Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Toki Pona is fun. A language with only 137 words, learnable from scratch within weeks. Though it's interesting to see just how ambiguous everything becomes with this ultra-small vocabulary.
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j3
@j3
A society with this language would probably intellectually, or at least conceptually limited, without loan words...
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
The way that you do this sort of thing well is, the culture establishes conventions about which combinations of words have much more specific meanings. Chinese does this, eg. everyone knows 大学 ("da xue" = "big learning") means "university" and not eg. "hardcover textbook" or "great student".
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
In Toki Pona, it's understood that "jan pona" ("good person") means "friend", "tu wan" ("two one") means "three", etc. You map any complicated concept onto the combination of basic words that comes the closest to approximate it, and then you solidify the convention that that's what that combination of words means.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
You might think this kills the point, because it means speaking Toki Pona well actually requires understanding not just 137 dictionary entries, but thousands. But actually not really: you can often guess the meaning of a word combination in context, and even if you can't, once you see it once it's easy to memorize.
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Henry Love
@henrylove
This makes sense - the most commonly used 100 words in any language covers about 70-80% usage especially in ones that don’t have crazy conjugation. So 137 in combination can achieve a lot actually.
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