#but in toki pona it's just more fun

[magpiereplika]

one of my favorite things that i can do is throw in some toki pona when i'm speaking english

like esp when something is intended for only really me to put my thoughts out there and not really be listened to then mi wile toki e ona kepeken toki pona and no one can fucking stop me

[sliimetrash]

getting irrationally mad over jan sin just tokiponizing specific english words and using them in speech like they're normal

[deerspherestudios]

Hey!! Thank you so much for day 3, i loved the way you wrote mychael and made him react to the MC's decisions. The way we discover more about his personality, how he reacts to the world around him and MC's decisions makes me love him more every single update !1!!1 comfort character fr fr

Now, for the question, how did you come up with the words ktchreikrichein and greighkhen? (and what does the last one mean lol)

Tysm for your work, effort and, of course, sharing your silly lil mushroom man with us :) take care !!

Aaa thank you so much for the praise!! He's just a goober and I love showing multiple sides to him! I'm just glad everyone likes him as much as they do <3

As for the 'language', I'll put a read more here since I ramble a little:

Honestly, as embarrassing as it is to admit, I just crunched a couple letters together. I've mentioned before his language is a lot of clicking, hissing, growling; the less people can pronounce it the closer the vibe is to his language I intended, as well as sounding like clicks and growls.

Here's a rough translation of what I was going for:

ktchreikrichein - person of pleasant appeal (synonymous with cute, handsome, pretty, beautiful, etc; a compliment in visual appearance.)

greighkhen - person of inconvenience (synonymous with mischievous, dangerous, troublesome, annoying, etc; Mychael was calling you a troublemaker)

Inspired by the language structure in Toki Pona, the intent here is the last syllable sounds like 'khein' = person.

So adding 'ktch' = look/see + 'reikri' = pleasant/nice has the meaning "person that is nice to look at" or 'greigh' = trouble/problem has the meaning "person that causes problems."

At the end of the day it's just some silly fun with nonsense syllables.

[transgenderer]

Thinking about constructed interlangs in the vein of toki pona. Toki pona is fun but also intentionally impractical and I find the idea of a "functional toki pona" really intriguing. Could it be done? You'd definitely need more words than toki pona, and much more carefully chosen. But I think with idk...500 words, and carefully chosen rules about how you can combine them to form larger meaning, and careful grammar, you could probably make something slow to get meaning across but functional. I think for me the big issue would be assuring the compounds don't just become new vocabulary, youd have to be very strict about sacrificing brevity for unambiguity, or alternately, you could leave ambiguity in and accept having a lot of homonyms. Which could be interesting too! Poetic, potentially

[solipsistful]

did you know i used to have a pretty strong conlang special interest as a teenager

sigh

anyway w.bg concepts translated into toki pona.

consolidation: wan sijelo ('unite bodily') or, if you're feeling spicy, wan kon ('unite essence-ly'). im sure Mikes would tend towards the latter

correction: you could probably talk about pona pi ijo pini ('making better of a past thing') or just ante pi ijo pini ('change of a past thing'). i dunno, "a correction" isn't a really a single Thing is it lol. however, i imagine "continuous correction" would look something like ante awen pi ijo pini ('continuing/staying change of a past thing'), or really it's more like lon ante ('other existence'). lon namako ('extra existence') lol.

iteration: mute tenpo ('multiply temporally') for the action, jan mute tenpo for an iterated person. that mayyy be a bad use of tenpo but toki pona doesn't really have a good term for "time, abstractly". maybe it still works?

calculator: ilo luka pi tawa tenpo ('handheld tool for time travel')

storage: poki pi tenpo awen ('box of continuing time')? again, iffy use of tenpo, to my knowledge. maybe it's more like poki pi lon awen ('box of continuing existence').

tracing: sona ijo pi tenpo ante ('knowledge of a thing in different times')

connectivity: i feel like you could go pretty abstract/vague with linja tan ('rope/thread of causes') or linja pi tenpo ante ('rope/thread of different times'). a connectivity strike is a sorta separate thing, more like moli pi jan mute tenpo ale ('killing/death of all iterations'). shorten that to moli mute ('death of many') lol.

and the most important one of all, cowboyification, which would be hard. my first thought would be kama jan mama soweli ma pi weka sona ('becoming a person who cares for animals of the place where the sun sets' does that even make sense in English.)???

toki pona also has a neat way of doing proper names that makes it fun to differentiate between jan An (Anne, a person), kulupu An (the council of Annes), and something like kon An (Anne, the essence). or go the other way and say jan An is the overall person, and any single one is sijelo An (Anne, a body)

...

ugh. anyway.

