languages. For example, toki pona has a less complex inflectional morphology system than English. toki pona has a much smaller lexicon than Vietnamese. toki pona requires more information to be disambiguated via context in order to disambiguate large concepts than Nahuatl. But to say toki pona is generally simpler than other langauges is misguided and not really useful.

Some people also say that toki pona sounds like Japanese, but according to a study done in Malaysia, Malaysians and Chinese people are more likely to say toki pona sounds like Italian! So this is entirely based on perspective. If toki pona sounds like Japanese to you, it may be because you come from the Americas or Western Europe or something.

A - Nope! toki pona doesn’t mimic any of English’s grammar. Any similarities are not because it is a cipher. There have been a few games of toki pona telephone where speakers translate a paragraph back and forth between toki pona and english until the paragraph is unrecognizable. This wouldn’t be possible if it was a simple cipher. A toki pona speaker cannot rely on english when speaking toki pona.

What sounds culty about it? This isn't a funny term to be thrown around. There are many people who have suffered (and are currently suffering) through cult abuse, and it's frankly disheartening how much the term is thrown around and used as a punchline. It's become a buzzword. If you have concerns about toki pona being a cult, let me know on discord and I promise I'll get back to you.

BEFORE I write ANYTHING ELSE I want to make clear that the answer is NO at the time being. There are in fact NO native speakers and the guy who said that he was raising native speakers in a youtube video was LYING. You can learn more about this here. (It's a great read by jan Olipija.)

Something that Olipija doesn't mention is the use of the word "native." This word can be kind of problematic for a few reasons. I'll list them here.

• The indigenous people of the Americas, also known as Native Americans, are "native." Wether or not they speak their indigenous language from childhood or not, an indigenous person's language is still a Native language, and it's their Native language, by virtue of the word "Native." All speakers of indigenous languages in the Americas are Native speakers, and all people indigenous to the americas are Native speakers because they are speakers that are Native. So while this doesn't say much about toki pona, the term itself is not universally applicable to all languages because of this confusion. Many people prefer "mother language," "first language," "language from childhood," or "L1." From here on I'm going to put "native" in quotes to highlight this, but I'm going to continue using that term.
• The concept of who is and isn't a "native" speaker is kind of a loaded subject a lot of the time. The people who have the privilege of deciding the criteria for this are usually those in power. The exact definition of "native" speaker can range from learning a language anywhere between the ages of 0 and 14, depending on who you ask. So the answer to this question may be yes! There are many people who learned toki pona below the age of 14. But that's a pretty high estimate. A more reasonable estimate of the critical age where the brain stops learning languages as quickly is 7.

It's very possible that we will eventually have "native" speakers. But we should absolutely not treat them as divine. They will just be Guys. Let us treat them as Guys. Like please if we ever have "native" speakers please be normal about it like please.

A - Not quite. Unlike Esperanto, toki pona wasn’t designed explicitly for this purpose. However, part of its design was to be culturally neutral towards natural langauges across the world, something that Esperanto doesn’t really succeed at. toki pona lacks sounds that aren’t abundantly common in natural languages. It lacks complicated cultural customs that exist in any culture associated with natural languages. Its words come from a very interesting set of languages, which do include European languages, but also include languages from outside of Europe. A lot of the vocabulary is recognizable to English speakers. But hypothetically, if given access to the same resources, the advantage being a native English speaker affords is marginal at best and wouldn’t help much. So while toki pona was made primarily for other things, this is something it is good at.

A - The answer here is a bit complicated and goes into the heart of toki pona’s philosophy. In most languages, there are two methods people use to disambiguate. The first is a large lexicon with lots of words that can mean lots of specific things. English has the word “phonebook” which is very specific. However, you could also use the other method—context—to describe the same thing using only words that are as vague as toki pona words, or close anyway. “A large book filled with numbers. Some of the pages are white, and some of them are yellow. I can use these numbers on the white pages to communicate with other people even when I’m not in the same room using a different tool, the telephone. I can use the numbers on the yellow pages to contact buisnesses.” I’m not sure if everyone reading this knows what a phonebook is, but one thing to note is that if the listener does know what one is, they could probably cut off the speaker at the end of the second sentence. It doesn’t really take that long after all. And if someone doesn’t know what a phonebook is, they’d probably need it to be explained to them anyway. toki pona has a small lexicon to force its speakers to communicate using the second method only—no large lexicon with lots of words that can mean specific things means that speakers have to use context to be understood, which might feel a little weird. It’s one of the reasons why toki pona can take a while to get the hang of, which is unique. This process can slow down how you think and help you analyze what actually needs to be communicated using words in order to get across what you want to get across. It’s not as efficient as natural languages are, but it’s not that much less efficient either.

A - Of course! Because the language varies so much by speaker, the exact way this manifests can change from person to person, and there have been no studies on this, so I don't have any more specific data for toki pona as a whole. As for myself, I tend to be more verbose when speaking out loud.

A - Nope! AI is particularly unreliable for toki pona. Especially when there are people online ready to answer all your questions with reliable answers for free, why would you need to use AI? I've seen some people on the subreddit post responses based on AI and said "this is what the AI said," and they're always either at least half gibberish or false/misleading. Join kama sona, a discord server for toki pona learners, or post on the subreddit if you want these questions answered. And chances are they will get answered like immediately.

A - Sure! Trying to translate something is a great way to learn a new language. Make sure to ask for feedback if you're able. You will likely make mistakes. I am not very proud of my first translations, but I'm VERY proud that I tried. Don't get too attached to your early translations and don't be afraid to scrap them. They will probably be very bad, so think of them as a learning tool and not a final product you can publish that others will enjoy profusely. Good luck!

A - DEFINITELY learn them at the same time! Especially if you're dyslexic like me, being a proficient reader of a logography will be a big confidence boost early on. There is significant scientific evidence that dyslexic people read faster when reading logographies than when reading alphabets. Most proficient speakers I know read sitelen pona, and sitelen pona is really fun and cool! Make sure to experiment with sitelen pona. When I learned toki pona, I actually learned the glyphs and their meanings before learning the words themselves. I think this was particularly useful for me because I could tie the semantic spaces to glyphs before having to tie them to sounds, which made reading them faster.

A - It might! One of the goals of toki pona is to slow down thinking so you can be aware of what you're really thinking about. Like the classic example of a bad friend. If a friend is a jan pona, then a bad friend is a jan pona ike, which doesn't make sense. So maybe a friend isn't always a jan pona. You HAVE to think about these things in order to communicate effectively in toki pona. Is this method of thinking really more simple than how you normally think? In my opinion, it's just different, not more simple. But who knows!

