What the heck is Toki Pona?
After publishing my last short article, several people expressed interest in a deeper analysis of various aspects of toki pona--among them, Sai forwarding me a request from jan Sonja for one conlanger's opinion about how to categorize toki pona. So, I shall attempt to give that opinion here.
The Gnoli Triangle, devised by Claudio Gnoli in 1997, remains the most common way to classify conlangs into broad categories.
Within each of these three categories are numerous more specific classifications, but broadly speaking we can define each one as follows based on the goals behind a conlang's construction:
Artlang: A language devised for personal pleasure or to fulfill an aesthetic effect.
Engelang: A language devised according to meet specific objective design criteria, often in order to test some hypothesis about how language does or can work.
Auxlang: A language devised to facilitate communication between people who otherwise do not share a common natural language. Distinct from a "lingua franca", a language which actually does function to facilitate communication between large groups of people without a native language in common.
Any given language can have aspects of all three of these potential categorizations. But, to figure out where in the triangle toki pona should fit, we need to know the motivations behind its creation.
To that end, I quote from the preface of Toki Pona: The Language of Good:
Toki Pona was my philosophical attempt to understand the meaning of life in 120 words.
Through a process of soul-searching, comparative linguistics, and playfulness, I designed a simple communication system to simplify my thoughts.
I first published [Toki Pona] on the web in 2001. A small community of Toki Pona fans emerged.
In relation to the third point, in private communication jan Sonja confirmed that she never actively tried to get other people to use it. The community just grew organically. Even though the phonology was intentionally designed to be "easy for everyone", that tells me that the defining motivation behind toki pona was not that of an auxlang. In practice, it does sometimes serve as a lingua franca, but it wasn't designed with the intention of filling that role. It was designed to help simplify thoughts for the individual. Therefore, we can conclude that toki pona does not belong in the auxlang corner, or somewhere in the middle. A proper classification will be somewhere along the engelang-artlang edge--what I am inclined to call an "architected language" or "archlang" (although that particular term has been slow to catch on in anyone's usage but my own!)
So, what are the design criteria behind toki pona? Referring again to The Language of Good, toki pona was intended to be minimalist, using the "simplest and fewest parts to create the maximum effect". Additionally, "training your mind to think in Toki Pona" is supposed to promote mindfulness and lead to deeper insights about life and existence.
Toki Pona is also described as a "philosophical attempt"; can it then be classed as a "philosophical language"? I referred to it as such in my last post, and I think yes; it is, after all, the go-to example of a philophical language on the Philosophical language Wikipedia page! The term "philosophical language" is sometimes used interchangeably with "taxonomic language", where the vocabulary encodes some classification scheme for the world, as in John Wilkins's Real Character, but more broadly a philosophical language is a type of engineered language designed from a limited set of first principles, typically employing a limited set of elemental morphemes (or "semantic primes"). Toki Pona absolutely fits that mold--which means it can be legitimately classed as an engelang as well.
However, Toki Pona was clearly not constructed entirely mechanistically. It came from a process of soul-searching and playfulness, and encodes something of Sonja's own sense of aesthetics in the phonology. Ergo, it is clearly also an artlang. Exactly where along that edge it belongs--what percentage of engelang vs. artlang it is--is really something that only jan Sonja can know, given these categorial definitions which depend primarily on motivations. But I for one am quite happy to bring it in to the "archlang" family.
To cement the artlang classification, I'll return to the "minor complexities" I mentioned in the last article. To start with, what's up with "li"? It is supposed to be the predicate marker, but you don't use it if the subject is "mi" or "sina"... yet you do for "ona", so it's clearly not a simple matter of "pronoun subjects don't need 'li'". But, if we imagine a fictional history history for toki pona, it makes perfect sense. There is, after all, a fairly common historical process by which third person pronouns or demonstrative transform into copulas in languages that previously had a null copula. (This process is currently underway in modern Russian, for example.) So, suppose we had "mi, sina, li" as the "original" pronouns; "li", in addition to its normal referential function, ends up getting used in cleft constructions with 3rd person subjects to clarify the boundary between subject and predicate in null-copula constructions. Eventually, it gets re-analyzed as the copula, except when "mi" and "sina" are used because they never required cleft-clarification anyway (and couldn't have used it if they did, because of person disagreement), and a new third-person pronoun is innovated to replace it--which, being new, doesn't inherit the historical patterning of "mi" and "sina", so you get a naturalistic-looking irregularity.