- ace

[twig-gy]

random toki pona hcs:

heart learned toki pona first, for fun, and then mind learned it bc he needs to be better at heart in all intellectual pursuits

just to be a dick, mind calls heart "soweli pilin" instead of using sina. when mind uses sina for him heart's like "omg you love me after all" and then mind spends the next week or so never using toki pona

heart printed out kijetesantakalu and will randomly drop the word into every single conversation. "(i'm so kijetesantakalu rn ngl)" "[shut the fuck up]"

soul does not know toki pona but is a kijetesantakalu appreciator

kijetesantakalu is the only word soul knows in toki pona

if soul did know toki pona he would call heart and mind kipisi pilin and kipisi sona (for lack of a more accurate word) respectively, at least until concord

sometimes mind and heart argue in toki pona when they don't want soul to realize they are arguing, but they are still the same volume. this also leads to the argument taking twice as long to escalate bc both of them are taking several minutes to come up with the most elaborate insults

like so: "(sina toki e mi kepeken 'soweli pilin' a! sona sina li lon ala!)" and then mind has to parse whatever he said and say back "[tenpo kama la, kipisi ale li moli tan soweli pilin!]". they may or may not have a wordlist pinned to the fridge for this purpose.

imagine mind in the middle of an argument, pausing to stare at the toki pona wordlist and squinting for whatever word is most accurate, then taking 5 minutes to figure out the best phrase

after heart was blinded, he'll ask if there's a word for whatever on there, then mind will look at it and recommend what word he could use

"[what's the best word for akaryocyte on there?]"

"(toki pona is the minimalist language mind shut the fuck up. figure it out yourself.)"

this has been random toki pona hcs

[aszles]

i physically cannot be normal so i translated the one omake with kobeni's sister to toki pona

click read more for a sitelen pona version, english translation, and translator's notes!

i mostly wanted to test typesetting sitelen pona! i think this is my first time doing this? i've used sitelen pona a little bit on a previous comic translation, but only for a couple things since it was so hard to format in csp. gimp makes it so easy!

translation:

[today these sweet sisters are by the water!] sister: hey, hey, i want to eat. we should eat at the restaurant (food building) kobeni: we can't. that place costs a lot of money. but everything's fine! i brought riceballs (see TN) ah! Denji and Power! they're bad-powerful. but they can (might) have money! we'll all eat. those two will pay! sister: ah! is that okay?! denji: ah? food? i've been killing and eating the fish! sister: ah... power: uh... did you steal the rice from me? give me it. kobeni: ah?! (weirdness and lies defeated them!) ...end

translator's notes:

first i just want to mention the riceballs thing. i translated this quite unspecifically in toki pona. i translated it as "pan sike" / "circular grain". pan most commonly means bread or rice, so there's lots of foods she potentially brought along!

i'm a lone "o" user until the end of time o7

uh. bad-powerful. as in, powerful in a bad way!

i made very small changes to the dialogue in the sitelen pona version. i can't be bothered telling you so why don't you learn toki pona and sitelen pona already and see for yourself? oops that sounded aggressive

it's 5am i hope there are no mistakes

time to talk about names! woohoo! first we have Denji as jan Tensi which featured in my last translation, but i hadn't come up with his sitelen pona yet! if you're unfamiliar, which you probably are, in sitelen pona we write our names as a combination of existing glyphs inside a cartouche. this is a really fun way to add some personality to your name and really make it your own! (for instance, my name features the glyph for sleep, because i'm a sleepy motherfucker) for Tensi i used tenpo, soweli and insa. tenpo means time. it has no specific relation to denji but i thought it was kinda nice. soweli means animal, and insa means inside. are you catching on yet? these two glyphs are separated from tenpo, and together say something like "inner animal", isn't that fun?

separating this point so it doesn't look like i'm blabbing on too long. i'm quite proud of Power's name, because it's... ridiculous. naturally in this universe, she named herself after the toki pona word for power, wawa. to write this name you could of course just put the word wawa in a cartouche (with two dots to indicate you pronounce the whole word) but that's not powerful enough! so her name is written with TWO, count em TWO wawa glyphs! (with one dot each to indicate you pronounce the first syllable) wawa mute a!

by the way, why is kobeni so devious in this? did she get possessed by the theft devil? :/

alright imma go pass out now

[ulysses-but-somehow-more-transer]

hi i made up yet another impractical number system/nomenclature for toki pona!!

its base six or seximal, using the digits wan (1), tu (2), san (3), po (4) and luka (5) [as used in jan Usawi's song likujo]

now a lot of number systems use suffixes to denote the position of a given digit (see four = 4 , four-ty = 40, four-hundred = 400). personally i like single syllable suffixes so i could just come up with a bunch of sounds BUT. luckily there already is a really fun tp word with a lot of fairly distinct syllables in it: kijetesantakalu!

so we just add one syllable of kijetesantakalu after every digit of a number? yes! but theres once again a but! we need to either go through the word kinda in reverse order or [much more fun option!]

reverse the order of the digits! (i struggle to explain why i think this is nessecary soo.. trust me bro?). my native language german already does this (at least for double digit numbers) so thats proof enough this makes sense. okay thats a lot of abstract rambling so heres some examples:

"53" (fifsy three)

san-ki luka-je

"3514" (thirsy five nif ten)

po-ki wan-je luka-te san-sa

(i shorten san to sa to avoid ambiguity)

"142513" (ten unexian dozen five nif nine)

san-ki wan-je luka-te tu-sa po-ta wan-ka

cons:

-unnessecarily complicated and therefore against the spirit of tp

-requires knowledge of base six

-will not be widely used so youd need to link this post everytime you use it.