A - There is actually a study on this! Paolo Coluzzi, an Italian professor at Universiti Malaya, conducted a study entitled How learning Toki Pona may help improving communication strategies in a foreign or second language. In it, he has his Italian students try to use circumlocution (talking around things) before and after four toki pona classes. My italian isn't great, but it looks like any effect toki pona had on learning Italian was concentrated specifically in circumlocution. For example, a student who translated "monkeys" as "monkeys" (which is, unsuprisingly, not actually an Italian word) translated it as "molti animali che gli piace mangiare la banana" (which means "many animals that like to eat the banana") after the four lessons. Students were also more likely to use less specific terms when they didn't know the Italian word for something. For example, one student who translated "cherries" as "fragole" (which means "strawberries") and another student who translated it as "ceri" (which is a phonetic transcription in Italian of the English word "cherry" that is plural because it ends in an i) both later translated it as "frute" (which means "fruits"). Circumlocution is an important skill in language learning, and the evidence from this study looks somewhat promising, but it had a sample size of six, which is definitely not many! So we don't really know, but a lot of toki pona speakers have claimed that it has helped them, and I can agree that anecdotally learning toki pona has helped me with circumlocution in my target languages. This is all to say: we don't know for sure, but anecdotally, some toki pona speakers attribute ease of language aquisition of other languages to having learned toki pona in some aspects.

A - Yeah, sure! The resources online for toki pona are some of the best langauge learning resources out there. It's probably because toki pona lends itself very well to many divergent methods of language teaching, which is why it works so well for so many people.

A - Well, there might be a single word for it! For example, the toki pona word for "defenestrate" is "pana." The toki pona word for "antidisestablishmentarianism" is "nasin." The word for "Eukaryota Animalia Chordata Mammalia Carnivora Procyon Lotor" is "soweli" (or in this case, you could also use kijetesantakalu). None of these words are very specific, and definitely not as specific as their english counterparts, but it's really not that hard to elaborate on what makes antidisestablishmentarianism different from other nasin, or that which separates Eukaryota Animalia Chordata Mammalia Carnivora Procyon Lotor from other soweli. Sometimes, though, those details aren't relevant to communicate an idea, so toki ponists leave them out!

A - tokiponidos are conlangs based off of toki pona. Sometimes a learner or speaker of toki pona will want to tweak the design goals of toki pona, and frequently they'll design a new language that answers the question, "what if toki pona did X instead of Y?" For example, tuki tiki answers "what if toki pona only had 39 words?" luka pona sign language answers "what if toki pona was a signed language?" There aren't really any other notable tokiponidos besides these two, but if you disagree with any of the design choices Sonja Lang made or any of the common ways toki pona is used, consider trying to branch out to tokiponidos. You might enjoy yourself more!

Specific numbers are complicated and often not as necessary in our lives as we think they are. A good toki ponist will avoid talking about the specific numbers of things when possible. toki pona is built perfectly for cooking, not baking. In home cooking, you never give an exact weight of garlic to use in a dish, you just use however much feels right. You learn how to get a feel for these things through experience and through learning from others, which is how knowledge of cooking has been passed down around the world for thousands of years.

Dates are often not very important if you live your live spontaniously, which toki pona's lack of numbers encourages. If you live close to other toki pona speakers, you can text them day of and as "are you doing anything today?" and if they're not, you can meet up right away! This is unfortunately not compatable with a society in which we are forced to work long jobs far away from our homes and pay large sums of money on rent, which limits our ability to live near people we want to live near. Sometimes we need to plan things in advance anyway. This does go against toki pona's philosophy of dates, unfortunately.

Specific distances and durations are not as important as you think. Sometimes the experience of going a certain distance itself is enough, and the exact number isn't important. toki pona encourages its speakers to pay attention to these things and have a sense for their enviornments. How long it takes to get to a place should come from the experience of going there many times, not from google maps. Unfortunately, once again, many societies are not built for this. Most cities in the united states are so relient on either cars or public transportation that even though everything's so close together, there are so many things that you visit new locations every day. Maybe getting a sense for how long it takes to get to work is easy, but if you're hungry for Thai food and you want to go to a place you've never been before, having a number on how long it takes to get there is really useful in the moment. toki pona would prefer that you tried making thai food at home without measurements.

All this aside, there are actually a few systems that are both used and understood frequently in the case that you really do need to use numbers. You can learn more here.

Yes! There are quite a few, but only one of them is actively used. It's called luka pona sign language and you can learn more about it on jan Olipija's blog, which includes lessons and a bunch of unrelated articles that are all good reads. There is also a version of exact signed toki pona present in lipu pu, but it is not an actual sign language, it's just a cypher of toki pona. Specific luka pona Q&A:

• Q - Do you have to be proficient in toki pona in order to learn luka pona? A - I guess you don't, but all of the resources on luka pona are in toki pona, and all of the teaching I've seen for luka pona has been done in toki pona. Actually, it's mostly done in luka pona. It is against the rules to learn luka pona while using spoken language. Written language is fine, but because of systemic issues around the formation of sign language communities and how tied together with Deaf culture sign languages can be, teaching a sign language in a way that is inaccessible to deaf or hard of hearing people is considered disrespectful to deaf people, hard of hearing people, and Deaf culture. knowledge of toki pona also really helps you learn luka pona, so don't start with luka pona unless you already have knowledge of a specific sign language and can learn in that instead. Learning about how sign languages work AND learning one that accompanies a language you've never spoken before is really hard.
• Q - If you already speak toki pona, how long does it take to learn luka pona? A - It really depends on the person. People who struggle with proprioception may struggle more with learning luka pona, for example. But the bottom line is that if you've never used a sign language before, luka pona will be significantly difficult.
• Q - Where can I learn luka pona? A - There are lessons on the discord server kama sona! You can find it on Sonja Lang's website, and I recommend it most to beginners of both toki pona and luka pona. You can also use the blog post I linked above.
• Q - What's the difference between a sign language and a spoken language? A - I am not qualified to answer this, but I can at least tell you that grammatically, there are a LOT of things that they don't share in common.

A - I don't feel like it! In fact, I feel like making it lowercase, because natively in toki pona, it is lowercase, even if at the start of a sentence! This is a personal stylistic choice. You can definitely spell it "Toki Pona" if you want. I just don't want to.

A - This is a really good question, and it can depend on your spirituality. toki pona can work as well as any language, but I've found that it can work better because the individual words are such powerful symbols that spirits and the like can latch onto them really easily. So it's easier to transmit intent. But as long as your intent is clear your occultism and divining should work no matter the language. Unless you like don't speak said language and then prolly not. As with all things spiritual, try stuff out and see what works.

A - Sonja Lang has published three toki pona books herself through her own publishing company, Tawhid Press. According to her, these books are the only "official" things about toki pona, and they are still not to be treated as special and any more correct than any other resource on the language (much like how the word of Sonja Lang isn't automatically correct). These books are, in order of publishing:

• Toki Pona: the Language of Good - A set of extremely well crafted toki pona lessons from 2014, epresentitive of Sonja Lang's usage of toki pona at the time. It is xtremely influetial. In toki pona, the word "pu" means "to interact with Toki Pona: the Language of Good." In english, the word "pu" is often used to refer to the book directly, something that is uncommon in toki pona.
• Toki Pona Dictionary - A collection of example translations between toki pona and English, using data complied on the discord server ma pona pi toki pona in 2020-2021. Like pu, this book also has a toki pona word: "ku." This word is used exactly like the word "pu" in both languages.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Toki Pona edition) - Sonja Lang's translation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. She chose this book because it is public domain. Just like the other two official books, it too has a special word that works the same way the others do: "su." However, "su" will potentially refer to other official translations of public domain books by Sonja Lang.

