Tokipona (toki pona) is a language created by the Canadian Sonja Lang (formerly Sonja Helen Kisa) and claims to be the simplest of the artificial languages. The first information about it appeared on the World Wide Web in 2001. The name Toki Pona translates as "language of kindness" (possible translations: "good language", "simple language", or "good conversation"). Lang was inspired by the teachings of Tao and Zen and the works of primitivist philosophers while working to create the language.
The worldview of tokipona is reflected in its structure and content. There are about 120 roots in the vocabulary of the language - according to the author, the most necessary ones. The minimalism of the vocabulary is also reduced to the fact that, for example, there are no names of animals and plants in the language. However, in the unofficial vocabulary of Tokipona there are names for countries, nations and languages, as well as names of people, but they are spelled with capital letters (ma Nijon - Japan, toki Epelanto - Esperanto, jan Tana - Tanya). The simplified vocabulary of tokipon combines with simple phonology, grammar and syntax
Tokipone is communicated mostly on the Internet (in IRC chats and the discussion list on Yahoo!Groups), and outside of it, in Canada, the United States, Europe, Israel, Japan and Russia. Tokipona is not classified as a cross-national language. Known primarily among users of the Web, it exemplifies Internet culture. In 2020, a textbook compiled by Internet activists and published by Scriptorium was published in limited edition in print.
Multiple meanings
Almost all words in tokipon have multiple meanings. For example pona - good, kind, kind, simple, mend (!). Because of this, for example, the sentence jan li pona can be translated in several ways: man is good, or man is kind, or, which is not at all like the previous translations, man fixes. Therefore, the translation is often chosen based on the context or refined. For example, if in the previous example you want to emphasize that the person is fixing, you can specify the object he or she is fixing: jan li pona e tomo (the person is fixing a building). If no object of mending is specified, we can almost always assume that "pona" has the meaning "good, kind, simple."
Dictionary
There are currently about 125 roots being used in voluntary simplification, with complexities ignored.
Due to the small number of roots, words in other languages are often translated into tokipon using multiple roots, for example "to teach", "to train" would be pana e sona, literally "to give knowledge."[6] Although tokipon is often spoken of as a "120 word language", skeptics believe this is not entirely accurate: it uses many word combinations and standard turns that must be memorized as separate lexical units.
From the point of view of the Tokiponists, however, the notion of "memorizing collocations and turns of phrase" is wrong. The Tokiponist himself combines concepts from available words, while the "phrases and standard turns" posted on the Internet are merely recommendations. Generally speaking, there is nothing standard in Tokipon (except, of course, the grammar and basic vocabulary): everything depends on the context and on the Tokiponist. For example, the word "table", depending on the context, can be translated as "supa sitelen" ("writing furniture"), "supa moku" ("eating furniture") or even "supa kiwen ike" ("furniture is hard and bad") if, for example, the speaker has banged on it.