-not actually useful

-you could just say the digits in order

pros:

-fun :33

-seximal

-has kijetesantakalu in it

-anything is better than the current systems

-suprisingly good at large numbers (works until 6^8-1 (dec) and would be fairly easy to extend)

[galacticscrotum]

Hello!

I don’t really like introducing myself.

I get stressed out trying to capture the essence of who I am in a reasonable amount of words. I’m far too complex for that. Not in a “I’m so complicated and cool and mysterious” way, but more of a “I literally don’t even fully have a grasp on my own existence” way.

So instead of trying to summarize my personality, I’ll just list some random things I’d like you to know if you follow me :) (If it’s too long to read, I put key info in bold)

My name is Em, it’s nice to meet you!

I’ve rotated around the sun 22 times. No wonder I’m dizzy.

I am autistic and have ADHD and CPTSD. All three conditions are intrinsically linked for me, I cannot fully relate to any of the conditions on their own without the other two.

I have several symptoms of BPD (abandonment issues go brrrrr)

I never want to speak over people with higher support needs so please (respectfully) tell me if something I say is incorrect or offensive.

Autism and neurodivergence are huge special interests of mine! (Comorbidities hellooo)

I have a ridiculous and sarcastic sense of humor. I’m a goose that is rather silly.

Communicating requires a lot of my energy, so I don’t like any criticism on how I do it, like how often I punctuate or what words I use. I’m doing my best to get my thoughts from my internal realm to the outside world.

I love to learn about anarchy and communism. Even more, I love learning about and imagining better ways of life outside of any common ideologies.

I am fucking queer as fucking shit.

My pronouns are they/them. she/he are okay too

I edit this post a lot.

I love you and I want to be your friend :)

I use :) a lot and I will not stop :)

I love The Sims 4! (I have three of the expansion packs, city living, cottage living, and cats and dogs, and I do use cheats, and I have wicked whims because tiddies)

I am half Slavic/Balkan and that’s important to me because I was disconnected and removed from my culture when I was 5. (Other half is boring western European white American). Began to reconnect with my culture when I turned 18.

Learning languages is sooo fun for me! Def a big special interest. I’m semi-fluent in Spanish, and have little knowledge of: Portuguese, Mandarin, Serbian, Russian, Hungarian, toki pona (this one is so fucking cool to me).

I love music and sharing recommendations! I used to play several instruments including viola, violin, cello, guitar, and piano. Viola is forever my main instrument. Haven’t played in a while though.

Music genres I like: reggaeton, Afrobeats, house/techno/EDM, 2000-2010s pop, Serbian folk/pop, Mexican/Chicano rap, Spanish guitar, punk rock, Falling in Reverse (genre of its own tbh).

I’m very interested in the origins of humanity, early human migration, language evolution, and related topics.

I like to sew and embroider :)

I’m not religious. I have been finding my own spirituality with Mother Earth and I love it. I like learning about others’ beliefs. I don’t care what your religion is, I’ll accept you as long as you’re not in my DNI list :)

As a queer, neurodivergent, mentally ill person, I will reclaim slurs if I choose to. If that offends you, block me. I’m not here to cater to your sensitivities, I’m here to freely express myself. The language is not being used towards you, you’re just being a cop.

Anonymous asks are now OFF because y’all can’t fucking behave 🙄

DNI: under 18, homophobes, transphobes, racists, bigots, bootlickers, ableists, misogynists, porn blogs, general assholes (I LOVE BLOCKING YOU BITCHES!!!!)

If you’re under 18 and want to interact just DNI with any of my posts labeled nsfw/mdni.

Thanks for reading :) Always open to questions! And memes. The more absurd the better.

[suitov]

Hello! Today I was thinking a little about the super-minimalist constructed language toki pona, as well as about your wonderful fic Izuru Kamukura’s Cuddly Toy, and I had the sudden thought of trying to translate it. The result would be something really niche, but the more I considered it the more I realized it might actually fit well with Izuru’s laconic narration. So I wanted to ask your permission to give translating it a try just for fun, and possibly to post it on Ao3 if I’m happy with the result.