Besides these three books and tokipona.org, nothing related to toki pona is "official," according to Sonja.

A - There are plenty of places online where you can voice chat with people! Most of them are on discord. I recommend the server kama sona for learners, and there are voice chats. Another thing I like to do is speak toki pona to people who don't speak toki pona. It is definitely annoying, but being allowed to practice speaking a language I don't know very well with people who know it even worse than I do means that they look UP to me and won't notice my mistakes at all.

A - If they don't already seem interested, they probably won't be! The worst thing you can do is to proselytize to someone who already knows what toki pona is and has not decided to learn it. Spend your time doing something else instead!

A - A "nasin," in English, is a style of speaking toki pona. It's usually a choice someone makes about the way they speak. For example, what words someone uses, grammatical features they use, etc.

A - You can try. It’s very unlikely anyone will use them. Many people have tried, and especially after 2020, very few words at all have entered common use. If you use your own new words, people will likely be confused. toki pona was completed a while ago. It’s a living language, and it grows organically. Especially as a learner, wouldn’t it be weird to suggest changes to Spanish in Spanish class? Like “what if we didn’t gender anything.” It would be ridiculous. Suggesting a change to toki pona is likewise at the very least a little weird. But it happens. Another thing to consider is: why do you want to add the new word? Is it because you think toki pona needs it? A lot of people have thought this about a lot of concepts, but it’s not ever true. toki pona doesn’t need a new word for think or a new word for context - you can already talk about those concepts with preëxisting words. You probably just don’t know how to yet because you’re still learning, and that’s fine.

This is accurate! In fact, all words in toki pona are unecessary, as is the entire language! It's all for fun, and words like "kili" and "pan" are indeed very fun to use. The only difference between these words and word proposals is that they are used by the majority of speakers already.

It's also worth mentioning that these words usually have more nuanced semantic spaces than what they could be replaced with. Like kili is not just "moku kasi" or "kasi moku," it can also refer to parts of plants that aren't edible or related to eating. pan represents how humans interact with certain types of food (like staple grains). What toki pona does have should help guide you in figuring out what toki pona is trying to do, not the other way around.

A - Yeah. You can degrade someone as much as you can in English. I’d put an example, but I don’t really want to say mean things to the person reading. However, it’s a lot more difficult to be passive agressive about it. Passive agression usually relies on some level of hiddenness in meaning. Because it’s passive, people say one thing and intent something else. This is very difficult to pull off in toki pona, but soweli Nata came up with a good example. If someone’s cooking something, saying “a, ni li tawa soweli mani anu seme?” “oh, is this for a cow or something?” is just a question at face value, but it’s rude because you’re calling someone’s food animal food. There’s a lot of nuance that goes into insults in any language, but some people have said some horrible things to me. You can be rude or violent in toki pona, definitely.

A - Before reading this section, which talks about methods for discussing larger numbers, please read this question, which talks about how toki pona's philosophy interacts with numbers, and encourages the reader to rethink why they're using numbers in the first place.

That being said, it actually does get inconvenient on occasion. When I've met up with people in cities, giving directions using just toki pona is often annoying. But there are ways to get past that, such as using a number system from lipu pu where luka means five, mute means twenty, and ale means one hundred. For example, if I wanted to go to 228 st in the bronx, I could say "nasin nanpa ale ale mute luka tu wan." It will probably take an extra moment for people to process but it's very widely understood and definitely standard under any definition of "standard."

For larger numbers, there is another somewhat uncommon but still understood method for talking about numbers called nasin nanpa pona. My friend jan Kapilu came up with it and it works pretty well if you need to talk about bigger numbers, like higher tempuratures for cooking("tu tu ale mute mute luka luka" for 450 degrees instead of "ale ale ale ale mute mute luka luka"), dates (like "mute ale mute tu tu" for 2024 instead of "ale ale ale ale ale ale ale ale ale ale ale ale ale ale ale ale ale ale ale ale mute tu tu"), and other things. That I can't think of a third example is evidence enough how specific the situations are for which nasin nanpa pona is required.

If you want to avoid nasin nanpa pona for dates, there's the extremely silly but also probably widely understood method of using "owe" for "1984" and adding the amount of years between that date. This only works reliably for dates after 1984, but it's really funny and understandable to say "sike nanpa owe mute mute" for 2024. I recommend this exclusively because I love fun and I want to cause chaos.

Lexicalization is when a word or phrase becomes a part of the lexicon of a language. A lexicon is the set of all words and phrases with their own meanings in the language. For example, "doorbell" is a lexicalized phrase because its meaning is greater than its parts. It isn't actually always a bell on a door. In fact, in English, we're likely to avoid saying "doorbell" to describe those little bells that some stores put on their doors so that they can hear when people enter and exit because a doorbell is usually a button next to a door that makes a noise when pressed. Another example might be "jew harp," which isn't actually a harp and isn't related to jews or judaism. Keep in mind that a lexicalized phrase doesn't have to be a compound word like "doorbell." Something like "old money" is still a lexicalized phrase because the money itself isn't actually old and "old money" refers to something different than what its parts would mean together.

In toki pona, speakers avoid lexicalization like the plague for one very important reason among many: lexicalization increases the size of a language's lexicon. toki pona is so awesome because it has such a limited vocabulary. Any lexicalization increases the number of words and phrases in the language. Even though it's made of two words, "anu seme" is a grammaticalized phrase (which is like a lexicalized phrase but for grammatical words) that has a grammatical meaning beyond the normal meaning of its two parts together. This means that for however many words are in toki pona, there is one extra entry in the lexicon tht must be learned.

Another reason why lexicalizations are avoided in toki pona is because as soon as a word gets lexicalized, it can no longer take on other meanings of a combination of its parts. Think about how "doorbell" can't refer to any bell related to any door without causing confusion. As soon as we lexicalize "sike tu" to mean bycicle, we can no longer use it to describe a turntable without causing confusion.

To avoid lexicalization, speakers try to talk about concepts from new angles. For example, "tomo tawa" is a common lexicalization for "car" because it was used in Sonja Lang's first official book. In order to avoid increasing the size of the lexicon and cutting off the possible meanings of "tomo tawa," speakers try to use "tomo tawa" to refer to things that aren't cars and try to use other phrases for cars, like calling a house during an earthquake a tomo tawa and calling a car an ilo tawa (or even something creative and a little rediculous, like "soweli!").

I'm not going to list common lexicalizations here because I think the people who use them are at some level aware of what they're doing. I'm sure that you can figure out when a phrase you're using is becoming lexicalized and take action to prevent that from happening. It's also important to mention that lexicalization is not the same as reusing a phrase to refer to the same thing in a single conversation because it doesn't add a word to the lexicon, it just ties concepts together as a type of context.

A - In a general sense of all languages, a calque is an idiomatic phrase in a language that is a literal translation of an idiomatic phrase from another language. "Idiomatic" just means that something doesn't make sense when translated literally into every language, such as idiom or an idiomtic expression, like "Oh they've got my goat!" or "out of the frying pan and into the fire." An example of a calque in a natural language would be "pequeno almoço" in portuguese, which literally translates to "little lunch," but actually means "breakfast." This comes directly from "petit-déjeuner" in French, which also directly translates to "little lunch" but actually means "breakfast." The Portuguese "pequeno almoço" is only considered a calque because it comes from a direct translation of a phrase in a different language.

