Toki Pona
|
---|
|
Pronunciation
| [?toki ?pona]
|
---|
Created by
| Sonja Lang
|
---|
Date
| 2001
|
---|
Setting and usage
| testing principles of
minimalism
, the
Sapir?Whorf hypothesis
[1]
and
pidgins
|
---|
Users
| more than 3.100 (2016)
|
---|
Purpose
| |
---|
Sources
| a posteriori language
, with elements of
English
,
Tok Pisin
,
Finnish
,
Georgian
,
Dutch
,
Acadian French
,
Esperanto
,
Croatian
,
Chinese
|
---|
|
ISO 639-3
| tok
|
---|
Toki Pona
is a
constructed language
. Sonja Lang, a
Canadian
translator
and
linguist
, made this language.
[1]
The words
toki pona
mean "good language" or "simple language".
Toki Pona uses simple ideas that all
cultures
know. However, Lang did not make Toki Pona as an
international auxiliary language
(a language to help people speaking different languages). She made it to test ideas about
minimalism
(taking out things that are not needed) and
pidgins
. She also used
Taoist
ideas.
Toki Pona only has about 137 words. Words can be used together to talk about other ideas. For example,
jan
means "person", and
pona
means "good". So,
jan pona
can mean "friend", a person who is good. This is why there does not need to be one word for "friend". The small number of words can talk about many ideas in this way.
There are a few words that show the structure of the
sentence
. They do not mean anything by themselves. For example, the word
li
shows that the next word is a
verb
(a word that tells about an
action
or a
state
).
Toki Pona can be written in the
Latin alphabet
. English also uses this alphabet. In Toki Pona, some of the letters make different sounds than they do in English. Each letter in Toki Pona always makes the same sound.
Sonja Lang made her own writing system for Toki Pona. It is called
sitelen pona
. In English, this means "good writing" or "simple writing". This system uses
pictograms
(small drawings based off of how things look). They help show what words mean, not how they sound. People who write in
sitelen pona
can put two pictograms together by putting the second one either on top of, or inside, the first one. Many Toki Pona speakers write with this system.
Some Toki Pona speakers make other ways to write this language.
Lord's Prayer
(translated by Pije/Jopi):
mama pi mi mute o, sina lon sewi kon.
nimi sina li sewi.
ma sina o kama.
jan o pali e wile sina lon sewi kon en lon ma.
o pana e moku pi tenpo suno ni tawa mi mute.
o weka e pali ike mi. sama la mi weka e pali ike pi jan ante.
o lawa ala e mi tawa ike.
o lawa e mi tan ike.
tenpo ali la sina jo e ma e wawa e pona.
Amen.