Maybe the title could be ijo puwa pi lon Isulu—Izuru’s fluffy thing. puwa, fluff or softness, is a rarer word that doesn’t come from the original 120, but it seems utterly essential here. soweli puwa has been used to refer to a stuffed animal, which Dandelion is not, so instead maybe he’s ijo, a thing or entity. Names in toki pona consist of a standard noun followed by a capitalized modifier (this modifier is usually based on the person’s name then altered to fit the toki pona alphabet)—the standard head noun is usually jan, meaning person or human, but you also see people occasionally deciding on different head nouns for their own names, such as soweli for a therian or an animal character. Because Izuru likes to refer to himself (and Dandelion) apart from humans, I figured I could also go with something like lon Isulu, lon meaning existence. Izuru is who exists now, and Izuru is himself, nothing more or less.

For Dandelion, I have other thoughts! First of all, to disguise Dandelion’s true identity in the narration, Izuru could use a different unusual head noun, like the word puwa itself. He is a Fluffy. Second, for the name Dandelion itself, there are a few ways it could go:

• something new derived from toki pona words themselves without necessarily a head noun at all, because the point of the nicknames is that concepts are faster than thinking in terms of the sound of a name. Downside: in toki pona, either too vague or too bulky. kasi kon?

• puwa Talasakan from Taraxacum, since as a scientific name it’s more common cross-linguistically.

• puwa Tanpopo from Japanese tanpopo, which sounds cute and wouldn’t even receive alteration.

• puwa Tantelijan from plain old dandelion, probably the most obvious answer—but it only became my very favorite once I realized I could tweak the vowels a little to make it into a stealthy little pun. li jan means “is a person”.

I’m sorry if I rambled a little more than expected; I’ve been enraptured by silly translation stuff lately.

I love this! Especially the pun. :) Have my blessing to play with it and post anything you're happy with. 🩵

(Come to think of it, I have no idea how translators will cope with the sonnet in the sequel, but let's worry about getting that finished first...)

[onelittlefoxen]

You know, ever since learning toki pona I’ve had an intense desire to learn more languages, but it’s a problem because there’s TOO MANY THAT IM INTERESTED IN!!! It’s like, I want to learn ASL, cause you know how cool that would be? Talking without using any voice? And it would be so helpful for scuba diving if people I know also learned it. But I also want to learn Spanish, cause it’s genuinely such a prominent language in the US and it’d be so helpful to know. But then I ALSO kinda want to learn Japanese? And I don’t even know if that desire came from watching anime or something completely different. AND THEN I ALSO kinda want to learn Swedish, just for fun? And, ooh, how about we throw a little Hawaiian in there too, for fun, like why not?

There’s so MANY. SO MANY THINGS I COULD LEARN! Too many. So for now I’ve just stuck with toki pona. This is not something I would have thought I’d be thinking about several years ago

[hbmmaster]

Judging from just this one song (I can't beat Air Man! for those reading in the after more songs have been revealed or in case another song has been revealed that I missed), gotta say disambiguation in parentheses is shaping up to be a decent album

Sidenote, as my knowledge of Mega Man is next to none I have to ask, why is this song half English and half toki pona? What is that a reference to?

great question!

my translation of airman ga taosenai is inspired by another, much older english translation of the song (you can find it pretty easily if you look. it's a pretty popular version), which with the benefit of many years of hindsight I can safely say is. not a great translation.

it's like, an accurate translation, it does a good job taking the line-by-line meanings of the japanese lyrics and turning them into english lyrics that fit the melody, but like. I could do better. this is a song about someone having a hard time playing mega man 2, it doesn't feel right for them to say things like "The Item Number Two". where's the Gamer Rage in these lyrics?

the toki pona section is because I already demonstrated what the english lyrics for that part would be (the last chorus is just the same as the first chorus again) and wanted to do something else. a full toki pona translation would be hard (maybe someone else can extend my translation of the chorus into a full thing? that would be fun) but I knew the chorus at least had some potential. there's something about the phonoaesthetic of the word tatsumaki that doesn't feel quite as cool when translated as "tornado", but kon pi tawa sike has a very promising mouthfeel to it

[whimsy-of-the-stars]

whimsy-of-the-stars: a writeblr re-re-intro!

hey guys, it’s been a minute! I’m whimsy-of-the-stars, and since my main projects have kinda shifted around, I thought it would be a good time to update my intro! ngl it’s a pretty inopportune time to do a re-intro, since I’m close to the end of one draft and planning two more… it’s just overdue!

some info about me:

I’m gonna start college in the fall majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing! :D

learning languages is a passion of mine! I’m focusing on Spanish right now but I’ve dabbled in both Esperanto and Toki Pona (yeah I’m a nerd!)

I’m a video essay enjoyer and possibly maker, eventually

fiction podcasts and actual plays slap???

I have “I want to do too many things” disease and want to try making stories in many different mediums!

ttrpgs are really cool but I have yet to play them with other people! does that stop me from trying to make games… no

elements I like to write: Found family! Chosen ones (+ the subversion of)! Big Emotion™️! Organized crime (idk why it doesn’t leave me alone)! Gay people, of course!

genres I like to write (YA and middle grade): high fantasy, low fantasy, different -punk stuff, sci fi maybe, superheroes, fairy-tale esque, romance, coming of age

I also write poetry! You can find it in this tag: whimsy of the poetry

ALSO, I did DraftDash in January 2024, which was fun but I did end up petering out halfway thru. Follow my journey in the tag draftdash!

ok, now onto wips!