Calques in toki pona are usually discouraged because they cannot be lexicalized (click here if you don't know what that means). Let's look at an example of what I'm talking about with English and Tok Pisin. If I said "This place is an easy belly" and you didn't speak Tok Pisin, you would have no idea what I meant. In reality, this phrase in Tok Pisin (dispela hap i bel isi) would mean "this place is calm and peaceful." Because this calque isn't lexicalized in English, it isn't understandable. Any time someone calques in toki pona, unless the phrase already makes sense in toki pona without an outside perspective, it will not be understood as intended because lexicalized phrases do not occur most of the time.

Some common examples of calques that come up with native English speaking toki pona learners are:

• "tenpo monsi" for "before" and "tenpo sinpin" for "after." English has a conceptual metaphor that puts time on a line that we walk forward along, which we can see in phrases like "let's move forward with this" and "I looked back to my past." Many languages have different conceptual metaphors with time in which people walk backwards through time, facing their past, not their future. toki pona doesn't have either conceptual metaphor, so neither "tenpo monsi" nor "tenpo sinpin" are used for "before" or "after."

• "kalama sewi" for high pitches and "kalama anpa" for low pitches. English has a conceptual metaphor that places pitches in order from top to bottom. It runs so deeply in English that speakers of English can't talk about pitches without using words that also talk about height (try it! you will fail!). Turkish, in contrast, treats lower notes as "thick" and higher notes as "thin," so a Turkish toki pona speaker would have no idea what this meant! While it is true that for the human voice, lower notes can resonate lower in the body than higher notes, you can also sing lying down on the floor or upside down (and people do these things, especially in opera), not to mention that you can sing very low and control the resonance so that the note resonates in your head, and the opposite is also possible. My solution for this is usually to compare voices to the sounds made by soweli and waso, because waso are usually smaller than soweli and it's definitely not a calque of English. You could use "soweli lili" and "soweli suli" as tools here if you're worried about large birds and small mammals, but large birds are often flightless, and I don't use waso to describe flightless birds, so this is a moot point for me. "sama" is very useful here either way.

• "pali" for "do." This for sure isn't always a calque, but the word "do" is used a lot in English for things that aren't the same concept in toki pona. "I'm doing homework" could be "mi pali lipu" because homework is work, but "I'm doing dishes" couldn't be "mi pali e ilo moku" because that reads as "I am making dishes". Likewise, "mi pali e supa lape" means "I'm creating a bed," not "I'm making a bed." I would use nasin or pona instead of pali there. Any time you see yourself using "pali" for something you'd use "do" for in English, reconsider if what you're describing is actually a type of work or a type of making something.

• "lukin" for "to look like." This calque is influenced a lot by how "lukin" sounds like the english word "looking." You may see learners of toki pona say things like "mi lukin sama soweli." This doesn't mean "I look like a dog." This means "I see like a dog." English uses the words "look" and "like" to mean "appear as," but toki pona doesn't.

• "esun" for "spending time." Another conceptual metaphor in English is "time is money." This shows up all over the way we talk about things. "I'm saving time." "I spent my time in France." "I'll buy us some time." Note how the words "save," "spend," and "buy" are all used for both time and money. This conceptual metaphor is baked into our lexicon. So even though these phrases make sense in English, "mi esun e tenpo" doesn't mean "I'm buying us some time." In fact, it probably refers to switching dates on a calendar, because toki pona has a conceptual metaphor where buying and selling are acts of swapping.

As you can tell, a lot of calques in toki pona arise from a speaker's ignorance towards the conceptual metaphors in their mother tongue. This is for sure something to think about!

One more thing to keep in mind: just because it is phrased like something in a different language doesn't mean it doesn't work natively in toki pona. For example, "I'm under the covers" can be "mi lon anpa len" because toki pona has the same conceputal metaphor as English in which it uses the same words for "hidden" to refer to types of cloths. This is by coincidence, and if a proficient speaker uses len like this, they aren't calquing English, they're just speaking toki pona.But my list isn't exhaustive, and you will be able to spot calques I didn't mention. If you think a calque is common enough for me to include here, feel free to let me know and i probably will!

A - Yeah kind of. I hardly ever see them in the wild, but a large portion of speakers consider themselves users of open and pini preverbs. The concepts of starting and stopping things may not come up that often, and for most speakers there are other ways of saying these concepts that feel more natural, like by using the preverb "kama" or by rephrasing it so that open and pini are a normal verb instead of a preverb. In reality, we don't have any reliable data on usage of these preverbs at the moment. I'm working on a paper on this and I've collected data with a somewhat large sample size (it's looking to be over 125), and once I publish the paper I will provide more accurate information here.

I personally don't recommend using these words as preverbs because thinking about the concepts of starting and stopping and looking at how these manifest in the natural world is so much more interesting that using a preverb for it. Like what does it mean to start writing a book? The act of beginning to write a book may look like setting up a typewriter, or opening a document on a computer. Lots of things to think about!

A - Why would you want to call people slurs in any language? Doesn't seem very nice. But in any case there are no swears or slurs in toki pona at all. No word is considered vulgar by any stretch of the mind. Maybe eventually it will develop some but considering how concious of slurs the community is, I doubt it. Swears are much less of a deal than slurs. I fucking swear all the time. But in toki pona, there are no such words that are used like this.

A - This is something I've wanted to write about for a while. The concept of a "friend" differs so much across not just different cultures but also across different members of the same culture. What my friends mean to me is different from what I mean to them. A lot of toki ponists have said that a friend is someone who is good, and therefore a good word for friend is "jan pona," but I disagree with the premise here. Friendship is a type of relationship between two people. "jan pona" doesn't describe a relationship, it describes nothing but your perspective of the person you're talking about. A friend can be a jan pona, but "jan pona" does not convey that relationship. For me, saying something like "jan mi" or "jan poka" is much better. This is because these phrases call to mind a specific relationship: my person, or a close person. For me, closeness is the most important part of friendship, so when I'm thinking in toki pona, I break down the concept of "friend" to "jan poka" a lot. If you feel that you'd break it down as "jan pona," please consider what concept you're talking about when you say the english word "friend" and if "jan pona" is really exemplifying that.

A - There is a word for think! "toki" is used very consistently by speakers to mean think as well as speak. I know that sounds confusing, but let me explain. the concept of "toki" is broader than the concept of talking. toki is any type of communication, be that internal or external. The only difference between thinking and talking is that with thinking, the recipient is internal, and with talking, the recipient is external. For this reason, it's very common to specify that thinking is internal by modifying "toki" with "insa." But it's not strictly necessary, because the spectrum that thinking and talking share has a lot of gray area. Is thinking out loud talking? Is talking to yourself thinking? Can you think out loud to yourself? Can you talk to yourself without talking? None of these questions permiate toki pona because toki pona uses only one word for all of these concepts. Just explain what is actually going on. When practicing toki pona, try to think about talking and thinking as the same basic idea with more clarified information.

