[Link] sona ike lili
Toki Pona is a language constructed by Sonja Lang, as foretold by linguistic determinism. It is famous for only having about 120 or so words, and yet still being able to express a wide variety of concepts. Today, I am announcing sona ike lili (lit. little bad knowledge), a blog where I will translate famous LessWrong articles into toki pona. Currently, there are two articles: Scope Insensitivity and Taboo Your Words.
FWIW, “powe” has been removed from “official” toki pona. A more standard translation might be “sona ike lili”.
The idea of Toki Pona is, to some degree, to force you to avoid using complicated concepts by making doing so unwieldy. But if I’m gonna talk about something anyways, using a slightly more expansive vocabulary to make it more elegant seems within the spirit of things—especially if it’s for a title of something.
Mostly I just like this better, even if it’s nonstandard.
I take it on Sonja Lang’s authority that Sonya Lang has no authority, so you can do what you want.
However, I personally think “sona ike lili” is more descriptive in the way that Toki Pona is good for.
It seems like people mostly share your opinion, so I’ll change it.
Happy to take suggestions for other articles to translate—though preferably ones which are not particularly long. I’m not prepared to tackle The Simple Truth or anything like that.
It’s a RISC!
Does it operate thru similar principles to Person Do Thing (a game wherein you have to get someone else to guess a randomly selected word by only using the 49 words on an approved list)?
Unlike Person Do Thing, Toki Pona has a nontrivial grammar. (Also, it’s not too close to English grammar, or any one natural language grammar afaik. And the words are based on a variety of natural languages rather than just taken from English.)
Otherwise, yes, trying to explain things in the two languages is a similar process.
It feels a lot like “Person Do Thing: the language”. In fact, the 49 words are close to a subset of toki pona’s. But toki pona is more expressive. Obviously there are a bunch more words, but also every word can be used as every part of speech, and the grammar disambiguates which part of speech it is. That makes it suprisingly usable. Still, toki pona sentences do feel like puzzles to me.
I’m not too familiar with that game, but it sounds like they both revolve around identifying complicated concepts using only a small set of very basic ideas.