I am in a weird stage with a lot of my wips, but a re-intro was overdue so I decided to do it anyway!

wips I am currently writing:

apocalypse story!

status: first draft, 24k (almost done with part 1)

the basics: mg/ya apocalyptic + queer ?coming of age? story and its sequel, except they’re both short so they’re melded into one two-part book! it’s told thru diary entries with lots of extra ephemera glued in! part 1 of 2 is ALMOST done but I’m not inspired to finish it rn! ! I’m not gonna continue with part 2 right after, though, since I still need to plan it!

summary: stressed-out eighth/grader Allison goes to her old hideout in the forest to decompress, but one thing leads to another and she can’t find her way back home. the forest is seemingly ever-expanding, ever-changing, and even when she finds her friends who’ve come to rescue her, they still have to face the actual, real life botanical apocalypse that’s becoming more and more of an issue for the outside world. can they find their way home alive and well? and if they do get home, what will their home city even look like?

extras: fun fact I started this in April 2023 for camp nano and it has taken me this long to write the next 10k words! Also the main character is a bit of a self-insert, but of the person I was in lockdown in 2020!

um. That’s it for wips I’m currently writing rn lol

wips I am “revitalizing”:

(aka taking old drafts/concepts and turning them nice and new!)

Both of these have existed in different-ish iterations for years, however I am currently in the weird process of developing both of these into all-new things from an existing groundwork! Neither of them currently have “statuses” because it’s hard to explain where exactly I am right now!

heist story!

the basics: ya fantasy heist novel (maybe eventually a trilogy?) set in a faerie world that rapidly advanced not too long ago into a dieselpunk/decopunk society rife with corruption and crime!

summary: Logical and inquisitive teen Calliope is relatively normal. Her offbeat parents, however, have raised her in a house full of strange curios and old tomes of faery stories. But only when she starts to exhibit unwieldy shadow magic, and her parents invite a prim woman she’s never met before into their home do things really start to get strange. The woman whisks Calliope away through one of the aforementioned curios to a noir hubworld where ancient faerie bloodlines and newfangled magitech collide. Why? To take part in a high-stakes heist with a surprising trio of other teens who want nothing more than to take down the crime boss who runs their town.

extras: this one’s a weird one imo. it’s one of the oldest wips that I am still working on, tho this one had a break of about 3 years!!! also I originally wrote it in hot pink comic sans XD

new superhero story!

(I am also revitalizing this one, but it’s in a way less put-together state! not much to say yet lol!) (also it’s not very new I just call it that)

it’s a ya superhero thing that features teenage (often queer) antiheroes trying to balance their heroic + civilian identities!

featuring: the shittiest entertainment/hero management company you’ve ever seen, shared trauma, gray morality, two different rock bands, and heroes that are at once government agents, influencers, and corporate concoctions!

considering making a “help me name my characters” post because i desperately have to name/rename like 3/4 of all of these characters!!!

more ideas I have bouncing around:

(lightning round!)

old ya romance wip i need to revitalize about two teens enter a competition to make a demo album and end up falling in love in the process (also they’re lesbians XD)

offbeat, ya supernatural + historical fantasy about a girl university student who is buried alive, and upon getting rescued, starts to transform into a strange underworld creature. also features a cute gravedigger :D

a musical about standardized testing (yeah lol) that’s goofy and queer and explores how seniors + juniors are so freaking stressed out all the time lol

that’s all folks! :D

[transgenderer]

Toki Pona seems pretty cool but the words are too long imo. Like you recently had a post about how to say "cow" and the resulting compound was a sentence of its own. It's 120 words in the language; find five vowels and 24 consonants (one can be "no consonant") and you can have everything in one syllable. Quicker! More efficient! Wasted opportunity imo.

thats just ithkuil! ithkuil is fun but basically unspeakable. which is less cool. i do think its weird that toki pona has three syllable words though, when its nowhere near exhausting its budget of 2 syllable words. perhaps we need...toki pona pona

[glazeliights]

Danganronpa in toki pona, part 2: talents

if you havent read the first part go do that

toki!

the first post only focused on transliterating, but now were getting into actual translation territory. that means I get to explain toki pona words and grammar. the main two words Ill be using here are ken (ability, skill (but also possibility)) and wawa (power). then there is of course jan (person) to talk about the actual students. for convenience, and to keep with the toki pona spirit, I will try my best to keep phrases short and only use up to one pi.

speaking of which

what the hell is pi?