A - What is and isn't "life" differs not just between cultures but also between members of the same culture. For example, are viruses alive? Are cities alive? What is and isn't life, in linguistics, is often called "animacy," and no two languages categorize life vs nonlife the same way. toki pona is unique in that it doesn't have a concept of life. Because life is such a complex idea, toki pona asks us to focus on other aspects of things: can they want? Can they move? Can they grow? Can they change? Can they love? Can they respond to changes in their environment? Can they reproduce? Can they regulate their internal levels of heat and concentration of electrolytes, other minerals, and loose protons, also known as hydrogen ions? These are all things that are really easy to talk about in toki pona! (Well. Maybe not the last one.) Instead of looking for a word for "life," reconsider how lacking a word for "life" changes the way you talk about it.

A - There are actually more than one word for context! If you want to learn more about what exactly "context" means, scroll up or click here and translate some of those concepts to figure it out for yourself, but the long and short of it is that context is the information surrounding something. It's the nearby information. The sona poka! Context is very frequently a type of sona, and I feel that context is inherently close to something metaphysically, which is why "poka" works so well as a modifier in this example. You could also use any other word in place of sona. Like if you were talking about a piece of context that was also a dog, you could say "soweli poka." poka, metaphysically, means "relevant," and context is also in my opinion inherently relevant. You can also use "tenpo" to mean "situation," which is very useful for talking about specifically situational context.

A - toki pona doesn't need to have a smaller vocabulary, and such a word would take away some of the fun semantic spaces we have. Like how "sinpin" can mean "wall," and "monsi" can mean "ass." An ass is not the opposite of a wall, at least not conceptually, so these words are not opposites even if they can talk about opposite directions. If you want to talk about an opposing direction, monsi can be very useful. For concepts of returning, "sin" is very useful as well. If you want to talk about an opposite meaning, you'll need to do a bit of thinking. The opposite of the "hidden" definition of "len" may very well be something like "jan li ken lukin e ona" or "jan mute li sona e lon ona." It may require a whole sentence like that. And there is no one clear opposite of the cloth meaning of len, so there's nothing to desire there. You can also use "poka" and "ante" to describe opposing sides of something. While it doesn't necesserily mean the opposite side, and may be a different other side, for things like rivers, there are only two sides anyway. These are just some ideas about how you can talk about opposites, but remember: the concept of an opposite is pretty weird and not always as useful as you think! Speaking a language without a word for opposite can pose a very interesting challenge.

A - Like probably. I have seen people use soweli like this, but only infrequently. I think it works in a pinch but if you don't want to risk it, you can always get by with an incomplete list. "soweli en akesi en waso en ijo ante kin li lon" works for "animals are here," for example. "mi jo e akesi e waso e ijo ante sama" could be "I have lots of pet animals."

A - The sharpness of an object, in my experience, is usually when an object is able to puncture or break open something, such as skin, paper, food, or building materials. What words we use to describe a sharp object are dependant on what that object is and how we puncture it. Paper, for example, is cut. Cutting is "tu," so we can use "ilo tu" to describe scissors, or maybe even a whole sentence, such as "ilo ni li tu e lipu." Skin is opened or wounded, so a sharp object used to cut into skin (like a scalpal) could be an "ilo pi open selo." To contrast, a potato peeler doesn't open the outer layer of the potato, it removes it. So it could be an "ilo pi weka selo." Graphic context of harm ahead. Now if a sharp object is used to harm skin (like a sword), we can use pakala instead. A sword can be contrasted from a club by its sharpness, so saying "ilo ni li pakala e selo" is very useful. You can of course still use open here. If a sword is meant to cut through bone and sever limbs, you could even use "ilo tu"! Graphic content is over. Knives used for cooking cut food into small pieces, so tu works best here. A carving tool, which is sharp, could be described as a tool that sculpts the selo of stone, wood, or clay.

Most of the time, if I need to convey sharpness in an emergency, it's because of a risk of harm. So if I need to say something like "careful, that's sharp!" I will say "ni li ken open e selo!" or "ni li ken pakala e selo!"

A - Glass is hard, so you can use kiwen! But when we think of hard substances, we're not usually thinking about what light can pass through, because most of the time, the light we can see can't pass through kiwen. But glass is one of a few exceptions to this rule. Some other types of kiwen that let some light through might be translucent, which you could describe by saying that you can see light coming from behind it (tan monsi ona), but you can't see what the light is coming from. Some glass indeed falls under this description, but most of the glass we talk about day to day lets enough light through that we can make out what is behind the kiwen. Glass like this can be easy as something like "it's a kiwen, and I can see what's on its other (back) side (lon poka monsi ona).

I have an alternative perspective on glass, too! I use lupa for a lot of things that glass goes in, like windows, telescopes, microscopes, etc. I will usually use kiwen to describe the substance itself, but the way that I clarify glass is by saying that it is a lupa, but only for light. Here I can describe what kind of light. Can humans see it? Does it change the shape (selo) of the light at all? Does it only let through some colors of light? Does it make an image appear bigger or smaller? I can answer all these questions by describing the image going through a lupa.

A - This comes a lot in my personal translation projects, because in English, writers love describing all the little noises their characters make one by one. In reality, you can just use "mu" for these, but in a translation I like to specify by modifying the mu with their feelings. Maybe a sigh could be a "mu pi pilin ike." Depending on the sigh, it could be more complicated. "mu li toki e ni: sijelo ona li awen wile utala, taso ona li kama wile ala li lawa utala e sijelo." Which could mean "The sigh conveyed that as much as he wanted to continue arguing, he willed himself to calm down." In other languages, showing and not telling is much easier because of the robust vocabulary. In toki pona, you often just have to say things how they are.

Some of the examples from the question are body language. You can use "kalama luka" for most of these, and specify further what that means with combinations of intent/emotion and descriptions of the sound itself. Is it loud? What contexts is it appropriate to use such a sound in your culture? Answering even just one of these questions can help people understand you.

A - kon and nena are fantastic for these! I use "nena" as a verb to mean "sniff," much like I may use uta to mean "bite" or "nibble." As for descriptions of scents themselves, the nitty gritty of aroma in English is already hard enough for me to wrap my head around, but I often compare the scents to objects with known scents. I think that toki ponists who talk about aroma and scents would make fantastic wine tasters because they're always picking apart nuances to help distinguish very complex and subtle aromas. Memories can also play a role in how we interpet aroma. In reality, English has many of the same pitfals. You can't really know how something smells until you smell it, unless you are doing research on aromatic compounds, in which case you could maybe figure it out, but only if you had enough experience to begin with.

A - Some fun ideas I've seen include "jo" (framing it as holding), "selo" (which calls images of protection to mind, because the selo of something protects the insides), and "sijelo" ("apply body to"). "luka" is also very common. People often modify all of these words with "suwi" or "olin" to show that it's an emotional or plesant gesture. I have said all of these within the past couple of months to describe hugging!

jan Tepo uses "poki" to mean hug, which also makes sense.

