Toki Pona Totally Explained

Everything about Toki Pona totally explained

Toki Pona is a constructed language first published online in mid-2001. It was designed by Canadian translator and linguist Sonja Elen Kisa of Toronto.
Toki Pona is a minimal language. Like a pidgin, it focuses on simple concepts and elements that are relatively universal among cultures. Kisa designed Toki Pona to express maximal meaning with minimal complexity. The language has 14 phonemes and 120 root words. It isn't designed as an international auxiliary language but is instead inspired by Taoist philosophy, among other things.
The language is designed to shape the thought processes of its users, in the style of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This goal, together with Toki Pona's deliberately restricted vocabulary, have led some to feel that the language, whose name literally means "simple language", "good language", or "goodspeak", resembles George Orwell's fictional language Newspeak.

Writing system

Kisa officially used letters of the Latin alphabet to represent the language, with the values they represent in the : p, t, k, s, m, n, l, j, w, a, e, i, o, and u. (That is, j sounds like English y, and the vowels are like Spanish.)
Capital letters are only used for personal and place names (see below), not for the first word of a sentence. That is, they mark foreign words, never the 120 Toki Pona roots. an initial vowel may be optionally proceeded by a glottal stop. There are no diphthongs or long vowels, no consonant clusters, and no tone.

Consonants	a href=http://labial_consonant.totallyexplained.com title="labial consonant - Totally Explained">Labial	Coronal	Dorsal
Nasal	m	n
Plosive	p	t	k
Fricative		s
Approximant	w	l	j

Distribution

The statistic vowel spread is fairly typical cross-linguistically. Counting each root once, 32% of vowels are /a/, 25% /i/, a bit over 15% each /e/ and /o/, and 10% are /u/. 20% of roots are vowel initial. The usage frequency in a 10kB sample of texts,(External Link

) was slightly more skewed: 34% /a/, 30% /i/, 15% each /e/ and /o/, and 6% /u/.
Of the syllable-initial consonants, /l/ is the most common, at 20% total; /k, s, p/ are over 10%, then the nasals /m, n/ (not counting final N), with the least common, at little more than 5% each, being /t, w, j/.
The high frequency of /l/ and low frequency of /t/ are somewhat unusual among the world's languages. The fact that /l/ occurs in the grammatical particles la, li, ala suggests that its percentage would be even higher in texts; the text-based stats cited above didn't specifically consider initial consonants, but indicate that /l/ was about 25%, while /t/ doubled its frequency to just over 10%. (/k/, /t/, /m/, /s/, /p/, respectively, ranged over 12% to 9% each, with /n/ unknown, and the semivowels /j/ and /w/ again coming in last at 7% each.)

Syllable structure

All syllables are of the form (optional consonant) + vowel + (optional final nasal): that is, V, CV, VN, CVN. As in most languages, CV is the most common syllable type, at 75% (counting each root once). V and CVN syllables are each around 10%, while only 5 words have VN syllables (for 2% of syllables). In both the dictionary and in texts, the ratio of consonant to vowel is almost exactly one-to-one.
Most roots (70%) are disyllabic; about 20% are monosyllables and 10% trisyllables. This is a common distribution, and similar to Polynesian.

Phonotactics

The following sequences are not allowed: */ji, wu, wo, ti/, nor may a final nasal occur before /m/ or /n/ in the same root. though in roots like ijo (from Esperanto io) and suwi (ultimately from English sweet), that might be considered an orthographic convention, with the effect that glottal stop only marks word boundaries. (The sequences /ij/ and /uw/ are no more easily distinguished from simple /i/ and /u/ than the banned */ji/ and */wu/ are.)

Allophony

The nasal at the end of a syllable can be pronounced as any nasal consonant, though it's normally assimilated to the following consonant. That is, it typically occurs as an [n] before /t/ or /s/, as an [m] before /p/, as an [ŋ] before /k/, and as an [ɲ] before /j/.
   Because of its small phoneme inventory, Toki Pona allows for quite a lot of allophonic variation. For example, /p t k/ may be pronounced [bd ɡ] as well as [pt k], /s/ as [z] or [ʃ] as well as [s], /l/ as [ɾ] as well as [l], and vowels may be either long or short. e precedes the direct object; direct object phrases precede prepositional phrases in the predicate; la separates complex adverbs or subclauses from the main sentence.
   The language is simple enough that its syntax can be expressed in ten rules and two exceptions: ť [brackets] enclose optional elements;

   *asterisks mark elements which may be repeated

Syntactic rules ť 1. A sentence may be

   :(a) an interjection ť :(b) of the form [sub-clause] [vocative] subject plus predicate

   :Exception: ť :*If a vocative is used, a subject isn't required

(The interjection may be a, ala, ike, jaki, mu, o, pakala, pona, or toki.) ť 2. A sub-clause may be

   :(a) [taso] sentence la, or ť :(b) [taso] noun phrase la

   3. A vocative is of the form ť :[nounphrase] o

   4. A subject is of the form ť :noun phrase li

   :Exception: ť :*If the subject is mi or sina, no li follows. (li does follow mi mute etc.)

