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

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 3[¹] 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.

---

The greatest strain on the Toki Pona community throughout its 20 years of existence has been that the language is largely spoken online, and at that, largely through text conversations. For a subjective, intentionally ambiguous language, this is playing on hard mode. I distinctly remember trying to explain on ma pona pi toki pona that police were fighting protesters on the street outside my apartment. I said something like “poka pi tomo mi la jan lawa li utala e jan pi wile ken lon nasin”. No one could understand what I meant; they all wanted to know what nasin was being fought over.

Can you imagine not understanding that sentence face-to-face? Even if it were unclear or ungrammatical (which it probably was; this was early in my learning experience), context would have made readily clear that “nasin” referred to the literal street on which the violence was occurring.

For a sub­jec­tive, in­ten­tion­al­ly am­big­u­ous language, text con­ver­sa­tions are playing on hard mode.

For two years now, I’ve been lucky enough to speak Toki Pona in my home with my wives. When we started that endeavor, it was a huge change from the online conversations I had had. How should I disambiguate between the table I want my wife to set a bag down on, versus the chair I want to sit in? Easy: pointing. “o poki moku e supa ni.”

Over time we developed a sociolect, albeit one for a very small group—one with a bit more grounding than the normal ma ponan dialect in physical things (e.g. frequent usage of “sin” to mean “clean”) and more ability to play with ambiguity (e.g. taking noun-to-verb usage to its logical extreme⁶). We call it toki pona Kenpe,⁷ after Cape May, N.J., the area where we lived when we began to speak it. But it’s more than that place, or the three of us. I’ve gotten to see how toki pona Kenpe has influenced some of our friends’ nasin toki. Over time, perhaps, it could become a dialect proper. I hope it does, not out of vanity, but because that, more than anything, is the future of Toki Pona. Toki Pona will not truly know what it is until it has households, communities, sociolects, dialects, people speaking the language face-to-face and learning what it does and doesn’t provide for their use case. And then it will change by necessity, like any other language—not by number of stars or upvotes.

Which brings us back to nimi sin. My polycule had a period early on of gently sorting out which of those 25 “buffer” words we wanted to use.⁸ And I think like most Toki Pona speakers, we found that once we got into the flow of speaking together, we had little use for some of the other supposedly useful words. We borrowed one joke nimi sin and came up with several others, but to me these clearly occupied a separate, humorous, register of the sociolect, on the same level as kijetesantakalu.⁹ We didn’t seek out any sincere new words. We let our world flow around us and into our lexicon until we could see that which was pona and that which was not.

Toki Pona will not truly know what it is until it has households, com­mun­i­ties, so­cio­lects, di­a­lects, people speaking the language face-to-face and learning what it does and doesn’t provide for their use case. And then it will change by ne­ces­si­ty, like any other language—not by number of stars or upvotes.

And then we found the gap. A lexical gap that might not exist for most people, but existed for us: Toki Pona has no word for non-sexual physical affection. There are, to be sure, a number of ways to describe it. You can describe the physical act, “mi luka e luka sina”. You can describe the general act of touch, “mi pilin e sina” or “mi selo e sina” maybe. You can describe the emotion, “mi suwi e sina”. All of these are adequate options for most people who speak Toki Pona. But in an asexual-leaning polycule where cuddling, hugging, hand-holding, booping, and so on are all regular topics of discussion, this becomes clumsy and tiresome. It does something worse than make it hard to say an English thought in Toki Pona. It makes it hard to say a pona thought in Toki Pona: “I want to be physically affectionate with you in some unspecified way” is a very pona concept, but with no easy nimi pu mapping, at least not in our context.

If we were a fully asexual polycule, we might have just repurposed “unpa”, but we are not, so that would have created ambiguity rather than resolve it. So we made our one non-joke nimi sin. Except it’s not really a nimi sin, because it’s not intended to become widely used. It’s a nimi kulupu. After some brainstorming, we went with:

popu
n.: physical affection (compare and contrast unpa)
v.: boop, cuddle, hug, nibble

From the English “boop” (to gently touch on the nose).

popu has become a really useful word for us. It has even genericized outward a bit, occasionally used to mean an object gently touching another object. If you, dear reader, like the word, feel free to use it of course, but let me be clear: I am not saying that Toki Pona needs this word. I am saying that my kulupu olin needed this word. And that distinction, I think, is the future of Toki Pona.

---

At least if we can get more people speaking the language face-to-face. But I am optimistic for that. The Toki Pona community is young. One of the main hindrances preventing physical-space communities from forming is that many speakers are still in secondary school or college. But our speakers will get older, and will keep teaching Toki Pona to their friends and partners, and turning online Toki Pona friendships into physical-space ones, and building communities where they can see how much easier the language is when you’re in the same room.