A - "awen" is good to describe the quality of something sticking. "ken ala weka" is also useful here to describe that it can't be removed. Adhesives are usually a type of ko, but they may also be telo. I think the big difference between glue and magnets for toki pona is that when you unstick magnets, they don't break anything, but when you unstick something that has been sealed with an adhesive, it often leaves a residue or breaks the object that was glued together. They do say that wood glue is stronger than the wood itself, after all. There are exceptions to this, like command strips, which can be removed easily without damaging anything or leaving any residue.

A - Two important words here are ko and linja. linja is used a lot to describe fur or similar textures made up of lots of hairs. ko can also describe these, and works especially well for objects that can change shape, like a pillow or something else made out of foam. Seafoam, bubbles in a bubble bath, and foamed milk can easily be ko, but consider that depending on how fine the bubbles are, sike might work better.

Another common word here is "suwi," beacuse it can denote a pleasant sensory experience, but not every soft or fluffy thing is pleasant. I recommend using "jaki" instead of "suwi" to describe mold, for example. Things can have soft or fluffy textures and be very not suwi.

A -

A -

A - One thing I think a lot of people don't get about math is that it isn't just numbers. You can represent most math without numbers at all. You can prove the pythagorean theorem without using numbers at all. Pythagoras sure did. But the key for talking about math in toki pona is realizing that in order to teach math in the best way possible, you must teach with visuals. The moment you let yourself talk about math with visuals in ANY language, the more fun you'll have, and the more easily you'll learn.

Anecdotally, I learned what a derivative was in a toki pona only environment and aced a test on derivatives the next day, no English instruction required. I had a good teacher who spoke toki pona well and was patient enough to teach math to me. If I had already known how derivatives worked, it would have been really easy to start clarifying concepts in a barebones way until the other person understood enough to cut me off, and the opposite would have been true as well.

If you want to see someone teach math in toki pona, click here to be transported to a youtube video about non-Euclidean geometry by jan Telakoman.

I'm not a mathematician. I stopped learning about math in high school. If you have a better description for this section that does the field of mathematics more justice than I could, please reach out to me! Here is my best attempt at talking about math in toki pona without a visual aid:

A - So politics can definitely be tricky to talk about in toki pona. But I believe this is due to the nature of buzzwords. Many a time have I had a discussion with someone in english and mentioned terms like "power dynamic" and "systemic oppression" or even "racism," and the mere mention of these ideas shut down the entire conversation. Given, I was talking to someone who was not open to the concept that he might benefit from the suffering of others, but even so, it was the use of these words that shut down the conversation, not the meanings of them.

toki pona completely lacks this issue because of its limited vocabulary! In order to talk about politics, you need to say what you mean without using politically charged terms. The best way to demonstrate this is with examples so for this section I'm going to eventually include more than just one.

I'm not a politician or political scientist. I spend a lot of time thinking about social injustice. If you have a better description for this section that does the field of politics more justice than I could, please reach out to me! Here is my best attempt at talking about politics in toki pona:

A - Whenever the term "through" comes up in English, an object is moving through something else. The semantic space of lupa is in part based on the concept that things can move through them. Saying "X li tawa lon lupa" is generally understood to mean either "through" or "into," depending on wether the lupa in question is a thurough-hole or not. You can get around this by describing two opposing sides of a lupa, and say that something arrived at the other side. The only way to move lon lupa and come up on the other side is through, so this works! I like this method because it uses the word "lupa," which I'm quite fond of.

"Across" is almost exactly the same, but where objects travel through lupa, objects travel across supa, usually. The information in these prepositions in english can be clarified outside of a prepositional phrase in toki pona, and I think that's really cool.

A - "weka" is great here. A lot of learners haven't discovered how crucial "weka" is to toki pona's spatial system. weka describes a location or object that is not present, either through an act of removal or through having never been there in the first place. But sometimes "beyond" also conveys the idea of existing outside of an outer layer of an object. If I am beyond a wall, I am at the weka of the "selo" of that which the wall protects.

There also exist nonphysical usages of "beyond" in English. It is still crucial to beware of calques, but weka can still be used metaphorically in toki pona. You just need to bring the metaphor into the physical. For example, "she's beyond reason!" could be "mi lon ma pi sona pona. ona li lon weka pi ma ni!" which means "We're in the land of reason. She is beyond it (the land of reason)!"

I think the most useful thing to do here is try to figure out how we can frame distance using the vocabulary already in toki pona. Usually we frame distance as either near (poka) or far (weka). In many cases, all you need to do is say how far the distance is relatively.

Where this gets tricky is with exact measurements. Most of the time it's easy to avoid these, but if you need to talk about more specific units of distance, a method I sometimes use is landmark distances. For example, if I wanted to say that two cities were as close to each other as New York and Boston, if that distance didn't sound too far to me, I may say "poka pi ma ni tu ni li sama poka pi ma tomo Newa Jo pi ma tomo Poson." "The closeness of these two cities is the same as the distance of new york city and boston."

Another really useful tool here is to use time and method of transportation, which may be more useful than a specific distance anyway. Sometimes it's more useful to know upfront how long a flight from one place to another is. You can use some of the strategies in the time section to talk about how long it takes to walk, drive, or fly somewhere (or any other mode of transportation).

A - I wrote an article about this! Go read it if you're curious! Click here.

A - This is how I usually do it:

1. I describe an analogue clock. Clocks have three hands of three sizes. I use "palisa" for these hands, because "luka" doesn't describe what they are well at all. The largest one demonstrates seconds, and it's often red. The smallest one demonstrates hours, and the middle one demonstrates minutes, and those two are usually black.
2. I switch my way of thinking about time over to an analogue clock. I can feel the seconds passing as the long red hand ticks steadily. Then I can feel my concept of minutes pulling me faster as the middle length hand turns around the clock, a full hour, and finally I can feel the day slipping away as the hour hand, the shortest of them all, turns a full circle, pushing hard against the resistence of time.
3. Now that I can conceputalize whatever unit of time (or moment of time in the day), I simply use "palisa suli," "palisa lili," and "palisa insa" to talk about how long something takes (or I add nanpa before all the numbers if it's a specific time of day, and clarify if the sun is risen, rising, falling, or fallen if it's ambiguous). For example, "In about two hours I'll return" may be "ilo tenpo li jo e palisa tu wan. palisa lili li tawa sike lon tenpo tu la mi kama sin." "Unfortunately I woke up at 4:45 AM and couldn't fall asleep again" may be "o lukin insa e ilo tenpo pi palisa tu wan. sewi li pimeja la palisa lili li lon nanpa tu tu. palisa insa li lon nanpa mute mute luka. ike la tenpo ni la mi kama weka tan lape. mi ken ala lape sin."

There are other ways, but this one fits toki pona best if you need to be precise. But make sure to consider: do you need to be precise? If so, how precise do you need to be? For the second example, you could have rounded up to 5 AM or just said that it was still dark outside when I woke up.

Some people have lexicalized "tenpo ilo" as "hour" and I hate it. Please do not do this.

A - As you probably know already, toki pona is tenseless, which means that this information is not required in order to speak grammatically. But what if you want to convey this information? Well, "kama" and "pini" are your friends. In lipu pu, among their definitions are "future" and "past" respectively, because the past is what is finished now, and the future is what is coming now. But be careful; because of toki pona's lack of tense, pini can mean "will be finished" and kama can mean "has already come." Context is your friend here.

