The Allusionist: 25. Toki Pona

November 21, 2015 7:13 PM

There's a language which is said to be the smallest language in the world. It has around 123 words, five vowels, nine consonants, and apparently you can become fluent in it with around 30 hours' study. It was invented by linguist Sonja Lang in 2001, and it's called Toki Pona.

Further reading and useful links online at ww.theallusionist.org/tokipona

Simon, Louise, Anjali & Mathew's randomly selected word from the dictionary: Kobold

posted by jazon (4 comments total)

I am genuinely interested in learning Toki Pona, even if there is never another person I can speak it with. Sometimes it is worth learning something just for the sake of knowing it.
posted by maxsparber at 7:05 AM on November 22, 2015

Isn't there a novel or short story or something that gets at that idea that if you don't have language to express something it's hard to have an experience of that thing? Or maybe I'm thinking of the anthropological studies of tribes/peoples with completely different concepts of time and how that defines (or maybe is defined by) their experience of the past and the future. IDK. Interesting, though!

And I can't believe no one mentioned Newspeak! I couldn't stop thinking about it.
posted by that's candlepin at 10:52 AM on November 23, 2015

Isn't there a novel or short story or something that gets at that idea that if you don't have language to express something it's hard to have an experience of that thing?

That's called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and, remarkably, you've just described the concept without knowing what it's called!
posted by chrchr at 5:21 PM on November 23, 2015 [4 favorites]

Isn't it Averroes's search, from El Aleph ?
posted by nicolin at 6:37 AM on December 10, 2015