Toki Pona and efficiency of communication (Blaugust #2)

"The Salt Merchant and His Ass" is not a particularly famous Aesop fable, but it's a funny story and we recently translated it into Toki Pona.

By our count, the English translation we were working from (George Fyler Townsend's, basically), was about 169 words long.

By our count, our Toki Pona translation was 114 words long.

Now, some of that is editing. The Fyler English translation was a little florid, and we could have stood to be a bit more expansive when writing ours. But the obvious thing to expect when going from a language with a typical average vocabulary of twenty thousand words to a language with only about a hundred and twenty would be, y'know, the same ideas taking many times more words to express, and that's not what we're seeing. Toki Pona is really remarkably good at expressing the essentials of these old stories, despite having far, far fewer tools to do it.

I think that's really neat.

Edit 2023-08-03: We poked around a little more looking at other texts, and typically our Toki Pona renderings are longer than the English versions ... by somewhere between 5% and 30%. (For example, the IPA edition of "The North Wind and the Sun" has 113 words and our off-the-cuff Toki Pona telling would have about 144 if we didn't run out of space.) And all of these are written with the Sonja Lang's basic 120 words - we didn't even add "kin".