toki pona

nimi kulupu: “popu”, “wiki”, and the future of Toki Pona

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

nimi sin discourse is a staple of Toki Pona. Often it’s fun, sometimes it’s not, and it’s addictive enough that I’ve had to restart this essay twice to avoid getting bogged down in my personal opinions on which nimi sin are crucial and which are a disgrace to the language.

Let’s say this instead: the 120 nimi pu, minus at most 31 and plus at most 22,2 give you enough to have a completely satisfying conversation with anyone in the world. The exact number you settle on largely depends on whether you think the nimi pu adequately express a few basic concepts like “cut” or “take”. Different people will answer those questions differently, and that’s fine. As long as most speakers understand the 142 words that make up the vast majority of Toki Pona as actually used, it doesn’t really matter whether a given speaker thinks that “medicine” is adequately conveyed by “pona”, or whether it’s sufficiently distinct to warrant the nimi sin3 “misikeke”.

Beyond that buffer of 25 non-unanimously-used words, I will be honest, I think most nimi sin discourse has been A Bad Thing. It’s not that I have a problem with coming up with new nimi; we’ll get to some of that later. It’s that the discourse doesn’t really seem to represent natural language development by people who routinely speak a language. One level of this is obvious in the form of the ubiquitous “I just started learning Toki Pona and I think we need a word for this” post, such a staple of the community that it’s become its own genre of memes and humor. A subtler issue, though, comes from the fact that much nimi sin discourse seems to focus on “How would you say X?”, not “How do you say X?”

For a lot of people, Toki Pona is more of a thought experiment or artistic tool than a language they intend to have fully fluent conversations in. This is a great and beautiful aspect of the artlang, but it is not a great breeding ground for actual language development. A common phenomenon in Toki Pona spaces is the person who declares that they use a certain word in some unusual, provocative way. After some amount of discourse over whether this is good usage, someone may ask the person, “Do you ever actually use the word that way?” and it becomes apparent that no, they just think it’s interesting to say that they do.4 This betrays an important truth, which is that for every person who routinely uses Toki Pona in their daily life, there’s probably 20 who speak the language fairly well but aren’t frequently confronting new situations and having to think about how to describe them in Toki Pona.

This bedevils the nimi sin situation because most nimi sin are, at their core, an argument that some lexical gap exists. “lanpan” argues that “pana” and “jo” need an antonym. “leko” argues that “sike” needs a counterpart. “tonsi”, perhaps the most persuasively, argues that “meli” and “mije” really oughtn’t be a binary. And so on. But how can a community tell where the lexical gaps are when most of its members don’t use the language day-in-day-out, don’t become fluent enough that they can facilely talk through complex abstract subjects only to find that there are still one or two concepts that are unwieldy to describe and would be abetted with a nimi sin?

So here’s my take: We have enough nimi sin. Usage seems to have found an equilibrium. For one reason or another, the community mostly feels like fear is distinct enough from general badness that it needs its own word, but that shame isn’t; that we need a word to cover gender variance but not ones to cover sexual orientation; and so on. There may be some movement left to be seen,5 but I don’t think we’re going to see another word where a large chunk of the community all say “Oh wow, yeah, we really can’t make do without a word for that.”

We don’t need more nimi sin. What we need is something much, much cooler than that. And something we’re going to get naturally, as long as one thing happens: More people speak Toki Pona face to face.

Continue readingnimi kulupu: “popu”, “wiki”, and the future of Toki Pona

There is no transgender in toki pona.

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

One thing I sorta breezed past in “There is no gender in toki pona” is the word tonsi. tonsi isn’t technically a nimi pu in the sense of appearing in Toki Pona: The Language of Good, but it’s so widely accepted in the toki pona community that it is better counted alongside those words than the nimi ku suli. It is unique, I think, in having received jan Sonja’s explicit endorsement even before the publication of ku.

[NSFW] The surprising profundity of how toki pona handles sex

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

[Obvious CW, this entire post is about human sexuality. Academic-ish terminology but yeah.]

As I was writing “There is no gender in toki pona.“, I kept thinking about how what I was saying applied to discussions of sexuality. But I didn’t want to meander too far from my main point, and didn’t want to turn an SFW post into an NSFW one.