Or, take the case of "en". It seems fairly transparently derived from "and", and that is one of its glosses in The Toki Pona Dictionary, based on actual community usage, but according the The Language of Good it does not mean "and"--it just means "this is an additional subject of the same clause". Toki Pona doesn't really need a word for "and"; clauses can just be juxtaposed. and the particle "e" makes it clear where an object phrase starts so you can just chain as many of those together as you want with no explicit conjunction. So, we just need a way to indicate the boundary between multiple different subject phrases. You could interpret that as just as kind of marked nominative case--except you don't use it when there's only one subject. It's this weird extra thing that solves a niche edge case in the basic grammar. A strictly engineering-focused language might've just gone with an unambiguous marked nominative, or an explicit conjunction, but Toki Pona doesn't. It's more complicated, in terms of how the grammatical rules are specified, than it strictly needs to be.
And then, we've got the issue of numerals. All numerals follow the nouns which they apply to, whatever their function--but that means an extra particle must be introduced into the lexicon to distinguish cardinal numerals (how many?) from ordinal numerals (which one?). That is an unnecessary addition which makes the lexicon not-strictly-minimalist. The existing semantics of noun juxtaposition within a phrase make it possible to borrow the kind of construction we see in, e.g., Hawai'ian, where using a numeral as the head of a noun phrase forces a cardinal interpretation (something like "a unit of banana", "a pair of shoes", "a trio of people", etc.), while postposing a numeral in attributive position forces an ordinal interpretation ("banana first", "shoe second", "person third"). But Toki Pona doesn't do that!
Finally, as discussed previously, the lexicon is not optimized. These are all expressions of unforced character--i.e., artistic choice.
But what if Toki Pona were an auxlang? How would it be different?
Well, first off, we'd fix those previous complexities. At minimum, introduce an unambiguous marked nominative (which also helps with identifying clause boundaries), unify the behavior of pronouns and the copula / predicate marker, and get rid of the unnecessary ordinal particle. Then, we look at re-structuring the vocabulary. I collected a corpus of Toki Pona texts, removed all punctuation, filtered for only the 137 "essential words", and ended up with set of 585,888 tokens from which to derive frequency data. Based on this data set, 7 of the "essential words" appear zero times... which really makes them seem not that essential, and argues for cutting down the word list to an even 130. (Congratulations to jan Sonja for getting so close to the mark with the earlier choice of 120!) There are 72 two-syllable words that occur "too infrequently"--in the sense that there are three-syllable words that occur more frequently, and so should've been assigned shorter forms first. And similarly, there are 23 one-syllable words which are too infrequent compared to the two-syllable words. Honestly, predicting what these frequency distributions ought to be is really freakin' hard, so jan Sonja can't be blamed for these word-length incongruities even if she had been trying to construct a phonologically-optimized auxlang, but now we have the data from Toki Pona itself, so we could do better! Design a phonology, enumerate all of the possible word forms in order of increasing complexity, and then assign them to meanings according to the empirical frequency list!
For that, of course, we need to define a new phonology. It needs to produce at least 129 (remember, we're dropping the ordinal particle) words of three syllables or less, but no more than that. Based on picking the most cross-linguistically common segments according to Phoible data, we can go with the following inventory:
i,a,u
n (/m), p, k, w (/v)
With a strict syllable structure of CV, that produces 12 monosyllables and 144 disyllables.
Cutting out w/v gives us 9 monosyllables and 81 disyllables--not enough to squish everything into two syllables or less. But there are 729 trisyllables--way more than we need! So, we could cut it down even more... But, that gets at a hard-to-quantify issue: usability. Aesthetics, it turns out, can be an engineering concern when engineering for maximal cross-cultural auxlang usability! Too few phonemes, and the language gets samey and hard to parse. Toki Pona as it is seems to hit a sweet spot in having some less-common phonemes, but sounding pretty good--good enough to naturally attract a speaker community. If I were doing this for real, I'd probably not just look at individual segments, but instead comb through Phoible for the features that are most cross-linguistically common, and try to design a maximnally-large universally-pronounceable inventory of allophone sets based on that to give variety to the minimal set of words. But if we accept the numbers of phonemes, and accept their actual values as provisional, what happens if we enumerate words while also aliminating minimal pairs?
Well, then we get a maximum of 3 monosyllables (re-using any vowel would produce a minimal pair) well under a hundred disyllables, but plenty of trisyllables. It would be nice to not do worse than Toki Pona in the average word length, though, which means we probably need 118 monosyllables + disyllables--we can get that pretty easily by relaxing the word-difference constraints such that we can have minimal pairs between, e.g., /n/ and /k/, which are extremely unlikely to be confused. Or, we just go up to 5 consonants instead of four, probably adding in something like j (/l).
I'm still not super inclined to add the mountain of failed auxlangs or tokiponidos in the world... but, that's the process I would use to properly engineer an optimal auxlang-alternate to Toki Pona.
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