The Packbats' Weblog

If you spend any substantial amount of time listening to an English major or film major or literature major or whoever, you've probably come across the idea that all art is collaborative. Us, writing these words, can do nothing without your assistance, because they're just pixels on a screen until you come along and make meaning out of them. We say, as members of a society which has adopted the work-concept of creation, that Packcat wrote this and you 'just' read it, but there is no 'just'. None of this matters unless an audience comes along to do something with it.

But also language itself - the words we use to write - can do nothing without both of our assistance! We create and recreate language by using language. If a language is no longer spoken, it is dead ... but if a language is spoken, it changes, because we all change and we are who the language lives through.

This goes especially for a constructed language, a conlang, a language that was created by someone, and even more so for a philosophical conlang. And Toki Pona is a philosophical conlang - Sonja Lang set forth to seek a kind of simplicity, and that intent pervades the language.

And folks get gatekeepy about it - we've gotten gatekeepy about it (sorry!) - because they know that it will change when being spoken, and they want to keep it the way they like it, and the only way to stop change is to stop speakers from...

...well, having different artistic goals than they do. Or different pragmatic needs than they do. Or even just different taste.

No coherent conclusion, just thoughts.

We talk a lot about the conlang Toki Pona because we think it is delightful. We haven't talked a lot about our experience with the online Toki Pona community, once we moved beyond watching jan Misali videos and talking to friends of friends.

It was bad. It was real bad.

Now, this is a blog post written in mid-2023 about events occuring mid-2023. You, dear reader, might find the Toki Pona communities you encounter to be different. Our experience with tokiponists around our side of fedi (which actually bans people who adopt white supremacist memes, like functional antiracist communities do) has been positive. Toki Pona, the language, has not been hostile to us.

But ... listen, if you recommend people read Sonja Lang's book about Toki Pona without mentioning that there's a strong theme of jan Sonja's religion through it, then that's a big thing to leave out but not a big deal - there are a lot of atheists, including us, speaking Toki Pona, and jan Sonja seems like a nice person and explicitly queer-positive. But a history of racism is a big deal. And it's a big deal that Toki Pona communities are going to have to deal with, and keep dealing with for so long they get sick of having to keep dealing with it. That's how wrestling with a racist history works.

And if you're just learning Toki Pona in 2023? Stars, I'm sorry to have to tell you this. But stay safe. jan sin o, o awen e kon sina.

"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".

toki pona is a fun minimalist philosophical constructed language made by jan Sonja. As of early 2023, it has been exploding in popularity, and as more and more people who know us Packbats know, this means that there's a very real chance that a friend of yours will want to ask you, "how should I refer to you when I am speaking toki pona?"

There are three reasons why this isn't trivial for your hypothetical friend to answer themselves:

1. In toki pona, to talk about something, you have to say what it is - and different speakers use different concepts to encapsulate themselves, both for identity reasons and for fun.
2. In toki pona, one speaks using very few sounds, and those sounds are put together in very few ways. This makes it easy for anyone to speak toki pona, but means many names need to be modified to become toki pona names.
3. In every language, the correct thing to call someone is what they want to be called.

So: what do you want to be called?

A little belated of an announcement, but this is the introduction to our guide for non-tokiponists on how to make a name for yourself (literally) in toki pona.

We're really proud of it, honestly! It's about 3k words total, plus a wordlist for quick reference, and there's .html and .pdf downloads for offline use. We'd love to hear from anyone who tries it.

imagine this: the weather is good today, so we want to take tea out onto our porch and sit in the fresh air. let's talk toki pona grammar.

this essay exists because we, while we've been learning, have been very frustrated about not being able to translate things, and we couldn't translate because we didn't know how the words went together. this probably isn't gonna solve that problem for you, but it hopefully means you've at least met all the constructions and you know they exist.

we are not as of this writing fluent, so many thanks to our beta readers, including Russ Sharek of The Circus Freaks, @f00fc7c8@kind.social, and various members of the kama sona Discord. any remaining errors and eccentricities are our own.

first line is in toki pona.

second line is a word-by-word gloss in english (spaces separate toki pona words) with grammatical particles in square brackets and prepositions in curly braces.
third line is a somewhat-literal english translation. (obvious example: singletons saying an unmodified 'mi' probably mean "me" - the actual toki pona word does not indicate number.)

the rest are commentary.

let's go.

It's probably not surprising, given that we've been watching jan Misali's YouTube channel for years, but we've been following along on the toki pona language course they're doing with jan Kesi and practicing with flashcards and, recently, starting in on lipu sona pona by jan Lentan so we have more material. And making more flashcards because sitelen pona, the logography jan Sonja kicked off for the language.

It's been an interesting process, even if we're flagging a bit right now - toki pona feels like it'll bring out the poets in us. If you don't know, it's a minimalist language - less than two hundred words - and to talk of most things you must combine ... but the combinations are deliberately not standardized. Instead, the word for a concept is built out of how the speaker describing it right now conceives of it. And that makes it really interesting to ask questions like "what is Dwarf Fortress? what is a roleplaying game? what is a story?", because we have to think about it to talk about it. jan toki li pali e toki. jan toki li pali e toki ale.