#specifically-English idiomata

[darael]

Hello hello! I saw you said something about Toki Pona being built on a poisonous philosophy and I was wondering if you could explain what you mean? You don't have to of course but I don't know anything about Toki Pona and the tag caught my interest. Have a nice day!

Okay so some context, both for you since you say you don't know anything about it and for my followers:

Toki Pona is a constructed language. It was originally designed to have a grand total of 120 words, and while the current word-count depends how you count them and who you ask, it's still below 150, the most common count of "essential" ones being 137. The creator, Sonja Lang, describes it as "an attempt to understand the meaning of life in 120 words".

As you can probably imagine, having only 137 words means each word has to do a lot of work — has to carry a lot of possible meanings. There are only five colour words (black, white, red, yellow, and bluegreen). There are only five number words (none/zero, one, two, many, all/infinite/manymany), and some of them also carry meanings that in English are not numbers (for example, the word for none or zero is also the word for not, and the word for all is also the word for life). One word means all kinds of grains, and also bread. You get the idea. This is, explicitly, not ambiguity but a declaration that each of these words represents a single underlying concept that can be translated into English in multiple ways. It's a claim that "life" and "everything" and "all of them" are in some way the same concept, and therefore get one word. Put a pin in that; we'll come back to it later.

Unfortunately, the underlying philosophy of Toki Pona is, as the word-count might suggest, minimalism. Minimalism as an ideology for life already had some serious issues in my book, notably in that the common version of it that leads to empty white rooms with one or two objects as "accents" is classist as all get out. It also encourages disposability culture, which ties into that — to live a "minimalist" life in that sense you have to (for example) not keep a jar of pens on your desk, because you can buy a disposable one when you need it so you shouldn't clutter your space with them when you don't. But that's just an association, not what can be poisonous about Toki Pona.

The name "Toki Pona" literally translates to "the language of good", but also "simple speech". The word "pona" represents all facets of goodness and simplicity. In Toki Pona, "simple" and "good" and indeed "useful" and "peace" are the same concept. "Okay," you might ask, "what's so bad about that?" I'll tell you what's so bad about it: in the same way, their antitheses are declared to be the same concept. Complexity (and all the shades of meaning it can give the world, all the understanding we can derive from it) is declared to be ontologically not just bad, but the same thing as badness. Specifically, that word — "ike" — is defined in the translation dictionary as "bad, negative; non-essential, irrelevant".

This attitude, in my experience, results in Toki Pona enthusiasts being very convinced that Toki Pona is inherently correct, and that anything that's difficult to express in that language wasn't worth expressing anyway. It's a combination of intellectual elitism with anti-intellectualism. The former manifests as an attitude that anyone who can't express what they want to say in a way the Toki Pona speaker deems "simple" (usually meaning "easily translated to Toki Pona") is somehow inadequate, and the latter as the idea that any concept not easily translated must not be worth dealing with.

This was kinda rambly but I hope it gave you a general idea of why, while I find it interesting as an experiment and an intellectual exercise, I despise Toki Pona as a philosophy.