   5. A predicate may be ť :(a) simple noun phrase [prepositionalphrase]*, or

   :(b) verb phrase [prepositionalphrase], or ť :(c) predicate conjunction predicate (that is, a compound predicate)

(The conjunction may be anu or li.) ť 6. A noun phrase may be

   :(a) noun [modifier]*, or ť :(b) simple noun phrase pi noun plus modifier*, or

   :(c) noun phrase conjunction noun phrase (that is, a compound noun phrase) (The conjunction may be anu or en. A 'simple' noun phrase is one which doesn't have a conjunction.) ť 7. A prepositional phrase is of the form

   :preposition plus noun phrase ť 8. A verb phrase may be

   :(a) verbal ť :(b) modal plus verbal

   :(c) verbal_x ala verbal_x (both verbals are the same) ť :(d) modal_x ala modal_x plus verbal (both modals are the same)

(The modal may be kama, ken, or wile.) ť 9 A verbal may be

   :(a) verb [modifier]* (this is an intransitive verb) ť :(b) verb [modifier]* plus a direct object* (this is a transitive verb)

   :(c) lon or tawa plus a simple noun phrase (Some roots may only function as transitive or intransitive verbs.) ť 10. A direct object is of the form

   :e simple noun phrase Some roots are used for grammatical functions (such as those that take part in the rules above), while others have lexical meanings. The lexical roots don't fall into well defined parts of speech; rather, they may generally be used as nouns, verbs, or modifiers, depending on context or their position in a phrase. For example, ona li moku may mean "they ate" or "it is food".

Pronouns

Toki Pona has the basic pronouns mi (first person), sina (second person), and ona (third person).
   Note that the above words don't specify number or gender. Thus, ona can mean "he", "she", "it", or "they". In practice, Toki Pona speakers use the phrase mi mute to mean "we". Although less common, ona mute means "they" and sina mute means "you" (plural).
   Whenever the subject of a sentence is either of the pronouns mi or sina, then li isn't used to separate the subject and predicate.
   Demonstratives, numerals, and possessive pronouns follow other modifiers. is designed around the principles of living a simple life without the complications of modern civilization.
   Because of the small number of roots in Toki Pona, words from other languages are often translated using two or more roots, for example "to teach" by pana e sona, which literally means "to give knowledge". Although Toki Pona is generally said to have only 118 or 120 "words", this is in fact inaccurate, as there are many compound words and set phrases which must be memorized.

Colors

Toki Pona has five root words for colors: pimeja (black), walo (white), loje (red), jelo (yellow), and laso (blue). Each word represents multiple shades: laso refers to words as light as cornflower blue or as dark as navy blue, even extending into shades of blue-green such as cyan.
Although the simplified conceptualization of colors tends to exclude a number of colors that are commonly expressed in Western languages, speakers sometimes may combine these five words to make more specific descriptions of certain colors. For instance, "purple" may be represented by combining laso and loje. The phrase laso loje means "a reddish shade of blue" and loje laso means "a bluish shade of red".