In the previous post I talked about how gender-related words in toki pona are not exempt from subjectivity. That’s the idea that the words we choose depend on our own perspective. Some Penicillium roqueforti, for instance, might variously be jaki ‘grossness’ if found somewhere undesirable, namako ‘flavor’ if found as part of Roquefort cheese, soko ‘fungus’ to a mycologist, misikeke ‘medicine’ to a manufacturer of penicillin, and laso ‘blueness’ to an artist painting a slice of Roquefort and interested only in the color. None of these words is more or less correct than the other, even if some will statistically occur more often than others.

But I can’t think of a better way to explain the full depths of subjectivity in toki pona than by talking about how it applies to human sexuality. That’s because sex, as one of the most intimate and primal acts humans engage in, is one of the things most defined by the perception of the person doing it. And in toki pona, if we want to talk about sex in detail, we have to subjectively describe the things and acts involved.

Continue reading[NSFW] The surprising profundity of how toki pona handles sex

There is no gender in toki pona. (non-tokiponist–friendly version)

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

toki pona, as an isolating language with no gendered pronouns, is grammatically gender-neutral. End of post.

Okay but actually…

This is an adaptation of “There is no gender in toki pona.“, with added glosses and footnotes and reduced code-switching, so as not to assume toki pona proficiency on the part of the reader. If you understand at least basic toki pona, I would recommend reading the original instead. If there are things that are still not explained well enough for non-speakers, please leave a comment! If you are interested in learning toki pona, please see “Recommended learning resources” on sona.pona.la.

[CW: Very brief references to sexuality; discussion of what gendered terms to use for people.]

There are certain pitfalls ubiquitous to learners of toki pona. One early one many of us run into is hypermodification. We might translate “I drank some cold orange juice” as mi moku e telo lete pi kili suwi sike suli jelo loje, ‘I drank cold liquid of red yellow big spherical sweet fruit’. Eventually we realize we can just say mi moku e telo, ‘I drank liquid’.1 The next big hurdle is understanding the things we can’t translate directly because they represent views that clash with toki pona’s philosophy. Trying to say that you want something but don’t need it? Too bad; you’re going to have to learn to express differing kinds of wile instead.2

As we become more fluent, we internalize these pitfalls and learn to seamlessly navigate around them. This, in fact, is the essence of fluency. We learn to think not just how to translate the English words but instead the underlying, wordless concepts. But the toki-pona-incompatible worldviews closest to us are the ones that are hardest to let go of. And in my experience, the one I see toki pona speakers struggle with the most is the idea of gender. Discourse around gender in toki pona almost exclusively revolves around trying to twist the language to convey things that simply aren’t its nature to convey, any more than want-versus-need is.

Let’s start with this: There is no direct translation for “woman” and “man” in toki pona. “Hold on!”, you might say. “pu3 translates ‘woman’ as meli and ‘man’ as mije.” And yes, it does. But the translation doesn’t go both ways. If I say, “mi toki tawa mije,” ‘I speak to the mije,’ do you know the gender of the person I’m referring to? If you think you do, take another look at pu.

meli

noun woman, female, feminine person; wife
mije

noun man, male, masculine person; husband

The simplest form of this, that meli and mije do not refer exclusively to gender identity, can be proven pretty decisively. If I see someone in public with a funny joke on their T-shirt, and that person matches my local community’s definition of masculinity, I might say to my partner “o lukin e mije poka. len ona la sitelen li musi,” ‘Look at that mije over there. Their shirt is funny.’ I am not attempting to convey to my partner, in that moment, any commentary on the stranger’s gender identity. For all I know the person is a woman and takes she/her pronouns. Rather, I am using mije to describe their appearance, which will helpfully eliminate ~50% of the nearby people I might have been referring to.

If you have ever used toki pona to talk about strangers, there is a good chance you have used meli and mije in this purely presentation-based way. But the divergence between these two toki pona words and their frequent English mistranslations goes farther than that. Consider this scenario: A lesbian is at a lesbian bar. She is exclusively interested in women, and the friend beside her knows this. The lesbian says to her friend, “ike la mi taso,” ‘I hate being single.’ Her friend gestures to a fem at the end of the bar and says, “o toki tawa ona,” ‘Go talk to them.’ She shakes her head. “mi alasa e mije,” ‘I’m looking for a mije.’ In this context, it is unlikely that the lesbian is trying to communicate that she has suddenly become interested in men. Much more likely, she is saying, “I’m looking for someone butch.” Because a butch lesbian is—sometimes, in some regards—a “masculine person,” and thus mije is an appropriate (not the appropriate) term.