As for the present, there are a couple of common methods. The first uses "tenpo ni" to mean "this time" in the sense that you can point at the current situation. Dispite what some people may claim, this is no more of a lexicalization than "soweli ni" is a lexicalization for any dog you could point at. But be careful, because much like tenpo kama and tenpo pini, this could mean "that time" and talk about a specific time or situation that you have (or will) mention(ed).

Another common method is to say "tenpo lon," which is in fact sometimes lexicalized, but not by most people who use it. "tenpo lon" makes sense for "now" because it is the time that exists. However, this is subject to the same pitfalls as "tenpo ni" in that it can talk about a time that did exist, or a time that will exist, rather than the time that exists right now. There is also the issue in which "lon tenpo lon" for "during now" has lon in it twice, which may be confusing. All of these usually follow prepositional "lon" (or come before la) because lon can mean "during" and none of the other prepositions can mean that.

The first thing to mention is that the calques tenpo monsi and tenpo sinpin don't work for this. I talk more about this in the calques question in this FAQ, so go read that to learn why!

Now with that out of the way, how DO people talk about things happening "before" or "after" other things? Here are some methods that I use:

• I use la. it's 5 AM I'm not writing all that.
• That's actually it I think. but no details or nuance for you yet sorry I'm so fucking tired

tenpo dropping isn't really a real thing people do. It's based on a poor analysis of semantic shift in the word "suno" based on a reframing of time units in the community. For example, a day could be framed not just as a type of tenpo related to the sun, but also just as a type of sun itself. Each day, the sun that rises is a new sun, after all. This philosophy fits toki pona pretty well.

Does this work for other words besides "suno" though? Well, fewer people use "esun" to mean "week" than people use "mun" to mean "month," and fewer people use "mun" to mean "month" than people use "suno" to mean "day," but the same people who use "sike" for "year" (which is how it is used and described in pu) probably also use "suno" to mean "day," making it much more common.

"tenpo dropping" is misanalyzing the semantic shift of these words as dropping the head of the phrase, which is "tenpo," instead of a reframing of the concept of a day as a type of suno and not as a type of tenpo.

An example of this semantic shift that works the best is "pimeja" for "night." Many languages use a word for "dark" to mean night, and perhaps the night is indeed a type of darkness, not a type of time.

sona.pona.la o, please cite this when you need to explain tenpo dropping.

A - There are a few ways to do names, and here are the most common ones: tokiponization, calquing, or making up a new name. I'll go over all three methods here.

tokiponization is the process of taking a word from a different language and changing the way it sounds to fit the rules of toki pona pronunciation. The exact way of doing this can differ a bit from person to person, but Sonja Lang wrote these guidelines that are very commonplace. After loaning a word into toki pona like this, we capitalize it and put it after a different word, depending on what kind of thing it is. If the thing with a name is a type of kili, we put the name directly after "kili." These tokiponized names are often called "proper adjectives" because they only ever serve as adjectives and can't be used on their own. The one exception to this rule is in a sentence with the word "nimi" in it. Things like "nimi mi li San" (my name is San) and "nimi la ona li Atawan" (namewise they are Atawan) are both common and grammatical, but they only work because the word "nimi" shows up in the sentence to show that the loanword is acting as a name. Note that nothing I've said here is a hard and fast rule. You WILL find people who use tokiponized names and don't follow all these rules (such as jan Deni, who uses a D in their name despite toki pona not allowing D, lipamanka (me) who doesn't capitalize my name or give it a head noun, or people who don't have a specified headnoun and have people just use whatever).

Note that tokiponization is not limited to the names of people. Languages, places, vehichles, or anything else with a name can spoken about in toki pona using a tokiponized name. Just make sure that you're tokiponizing the word that the members of a group related to the concept use to describe themselves (an endonym), rather than a word used by a different group (exonym). This is really important because it keeps toki pona equally acessible to speakers of all languages and all groups, and it can also help increase your knowledge of what groups of people call themselves. I recommend trying to find indigenous names for places and tokiponizing those, and using them instead of whatever a colonizer named the place. Like I call Minnesota "ma Min Sota Masoke" and New York "ma poka pi ma Mana Ata" which are both based off of the indigenous names of those locations.

Calquing for a name is different than calquing in general. Calquing is usually bad in toki pona (see here to learn more), but for names, it's fine! A calqued name is simple: If your name in a different language has a meaning, translate the meaning into toki pona words instead of transliterating the sounds into toki pona sounds. If someone's name is "April," their toki pona name could be "tenpo mun," and that's pretty fucking cool. If someone's username on an online chatroom website is "MathLizard," their toki pona name could be "akesi nanpa." This is my personal favorite way of doing names in toki pona. It's really cool!

Making up a new name. This one is exactly what it sounds like. Take either of the two methods above, but instead of taking sounds or meaning from somewhere else, just come up with entirely new ones! Wanna try out being "ko"? Go for it, that can be your name. You are now a semisolid and that's really cool. What about "jan Akapelijanela"? I just made up those syllables like right now and that's really cool too. (Though consider making it shorter so others can remember it more easily.)

REMEMBER: these methods are not exhaustive. There are other ways to do names! You can also abstain from making a toki pona name! Just continue to use a name from a different language. "Charles li pona mute." This is totally fine if it's what you want to do.

A - This question is debated somewhat among tokiponists, but the consensus I've observed among proficient speakers is that you can't. Proper names are just names, and "Juwese" doesn't mean "the United States of America," it's just a name. "supa Juwese" reads as a table that is named Juwese, not a table from the united states. This whole question is usually refered to as "meli Sonko," which references how lipu pu translates "Chinese woman" as "meli Sonko." "Sonko" is a tokiponization of Zhōngguó, which is an endonym for China. In most speakers's modern usage, this would mean "a woman named Sonko," not "a woman from a place named Sonko." However, there are a handful speakers who use proper names in the meli sonko style out there.

A - A "headnoun" is, in the context of names, the word that comes before a name in toki pona. What something is will change what head noun you use for it. For a pet bird, "waso" is the most apt headnoun. For a country, "ma" is the most apt headnoun. But you are your own being and you have the choice to decide what you are and what word you want to use to represent that. toki pona gives you an opprotunity to experiment with your identity in a really silly way. You can use language to redefine what you are! It's great! For people, the most common head noun is definitely "jan," but you can use any word that isn't a grammatical particle as a head noun. It doesn't have to make sense, it just needs to be meaningful for you.

A - For conversation in toki pona? They come up sometimes, but not a lot, depending on what you're talking about. In practice if I haven't known a country someone was talking about, they either say what it is in a different language, usually english (like "toki Inli la ma Nijon li Japan"), and then I know, or they try to describe it or name some nearby countries (perhaps: ona li lon poka pi ma Sonko li lon telo li ma mama pi moku ni: sina selo e pan kepeken lipu pimeja pi kasi telo li pana e kala lon insa). I prefer the second method but it might not always work if the listener doesn't know much about the culinary traditions and geography of Japan.