this is one of the aspects of the language that is most difficult for new learners to grasp because theres really nothing like this in english. so, in toki pona you cant really combine multiple words into one (a process called agglutination, something you might know from jokes about how long german words can get) instead, you have one main word that you attach modifiers to (names, by the way, are always modifiers in toki pona, which is why they need a head noun). so a phrase X Y can be interpreted as "X exhibiting qualities of Y, Y-ish X, X of Y, Y's X", stuff like that.

but things get ambiguous when you have three words. "mute" means many, a lot, etc, but its also used to mean "very". so if you read something like jan pona mute, how are you supposed to know whether its "many good people" or a "very good person"? this is where pi comes in. pi regroups modifiers, and its easiest to show this with brackets. if you do not use pi, modifiers apply to all the words before them. so jan pona mute is ((jan pona) mute), many good people. jan pi pona mute, however, is (jan (pona mute)), a very good person. this is a very important concept to understand in toki pona.

a note about translation & interpretation

words in toki pona dont really correspond 1:1 to any specific word. rather, they cover a range of meaning that can be intepreted in various ways depending on context. akesi Lipamanka calls these ranges "semantic spaces" and has started writing a dictionary based on them. this is sort of like calling something a building and not specifying whether you mean a house, a school, a church, a shopping mall, etc. if its obvious from context, then you dont need to specify. the only difference is that toki pona words generally have broader ranges than english words. just know that for any translation and backtranslation I give, theres a lot of other ways someone could read them.

also, ideally all of the talents would actually be translated into full introductory sentences, both because its more pona and because, again, itd provide some neat opportunities for distinction between characters, especially ones who share a talent. but whenever I need to refer to their talents in a short-form way, these phrases will have to do.

so, aside from individual pieces of vocab, theres not much else to know. I will explain everything else as I go along.

- - -

talentless - jan ken ala (not skilled-person, non-ultimate) or jan pi ken ala (unskilled person, someone with no skills) Im sure theres something fun to be done with the subtle difference between these

ultimate ??? - jan pi ken ???

- - -

ultimate lucky student - jan wawa pi ken pona ("powerful good-possibilites person", luck is.. difficult to translate, but I feel like ken pona is alright at being both concise and clear enough in meaning. its also a wawa cause yknow. luck isnt really a skill)

ultimate detective - jan ken pi kama sona ("skilled knowledge-aquiring person", yeah, no notes here. after all what is a detective if not one who figures out information?)

ultimate affluent progeny - jan wawa pi mani mute ("powerful rich person", I didnt really lean into the heir aspect here sorry. I also do not really care about this guy so eh)

ultimate writer - jan ken pi toki musi ("skilled entertaining-words person", musi is a rather broad category so I think it fits for stories)

ultimate murderous fiend - jan moli ken ("skilled death-person", pretty self explanatory)

ultimate pop sensation - jan ken pi kalama musi ("skilled fun-sounds person", so I really wanted to make sure I distinguished the music-based talents cause technically you could just reduce all of them to kalama. kalama musi is a pretty widely used and generic phrase for music, which imo fits well for pop)

ultimate baseball player - jan ken pi tawa sike ("skilled ball-movement/circular movement person", okay so. I was originally going to talk about how I wouldnt be able to disambiguate the two ball sport related talents bc like. theyre both about moving balls, sike tawa. but then I had the absolute genius idea to use tawa sike instead since it can refer to both the movement of the baseball itself and the circular movement of running around the bases)

ultimate programmer - jan ken pi ilo nanpa ("skilled computer person", ilo nanpa is a fairly common way of referring to electronic devices so. yeah)

ultimate biker gang leader - jan wawa pi lawa kulupu ("powerful group-leadership person" uhhgh sorry I dont really know how to put the kon of "biker gang" into an short phrase. this is an example of why full sentences to describe talents would probably be more apt)

ultimate moral compass - jan wawa pi nasin pona ("powerful good-rules person" nasin can be interpreted as a lot of things, but fundamentally it is some sort of way one might follow, either physical like a path or metaphorical like rules (fun fact: in the context of languages, its often used to mean grammar. people who speak toki pona in a way that deviates from common usage generally call this their personal nasin)

ultimate fanfic creator - jan ken pi sitelen musi ("skilled entertaining-pictures person", I think thats a reasonable translation of comics? plus sitelen can also refer to writing so it works in two ways)

ultimate gambler - jan wawa pi musi mani ("powerful money-games person", also a luck-based talent, therefore a wawa. I dont think this one needs much explanation)

ultimate martial artist - jan wawa ken ("skilled strong person", wawa can also mean physical strength so. I really wanted her to be a jan wawa and a jan ken, to emphasize her strength and add to her initial intimidation factor)

ultimate swimmer - jan ken pi tawa telo/kala ("skilled water-movement/fishlike movement person" both of those are fairly uncontroversial ways to describe swimmimg. no notes here)

ultimate clairvoyant - jan wawa pi sona kama/jan sona pi tenpo kama ("powerful incoming-knowledge person/"future knowledge-person", uouuugh. this is one of the ones that gave me the most trouble. clairvoyance is something thats real fucking difficult to put into a quick and snappy phrase. moreover, I think the second phrase is more accurate but it doesnt include wawa which would set him apart from other ultimates for basically no reason? like mayybe I could say jan wawa pi tenpo kama but "future powers" is a bit too vague imo :/)

ultimate soldier - jan utala ken ("skilled battle person", no notes here)

ultimate fashionista - jan ken pi len pona ("skilled good-clothes person", theres a lot of ways you could go about translating fashion, but I think this one suffices. do not even ask me to try and translate ultimate analyst into a simple phrase I will literally die)