And in that world, it’s easy to imagine two lexica: A global lexicon, probably closely resembling the current 117+25, and in each community a local lexicon, some smallish number of nimi kulupu that satisfy use cases particular to this community. Perhaps a Toki Pona hiking club uses nimi kulupu for the cardinal directions. Perhaps a Toki Pona band has nimi kulupu for high and low and loud and quiet. Perhaps a Toki Pona religious study group finds the grouping of religion, spirituality, divinity, and for that matter height under “sewi” to be reductive for the purposes of their nuanced discussions.

As I’ve been writing this essay, a new nimi kulupu has seeped into my own lexicon, this time not from my polycule. As wikipesija.org, the fork of the original Toki Pona Wikipedia, appears on track to return to its home on Wikimedia servers, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on that project. In normal Toki Pona usage, the fact that “lipu” can mean both a website and a webpage causes no confusion. When talking at length about wikis, though, this gets tiresome, especially with phrases like “mi weka e jan tan lipu”. More importantly, though, we run into that problem of the pona concept that can’t be easily said. A wiki is a lipu and a ma and a pali and an ilo and a kulupu all at once. If you start a sentence by talking about the content on “lipu Wikipesija”, and then go on to talk about some site-administration matters, are you still talking about a lipu? So here too I find myself feeling that the pona thing to do is find a new word, one that can have meaning within the small community where it’s relevant, without any claim of being a necessary addition to the global lexicon.

wiki
n.: a collaborative project, taken as a whole to include its contents, its contributors, and its implementation

From the English “wiki” (collaboratively-edited website), originally from the Hawaiian “wikiwiki” (to be quick).

Will other people in the Wikipesija community start following my lead? Who knows! If they don’t, I guess it doesn’t become a nimi kulupu, but that’s fine. nimi kulupu o tan kulupu a!

---

Wait wait wait what about sitelen pona, Tamzin?

This is a good question. My polycule actually did come up with a glyph for “popu”, but of course this will never wind up in Unicode. Even reserving a UCSUR codepoint for it might not be feasible if you eventually have hundreds or thousands of local lexica with their own glyphs. I think the best solution is a set of characters defining radicals, which can be placed in some kind of delimiter to indicate the steps to create a nonstandard sitelen pona glyph. So the “glyph” for popu, in a Unicode-encoded document, could be a series of glyphs meaning something like “begin nonstandard glyph; flush with bottom; shallow arc N 1/2; full loop NW 1/12; line E 1/16; mirror on vertical axis; end nonstandard glyph”. Fonts could render that dynamically, could render a precomposed version if for a known nimi kulupu, or could render it as the radical glyphs within their delimiter.

1. The nimi pu “meli” and “mije” both have enough detractors to fall out of the “core” category of lipu Linku. “pu” itself has the least usage of any core word, at 95% (if “ale” and “ali” are treated as one). No other nimi pu has less than 98% usage. ↩︎
2. The 13 “common” and 9 “uncommon” words in lipu Linku, excluding “ali” as a mere variant pronunciation. ↩︎
3. Technically a nimi majuna, in that the word predates pu, but I’ll be including nimi majuna as nimi sin for the purposes of this essay. ↩︎
4. Memorably, I once had to ban someone from ma pona pi toki pona for their belligerent insistence on arguing that the correct word for sex (as in male/female/intersex) was unpa. People are of course allowed to be wrong about such things, but they were adamant that they were correct and that others had to prove them incorrect… and that somehow the lack of any prescriptive or descriptive authority for that sense was insufficient. ↩︎
5. If anything, I think the most likely is the gradual falling-out-of-favor of some of the jokier nimi sin, actually reducing the size of the core-ish lexicon. ↩︎
6. Seen above with “o poki moku e supa”. When a lot of your toki pona is about things right in front of you, this comes naturally, to a greater degree than when not sharing a physical space. No one face-to-face is going to think I mean some abstract sense of “poki moku” when I say that sentence to someone holding a bag of groceries. And when I would drive my wife to work at the zoo, saying “mi ma soweli e sina” could not be mistaken for throwing manure at her. ↩︎
7. I am not a “meli Sonko”-er, but in this case, by virtue of our leaving the U.S., Kenpe serves as an arbitrary name for the sociolect, not a reference to the region (else I would say “toki pona pi ma Kenpe“) ↩︎
8. Of those words, the ones we use are “jasima”, “kin” as distinct from “a”, “kijetesantakalu”, “kipisi”, “lanpan”, “leko”, “majuna”, “meli” and “mije” in the sense I discuss here, “meso”, “misikeke”, “monsuta”, “n”, “namako” as distinct from “sin”, “pu”, “soko”, “su”, and “tonsi”. However, I’m not sure if we’d all agree as to whether “kijetesantakalu”, “ku”, “n”, “pu”, and “su” are words in the same ways that the others are. Although living together has given me the chance to say “mi pu e sina” to mean “I am hitting you with our signed copy of Toki Pona: The Language of Good by Sonja Lang”. ↩︎
9. Most controversial thing I have ever written on this blog. ↩︎