Numbers

Toki Pona has root words for one (wan), two (tu), and many (mute). In addition, ala can mean zero, although its more literal meaning is "no" or "none." This feature was added to make it impractical to communicate large numbers.. For an example of this structure, see this posting, which uses luka luka luka wan to mean "sixteen."
Obsolete roots
Two words have archaic synonyms: nena replaced kapa (protuberance) early in the language's development for unknown reasons. Later, the pronoun ona replaced iki (he, she, it, they), which was sometimes confused with ike (bad).
   Many of these derivations are transparent. For example, oko (eye) is identical to Croatian oko and similar to other cognates such as Italian occhio and English ocular; likewise, toki (speech, language) is similar to Tok Pisin tok and its English source talk, while pona (good, positive), from Esperanto bona, reflects generic Romance bon, buona, etc. However, the changes in pronunciation required by the simple phonetic system make the origins of other words more difficult to see. The word lape (to sleep, to rest), for example, comes from Dutch slapen and is cognate with English sleep; kepeken (to use) is somewhat distorted from Dutch gebruiken, and akesi from hagedis (lizard) is scarcely recognizable. [Because*ti isn't possible in Toki Pona, Dutch di comes through as si.]
   Although only 14 roots (12%) are listed as derived from English, a large number of the Tok Pisin, Esperanto, and other roots are transparently cognate with English, raising the English-friendly portion of the vocabulary to about 30%. The portions of the lexicon from other languages are 15% Tok Pisin, 14% Finnish, 14% Esperanto, 12% Croatian, 10% Acadian, 9% Dutch, 8% Georgian, 5% Mandarin, 3% Cantonese; one root each from Welsh, Tongan (an English borrowing), Akan, and an unknown language (perhaps Swahili); four phonesthetic roots (one from Japanese, one made up, and two which are found in English); and one other made-up root (the grammatical particle e).
Tok Pisin
All but two of these derive ultimately from English.
   insa (insait, from Eng. inside), kama (kamap, Eng. come up), ken (ken, Eng. can), lili (liklik 'small'), lon (long 'at', from Eng. along), lukin (lukim, Eng. look 'em), meli (meri 'woman', from Eng. Mary), nanpa (namba, Eng. number), nasa (nasau '?'), open (open, Eng. open), pakala (bagarap, Eng. bugger up), pi (bilong 'of', from Eng. belong), pilin (pilim, Eng. feel 'em), pini (pinis, Eng. finish), poki (bokis, Eng. box), suwi (swit, Eng. sweet), taso (tasol 'only, but', from Eng. that's all), toki (tok, Eng. talk) Also obsolete pata (brata, from Eng. brother)
Finnish
ike (ilkeä 'bad'), kala (kala 'fish'), kasi (kasvi 'plant'), kin (-kin 'even, any'), kiwen (kiven, accusative/genitive of kivi 'stone'), linja (linja 'line'; cf. English 'linear'), lipu (lippu 'banner, ticket'), ma (maa 'land'), mije (miehen, accusative/genitive of mies 'man'), nena (nenä 'nose'), nimi (nimi 'name'), pimeja (pimeä 'dark'), sama (sama 'same'; also Esperanto sama), sina (sinä 'thou'), suli (suuri 'big'), wawa (vahva 'strong'), walo (valko ?, < valkoinen 'white' or vaalea 'pale')
Esperanto
Most of these come from English or Romance.
   ilo (ilo 'tool', from English/Romance suffix -il, -ile), ijo (io 'thing'), la (la 'the', from French/Italian la), li (li 'he', from French lui, Italian egli), mi (mi 'I', from English me, Italian mi), musi (amuzi 'to amuze', French amuser), mute (multe 'many'; cf. English multitude), pali (fari 'to do, to make'; cf. Italian fare < Latin facere), pona (bona 'good'; cf. English bona fide), sama (sama 'same', also Finnish sama), selo (ŝelo 'skin, peel', from English shell), suno (suno 'sun', from English sun), tenpo (tempo 'time', from Italian (& English) tempo), tomo (domo 'house'; cf. English domestic, domicile)
English
These roots were taken directly from English. Their semantics, however, may differ substantially. For example, tawa comes from "toward", but can mean "to go to".
   jelo (yellow), jaki (yucky), mani (money), mi (me; also Tok Pisin and Esperanto mi), mu (moo!), mun (moon), o (O; also Esperanto ho, Georgian o), sike (circle), tawa (towards), tu (two), wan (one)
Croatian
The body-part words come from Croatian.
   kalama (galáma 'fuss, noise'; cf. English clamour), lawa (glava 'head'), luka (rúka 'arm, hand'), lupa (rupa 'hole'), nasin (náčin 'manner'), noka (nòga 'leg'), oko (òko 'eye'; cf. English ocular), olin (volim 'I love'; cf. English volition), ona (ona 'she'), palisa (pàlica 'stick'; cf. Engish palisade), poka (bòka, genitive of bòka 'side, flank'), sijelo (tìjelo 'body, flesh'), utala (ùdarati 'beat'; cf. udara ('strike'?)), uta (ústa 'mouth')
Acadian French
anpa (en bas 'down'; cf. English on base), kule (couleur 'color'), kute (écouter 'listen'; cf. English 'scout, auscultate'), lete (fret/frette 'cold'; French froid), len (linge 'linens'), monsi (mon tchu/tchul 'my ass'; French mon cul), moli (mourir 'die'; cf. English mortal), pipi (bibitte), supa (surface 'surface'), telo (de l'eau 'of water'; cf. English gardyloo), waso (oiseau 'bird'; cf. obsolete English enoisel)
Dutch
Most of these are cognate with their English translations.
   akesi (hagedis 'lizard'), ale/ali (al, alle 'all'), ante (ander 'other'), awen (houden 'hold'), en (en 'and'), kepeken (gebruiken, bruiken 'use'; cf. obsolete English 'brook, bruik'), lape (slapen 'sleep'), loje (rooie, rood 'red'), sitelen (schilderen 'picture, paint, portray'; cf. Eng. dial. sheld 'particolored'), weka (weg 'way, path, away'), wile (willen 'be willing')
Georgian
ala (არა ara 'no, not'), anu (ანუ anu 'or'), kili (ხილი xili 'fruit'), mama (მამა mama 'father'; perhaps also motivated by English mama), o (-ო o; also Esperanto ho, English O), seli (ცხელი tsxeli 'hot'), sewi (ზევით zevit 'up'), sona (ცოდნა tsodna 'to know'), soweli (ცხოველი tsxoveli 'animal'), tan (დან dan 'from')
Mandarin
jo (有 yǒu 'to have'), kon (空气 kōngqì 'air'), pan 'grain, cereal product' (饭 fàn 'rice'; also Cantonese 飯 faahn; cf. Spanish pan 'bread'), seme (什么 shénme 'what?'), sin (新 xīn 'new'), sinpin (前边 qiánbian 'front')
Cantonese
jan (人 yāhn/yàhn 'person'), ko (膏 gōu/gòu 'fat, ointment'), ni (呢 nī/nì 'this'), pan 'grain, cereal product' (飯 faahn 'rice'; also Mandarin 饭 fàn; cf. Spanish pan 'bread')
Other languages
a (A!, ah! in many languages), esun 'store' (Akan, from edwamu [edʒum] 'at market', from dwa 'market'), kulupu (Tongan kulupu, from English group), laso (Welsh glas 'sky, blue-green'), moku 'eat' (Japanese phonesthetic モグモグ(食べる) mogu mogu (taberu) 'munch'), pana 'give' (perhaps from Swahili pana 'to give to each other')
Novel creations
e, unpa (phonesthetic)
Literature
Sonja Elen Kisa herself has published proverbs, some poetry, and a basic phrase book in Toki Pona.
Community
Sonja Elen Kisa has said that at least three people speak Toki Pona fluently and estimates that a few hundred have a basic knowledge of the language. Traffic on the Toki Pona mailing list and other online communities suggests that dozens of people are proficient in reading and writing. During International Congress of Esperanto Youth held in Sarajevo, August 2007, there was a special session of Toki Pona speakers with 12 participants.
Sample texts
mama pi mi mute (The Lord's Prayer)
Translation by Pije
mama pi mi mute o, sina lon sewi kon.
nimi sina li sewi.
ma sina o kama.
jan o pali e wile sina lon sewi kon en lon ma.
o pana e moku pi tenpo suno ni tawa mi mute.
o weka e pali ike mi. sama la mi weka e pali ike pi jan ante.
o lawa ala e mi tawa ike.
o lawa e mi tan ike.
tenpo ali la ma en ken en pona li pi sina.
Amen.