- - -

ultimate everything - jan pi ken ale ("all-abilities person", fitting + contrasts nicely with jan pi ken ala)

ultimate gamer - jan musi ken ("skilled games person", musi refers to anything related to entertainment, and its often used on its own to say game so. yeah)

ultimate imposter - jan ken pi jan ante ("skilled other-people person", again, I think this one especially suffers from not being in full sentences, but I think its still accurate. their talent is (being) other people)

ultimate animator - jan ken pi sitelen tawa ("skilled moving-pictures person", sitelen tawa is a fairly common & uncontroversial translation of movies/videos/animations so yeah)

ultimate chef - jan moku ken ("skilled food person", I really really dont think toki pona is built to get across the tiny little nuance cook vs chef so I guess thats staying out of the tp translation? then again I dont think Ill translate anything with teruteru in it because I dont really like him at all)

ultimate photographer - jan ken pi ilo sitelen ("skilled picture-tool person", no notes)

ultimate swordswoman - jan ken pi ilo utala ("skilled fighting-tool person", no notes)

ultimate yakuza - jan wawa pi kulupu Jakusa ("powerful Yakuza-group person", Im gonna say it outright, any attempts to describe the yakuza in this tiny little phrase turned out reductive and Bad. you really cant put the intricacies of organized crime into a two word toki pona phrase. it does feel kind of like cheating to simply tokiponize the word but the other options all suck ass. the actual description will simply have to be contained in fuyuhikos introduction, where I can use full sentences)

ultimate musician - jan ken pi kalama wawa ("skilled loud-sound person", like I said, I wanted to differentiate the kalama-based talents, and if theres one thing ibukis music is, its loud)

ultimate traditional dancer - jan ken pi tawa musi ("skilled entertaining-movement person", yeah, fairly normal way to say dancing. thats it)

ultimate nurse - jan ken pi pona sijelo ("skilled body-wellness person", if youre partial to nimi ku suli, you could also replace pona sijelo with misikeke ("medicine"), though due to the changed modifier amount the whole thing would then be jan misikeke ken)

ultimate gymnast - jan ken pi tawa mute ("skilled lots-of-movement person", no notes)

ultimate team manager - jan ken pi pona kulupu ("skilled group-wellness person", no notes)

ultimate breeder - jan ken pi soweli mute ("skilled many-animals person", while calling his talent unpa soweli might be more accurate to him being a breeder, I really really didnt want to call him the animal sex guy)

ultimate princess - jan lawa ken ("skilled leader", so, I generally consider leadership to be a wawa rather than a ken, however, I also wanted a way to contrast her talent w kokichis, and I think wawa is more capable of having sinister undertones than ken. I mean think about it, between "skilled leader" and "powerful leader", who sounds more menacing?)

ultimate mechanic - jan ken pi pona ilo ("skilled machine-wellness person", no notes)

- - -

ultimate pianist - jan ken pi ilo kalama ("skilled instrument (sound-tool) person", since theres no other talent that specifically mentions an instrument theres no need to specifically describe a piano)

ultimate child caregiver - jan awen ken pi jan sin ("skilled child (new/young-person) protection person, so I wasnt quite sure how to convey taking care of someone without using too many words, but I think awen comes close enough? because youre keeping them safe and happy? I dunno. though I do like that awen doesnt necessarily imply that maki would be nice to them, which I think could work in her favor?)

ultimate assassin - jan ken pi moli len ("skilled hidden-death person", no notes)

ultimate astronaut - jan ken pi tawa mun ("skilled star-travel person", no notes)

ultimate.. leader - jan lawa wawa ("powerful leader", like I said earlier, I think this makes him sound kind of ominous which fits the way he presents himself over the course of the game)

ultimate adventurer - jan ken pi tawa musi ("skilled? entertaining-travel person", because what is an adventure if not an exciting journey. also Im not sure how going on adventures is necessarily a skill but its even less of a wawa, so)

ultimate tennis player - jan ken pi sike tawa ("skilled moving-ball person", having tawa sike vs sike tawa as disambiguation between this and baseball is like, really flimsy but its better than nothing so Im keeping it)

ultimate maid - jan ken pi pali mute ("skilled many-jobs person", yeah, I think this pretty much gets across her Mädchen für Alles (lit. "girl for everything", a person whos there to help with anything and everything when someone needs them) energy)