For you as a person though? Going through the process of learning what each country calls itself is really quite the boon and I recommend it. I certainly don't know every name of every country in its national language or most spoken language, but if I want to name a place its always a fun process to check to see what the dominant culture there calls it, and better yet for some places, what the INDIGENOUS culture calls it. Like I could call new york "ma Nujo," but why do that when I can call Manhattan "ma Mana Ata" (from [double check this] Mudsee Lenape "manaháhtaan") and say "that and nearby places towards the cold direction and the direction the sun rises in." I can decolonize the way i talk about New York AND delegitimize Staten Island at the same time!! easy! win-win.

A - When I say "hello," I often don't need to. Sometimes I say it when I'm passing by someone. I don't really use "hello" the same way most people do. I'm more likely to say it multiple times after five minutes have elapsed since I encounter someone. It's a fun word and I like greeting people more once I've already been talking to them. In Anglophone culture, this is considered weird.

However, usage of this word in English can differ from place to place. In New York City, where I'm from, nobody has time for you. You would never even think about talking to a stranger most of the time (though I have had fantastic conversations with strangers on the subway). But in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul, where I live now), and in New England (which is where I spent some of my childhood), it is customary to wave or say "hello" to someone if you walk past them on the side of the road, or even on the sidewalk of a less urban place. Upon moving to the Twin Cities, the usage of the word "hello" bewildered me. Why is everyone using it so much?

So for function, the reality is that the majority of the time, "hello" and such are curteous and not actually communicating anything. Therefore, in toki pona contexts, you can usually omit them.

However, many speakers will want a way to initiate a conversation. The first thing I realized here is that often when I say hi, I'm looking for someone else to come up with a fun topic to talk about. Now, instead of saying "hello," I'm more often to ask a specific question to get the ball rolling. It's generally more successful.

All this being said, in toki pona, a common way to say "hello" is to evoke that which you desire (a conversation) by simply saying the word for conversation: "toki." You can do this with other things too, of course. "waso" could evoke the image of a bird on its own, and in the presence of birds, works very well as "hello," perhaps even better than "toki."

Another common way I greet people is to say their name really excited. I even have one friend named Basil for whom we greet each other with our own names. So I would yell "lipamanka!" really excitedly and she would respond "omg Basil! is that you?" That is a weird thing that the two of us do and it may not work very well in toki pona, but I almost always greet my roommate by exitedly exclaiming "OMG LYLE!!" Likewise, in toki pona, it's common to greet someone with just their headnoun (like "waso o" or "jan o" or something) or their name (like "waso Keli o" or "jan Kopijan o").

And finally, you can just say "mu." This is incredibly common and I love it so much. It's really effective.

I have replaced the names of real people who aren't public figures in toki pona spaces in this section with fake names that still fit their vibes.

A - This one is interesting because the English word comes from "god be with you." In fact, this is true for a lot of different European languages, including spanish "adiós" and portuguese "adeus" (both meaning "to god"). So if your intent is indeed to say something along these lines, you can say "sewi o awen lon sina" or something.

Another term, "farewell," comes from "fare thee well"/"fare you well," which is similar to "be well." This is most similar to how people say goodbye in toki pona.You can certainly say "o pona" when leaving someone, or when someone is leaving you. But something I like to do is use "pona" as a modifier for a verb describing what they're doing. If someone is chrocheting, I may say "o pali pona linja." "work well on your string." If someone is eating, I may say "o moku pona" "eat well" upon leaving. In general, if I'm leaving, "awen pona" works well, because the other person is remaining. If someone else is leaving me, "tawa pona" or "o tawa pona" seems most relevant, and is a very kind thing to say (wishing that someone travel well or approach something good). I like to pay attention to what people are doing and wish them to do it well.

In the midwest, when people are leaving, they often stand up and say "Ope! Best be goin' now." Likewise, in toki pona you can just say "I'm leaving" ("mi tawa" or "mi kama weka" or something similar works great here). Just make sure that whatever you say, it makes sense in the context. Don't say "tawa pona" to someone who's still eating sushi; say "o moku e kala pona."

A - Something I didn't know until I learned about it in a sociolinguistics class is that when people ask "how are you?", it's atypical to answer with anything other than "good" (or "well" if you don't belive in adverb "good"). I thought that one was supposed to evaluate their emotional state and respond accurately. So I would frequently respond to these questions with "bad" (or later, in high school, "tired"). Now I'm more likely to ignore them and cut to the chase, but "tired" is definitely a go-to response.

Once, in a job interview, I distinctly remember the interviewer asking "how are you doing?" and responding "I'm doing very well, thank you for asking, and I'm happy that you're doing well as well" dispite them not telling me that. So this is one of the reasons I avoid answering the question, the other reason being that I have in the past few years learned that "how are you" usually isn't actually a genuine mental health check in.

If you really want to know how someone is feeling in toki pona, you can ask them with something like "pilin sina li seme?" or "sina pilin pona anu seme?" but both of these will be treated as emotional check-ins and not as phatic phrases. It is atypical to ask strangers what their emotions are. (I do in fact often say "what are your emotions" to people I don't know very well instead of "how's it going.") But most of the time, it's good to just not say something that means "how are you."

A - Luckily, this one is easy! "Welcome" is composed of "well" and "come," and it is a statement wishing someone a good arrival. If you want to do this in toki pona, you can just translate "good arrival" as "kama pona" and call it a day. However, it may be interesting to switch

A - In English (and many other languages), directly telling someone to do something is considered too direct and rude. Adding "please" is one of many tools Anglophones use to make it easier to tell someone to do something without sounding rude. In fact, we use the word "ask" in english to describe the most common method of telling someone to do something, because we often phrase commands as questions in English ("can you please pass the butter?" instead of "pass the butter please," though both are used).

toki pona isn't like this at all! It is not considered rude at all to tell someone to do something in toki pona. Just say "o pana e ni tawa mi." You don't need a word for "please." A lot of people say that toki pona is "polite by default" due to this, but that's a misunderstanding. The direct translation of a command in toki pona will always sound rude in English, but that's only because commands in English sound rude, not because commands in all languages are rude.

Now sometimes it is actually useful to ask someone if they're able to do something. "sina ken ala ken pali tawa mi" "are you able to do this work for me," for example. This is directly asking if someone is able to do something, not a request that someone do something.

A - Many people don't know how to do this in any language. Here are the steps to a good apology:

1. Acknowledge the harm you did
2. Acknowledge who was harmed
3. Acknowledge what you learned
4. Explain what you will do to be better

Note that the word "sorry" isn't in this list of criteria. That's because an apology doesn't actually need a word for "sorry"! In toki pona, in order to apologize for something, go through these steps as necessary. Sometimes this information is clear from context and can be omitted. Like if I bump into someone by accident, I don't need to say "I harmed you" or "I have learned to not harm you," I probably only have to say something like "mi pakala" to show that I fucked up. Nothing else is needed because learning from mistakes is often implicit within acknowledging what you did by accident.

Conversely, if I intentionally bumped into someone, I DO need to explain what I will do to be better. A simple "mi pakala" doesn't work there because it wasn't a mistake.

I can't go over all of the nuances of apologizing here but if you have questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to me.