A different person, looking to convey the same meaning, might have said “mi alasa e tonsi” (where, by the same logic as here, tonsi can refer to any kind of gender-nonconformity) or narrowed her scope by saying something like “mi alasa e meli pi nasin mije,” ‘I’m looking for a meli with a mije vibe,’ or set gender aside and specified what precise attributes she sought. Context-sensitivity and subjectivity don’t stop mattering in toki pona as soon as gender is involved.

Continue readingThere is no gender in toki pona. (non-tokiponist–friendly version)

There is no gender in toki pona.

Posted on by Tamzin (wan Tansin)

toki pona, as an isolating language with no gendered pronouns, is grammatically gender-neutral. End of post.

Okay but actually…

[CW: Very brief references to sexuality; discussion of what gendered terms to use for people. This post assumes basic familiarity with toki pona. “There is no gender in toki pona. (non-tokiponist–friendly version)” also exists.]

There are certain pitfalls ubiquitous to learners of toki pona. One early one many of us run into is hypermodification. mi moku e telo lete pi kili suwi sike suli jelo loje. Eventually we realize we can just say mi moku e telo. The next big hurdle is understanding the things we can’t translate directly because they represent views that clash with toki pona’s philosophy. Trying to say that you want something but don’t need it? Too bad; you’re going to have to learn to express differing kinds of wile instead.

As we become more fluent, we internalize these pitfalls and learn to seamlessly navigate around them. This, in fact, is the essence of fluency. We learn to think not just how to translate the English words but instead the underlying, wordless concepts. But the toki-pona-incompatible worldviews closest to us are the ones that are hardest to let go of. And in my experience, the one I see toki pona speakers struggle with the most is the idea of gender. Discourse around gender in toki pona almost exclusively revolves around trying to twist the language to convey things that simply aren’t its nature to convey, any more than want-versus-need is.

Let’s start with this: There is no direct translation for “woman” and “man” in toki pona. “Hold on!”, you might say. “pu translates ‘woman’ as meli and ‘man’ as mije.” And yes, it does. But the translation doesn’t go both ways. If I say, “mi toki tawa mije“, do you know the gender of the person I’m referring to? If you think you do, o awen pu.

meli

noun woman, female, feminine person; wife
mije

noun man, male, masculine person; husband

The simplest form of this, that meli and mije do not refer exclusively to gender identity, can be proven pretty decisively. If I see someone in public with a funny joke on their T-shirt, and that person matches my local community’s definition of masculinity, I might say to my partner “o lukin e mije poka. len ona la sitelen li musi.” I am not attempting to convey to my partner, in that moment, any commentary on the stranger’s gender identity. For all I know the person is a woman and takes she/her pronouns. Rather, I am using mije to describe their appearance, which will helpfully eliminate ~50% of the nearby people I might have been referring to.

If you have ever used toki pona to talk about strangers, there is a good chance you have used meli and mije in this purely presentation-based way. But the divergence between these two toki pona words and their frequent English mistranslations goes farther than that. Consider this scenario: A lesbian is at a lesbian bar. She is exclusively interested in women, and the friend beside her knows this. The lesbian says to her friend, “ike la mi taso.” Her friend gestures to a fem at the end of the bar and says, “o toki tawa ona.” She shakes her head. “mi alasa e mije.” In this context, it is unlikely that the lesbian is trying to communicate that she has suddenly become interested in men. Much more likely, she is saying, “I’m looking for someone butch.” Because a butch lesbian is—sometimes, in some regards—a “masculine person,” and thus mije is an appropriate (not the appropriate) term.

A different person, looking to convey the same meaning, might have said “mi alasa e tonsi” (where, by the same logic as here, tonsi can refer to any kind of gender-nonconformity) or narrowed her scope by saying something like “mi alasa e meli pi nasin mije,” or set gender aside and specified what precise attributes she sought. Context-sensitivity and subjectivity don’t stop mattering in toki pona as soon as gender is involved.

Continue readingThere is no gender in toki pona.