ma tomo Pape (The Tower of Babel story)
Translation by Pije
jan ali li kepeken e toki sama.
jan li kama tan nasin pi kama suno li kama tawa ma Sinale li awen lon ni.
jan li toki e ni: "o kama! mi mute o pali e kiwen. o seli e ona."
jan mute li toki e ni: "o kama! mi mute o pali e tomo mute e tomo palisa suli. sewi pi tomo palisa li lon sewi kon. nimi pi mi mute o kama suli! mi wile ala e ni: mi mute li lon ma ante mute."
jan sewi Jawe li kama anpa li lukin e ma tomo e tomo palisa.
jan sewi Jawe li toki e ni: "jan li lon ma wan li kepeken e toki sama li pali e tomo palisa. tenpo ni la ona li ken pali e ijo ike mute.
"mi wile tawa anpa li wile pakala e toki pi jan mute ni. mi wile e ni: jan li sona ala e toki pi jan ante."
jan sewi Jawe li kama e ni: jan li lon ma mute li ken ala pali e tomo.
nimi pi ma tomo ni li Pape tan ni: jan sewi Jawe li pakala e toki pi jan ali. jan sewi Jawe li tawa e jan tawa ma mute tan ma tomo Pape.
wan taso (Alone)
dark teenage poetry
ijo li moku e mi.
mi wile pakala.
pimeja li tawa insa kon mi.
jan ala li ken sona e pilin ike mi.
toki musi o, sina jan pona mi wan taso.
telo pimeja ni li telo loje mi, li ale mi.
tenpo ale la pimeja li lon.

Further Information
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