toki pona

ale o, toki! sina pilin seme lon suno ni? mi wile toki lon toki pona tawa sina ale! toki pona li toki lili. ona li pali tan jan Sonja lon tenpo sike nanpa 2001. kulupu nimi ona li lili. nimi suli 120 li lon. taso, jan li pali e nimi sin lon tenpo mute. sina wile toki e ijo suli la, sina ante e ijo suli tawa ijo lili mute. (kipisi ni li lon toki Inli taso.) ni la, nimi wan li ken jo e kon mute. sitelen Lasina la, toki ni li sitelen kepeken sitelen lili. taso, nimi jan en nimi ma en nimi pi ijo ante li sitelen kepeken sitelen open suli. kin la, nimi jan anu nimi ma li nimi ijo ala. taso, ona li nimi ante. ni la, "Sonja" taso li pakala. sina wile toki e ni la, sina toki e "jan Sonja."

kulupu sitelen pi toki pona la, sitelen 14 li lon. sitelen luka pi kalama open li lon (aeiou). sitelen luka tu tu pi kalama len li lon (jklmnpstw). taso, toki ni li lili. ni la, sitelen pona li lon.

mi kama sona e toki ni lon pini pi tenpo sike nanpa 2021. ni la, ijo tu li kama. nanpa wan li ni: jan Misali li pali e kulupu sin pi sitelen tawa ni: sina ken kama sona e toki pona. nanpa tu li ni: musi Manka li kama sin. ni la, sina ken musi e musi kepeken toki pona. tenpo pini lili la, mi kama lukin e lipu Linku. lipu Linku li kulupu nimi. ona li jo e nimi ale pu e nimi ale ku e nimi sin tan jan ante!

ni li wawa tawa mi: jan mute li toki kepeken toki pona, li pali e ijo mute. jan li pali e lipu Wikipesija e kalama musi mute. jan Misali li pali e kalama "kijetesumikyoku" e kalama "ryuupekosi."

Err... let's try that again in a language my audience is more likely to understand.

Hello, everyone! How are you feeling today? I want to speak about toki pona to you all! toki pona is a small language. It was created by Sonja Lang in the year 2001. Its vocabulary is small. There are 120 main words, but people often create new ones. If you want to say something complex, you divide the complex thing into several smaller bits. (For instance, there is no single word that means "apple", but I could call the apple at the end of this page "kili loje", a red fruit.) Therefore, a single word can have a wide range of meanings. In the Latin script, this language is written using lowercase letters, but the names of people, places and other things are written using an initial capital letter. Also, names in toki pona are not nouns like they would be in English, instead being adjectives that modify a noun. For instance, it's not "Sonja", but "jan Sonja", the person named Sonja.

toki pona's alphabet has 14 letters, about half the size of the Latin alphabet. There are the standard five vowels (aeiou), which are pronounced roughly how Spanish's vowels would be, and nine consonants (jklmnpstw), which are pronounced roughly the same as in English, with the exception of the letter j, which instead represents the palatal approximant (think the letter y). However, for a language this small, there's also a logographic script called sitelen pona, literally "good writing".

This is a chart of the 120 main dictionary words, written first in sitelen pona, and then again in the Latin script.

I first learned about the language at the end of 2021, when two things happened: jan Misali started their new series of toki pona lessons, and Minecraft 1.18 released, featuring toki pona as one of the languages you can play in. Later on, I found the site lipu Linku, which is an online dictionary of all official toki pona words, plus some neologisms created by the community!

It's impressive to see just how many people speak using toki pona, as well as the number of works made using it, such as Wikipesija, a Wikipedia clone where all the pages are written in toki pona, as well as numerous songs, including jan Misali's mashups "kijetesumikyoku" and "ryuupekosi", named after the joke words "kijetesantakalu" (raccoon) and "yupekosi" (to behave like George Lucas and revise your old creative works and make them worse; no one knows how the y is supposed to be pronounced, because the consonant it represents in English is instead covered by the letter j)

mi tawa! (Goodbye!)