by Wayfarer

Created on: November 16, 2008

Toki Pona

What do you do once you have mastered the world's major languages? What do you do when you have travelled widely, experienced a vast array of cultures and are looking for a way to weave all these experiences together?

Creating a whole knew language might not be the first option that springs to mind for most of us, but that is exactly what linguist, translator and world traveller Elen Kisa did! And more ...

Since the times of legend humanity has been seperated by language rather than united through it. In the story of The Tower Of Babel a united mankind became powerful enough to reach for Heaven. Together they aspired to a greatness reserved only for God. So, he brought their tower crashing down and scattered the builders across the face of the earth, confusing their tongues for good measure.

The lack of understanding different languages brought with them engendered suspicion, isolationism, fear, and that great divider of peoples, war!

Lacking a world-wide language people see differences first, but those unusual, uncomfortable words only disguise the fact that men and women everywhere have the same dreams, the same fears and the same hopes.

Reuniting the tongues has been tried and has achieved a limited success. L.L. Zamenhof had high ideals in mind when he created Esperanto as a second language for the whole world. Esperanto, after all, means, "one who hopes" and was Zamendorf's pseudonym.

Elen Kisa aims to do more with her created language, though. Toki Pona literally means, "good language," and was created to emphasise the good; to focus the speaker's mind on the good aspects of life, the world and themselves.

As with anything designed for mass use, Toki Pona is incredibly simple. It is estimated that the English language has a vocabulary of around 500,000 words, not including a similar number of technical and scientific terms also in use. That's around a million words in total and English hasn't finished growing! Toki Pona has 118 words. Ask any schoolchild, world traveller, or Kalahari bushman which he or she would prefer to learn.

With such a limited vocabulary (and fourteen basic sounds) much of spoken Toki Pona consists of accumulated terms (a technique common in the German language.) "Unnessesary" terms such as "alcohol" and "geology" become "crazy water" and "earth knowledge."

The words that make up the Toki Pona language concentrate on basic necessities people the world over have in common. In formulating the language Elen Kisa imagined two strangers

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