ultimate magician - jan ken pi wawa musi (calls herself jan usawi wawa) ("skilled entertaining-powers person/powerful magic person", so. usawi is one of them newfangled words that barely anyone uses but its special to me bc jan Usawi makes some damn good music. also I read somewhere that in the japanese version himiko actually speaks in a distinct dialect? therefore I think itd be kind of cool for her to use nimisin that no one else does)

ultimate neo-aikido master - jan ken pi tawa wawa/tawa Akito ("skilled powerful-movement/Aikido-movement person", uhh this one could go either way. tawa wawa is more descriptive but tawa Akito is clearer abt the fact that its aikido specifically? then again it always feels a bit like cheating to just tokiponize. what ever)

ultimate artist - jan ken pi kiwen sitelen ("skilled artful-stone(or other hard material) person", shes a sculptor. thats her talent. why did they just translate it as generic artist SHES A SCULPTOR. shaking the localization by the neck)

ultimate anthropologist - jan ken pi sona jan ("skilled people-knowledge person", no notes on the talent itself but I heard this guy talks in a sort of archaic way. therefore Id like to propose that he uses majuna bc its a pre-pu (therefore old) word and the word itself means ancient. I think it would be funny if that was a word he used, and perhaps also limited to no usage of ku words? much to think about)

ultimate inventor - jan ken pi ilo sin ("skilled new-tools/machines person", no notes)

ultimate entomologist - jan ken pi sona pipi ("skilled bug-knowledge person", no notes)

ultimate robot - jan ilo wawa ("powerful machine-person", as mentioned in the names post I think theres some interesting stuff to be done with people referring to him differently, especially kokichi)

ultimate cosplayer - jan ken pi len ante ("skilled different-clothes person", so obviously cosplaying is more than just clothes, however it works well enough here  + len can also mean cover in a metaphorical sense, like hidden things and secrets. which works rather well I think)

[ranboo5]

reminds me of people saying wilbur (lovejoy) it's like its their last names. just like tumblr url

Yeah that I think is fun honestly like . Okay to compare it to a nimisin in post

FUCK I JUST ACCIDENTALLY DELETED A WHOLE PARAGRAPH FUCK MY LIFE. Whatever

Anyway toki pona, the gibberish I've been intermittently posting in, is a philosophical experiment of a conlang where, due to a restricted vocabulary and simple but restricted grammar, invoking any concept is an exercise in (as described by unofficial spokesperson/Renaissance jan/famous variety YouTuber jan Misali) not knowing what the "word for it" is but describing what it is in essential, contextual terms. It's a context-dependent ad-hoc descriptive process and it can be unwieldy fuzzy and sometimes bad for communication in novel ways sure but it's actually much more powerful and capable than people expect – I would say that toki pona doesn't have /more/ things it struggles to communicate than a natlang like English does, it just struggles with different ones – and many things that are hard to comprehensively express in English are easier to invoke in toki pona!

But yeah sometimes it can be hard. So sometimes ppl will introduce nimi sin, literally "new words" (loaned into English as "nimisin"), to describe some things.

These are. Debatable in value. I use "powe" (a nimisin) several times in the meta bc it affords me a greater agility w/ which to discuss the concept of fiction – I'm not sure if this is a decision I'll stand by as I get better expressing things in toki pona, but for now it seems to be good for my uses there

There are some nimisin though that are less convincing imo – "isipin", "thought," is the main one I wanted 2 compare this whole thing to

I really don't like "isipin." In toki pona there is no simple way to express the concept of thinking – and if you try to describe it that's because you aren't actually talking about things that necessarily belong in the same semantic grouping! Trying to analyze what you mean when you say "thinking" is really interesting – the different phrases people can come up with on that front are often more useful than just "thinking"!

"pilin" for gut feelings "mi la" for when smth is in your opinion "nasin mi" for moral codes "lukin" for examination "alasa sona" for investigation or exploration "kama sona" for learning "toki insa" for internal monologue "toki lawa" "lawa pilin" "Pali sona" and so much more – it communicates and helps you acknowledge what angle you're actually coming at something from. It's really interesting and a great thought exercise

"isipin" eliminates that exercise. You just say "isipin" and you skip over identifying and communicating what kind of consideration you're talking about, yk?

And that's how I feel about "content" and "content creator," I think, having evaluated it. We use these phrases as shorthand for... what, at this point? What are you talking about when you say "content"? Do you mean to say "art?" "Entertainment"? "Comedy"? "Presentation"? "Simulacra of companionship"? Do you mean a specific work of theirs? What do you actually like about things? And like ... at risk of somehow sounding even more pretentious than I already have, I think that's worth considering sometimes. What do you actually come here for? "Content" describes nothing. "This game contains scenes." And that can be useful as a term sometimes, sure, but like... idk . Actually citing what people do or perform is cool I think . And not to say that's not also a shorthand it v much is but like . Idk maybe we could all do to choose what shorthand we use more deliberately