Toki Pona is the best thing ever

I've always wanted to come up with a "semantic alphabet" from which I take a minimal set of primitive concepts, assign them symbols, and use the symbols to express more complex things. I was inspired at a young age by the system of radicals that compose chinese characters. The thing I disliked about chinese radicals was their use phonetically. I wanted a completely semantic set of primitives. I've set out many times to try to list out what I think would be the best minimum set of words to use in a language. My approach always usually began by looking at lists of the first N most common words used in English, and going from there.

I could never figure it out quite right.

To my delight, someone has already done something like this, though, and has shared her creation with the world. It's called Toki Pona. It's a language of 120 words, it's super easy to learn, and it's amazing. It's really quite impressive how expressive you can be even when so restricted.

It's also inspired me to try my hand at creating a small language to experiment with what happens when you try to apply some kind of intentional philosophical bias to your root word choice.

15 April 2022