💾 Archived View for tilde.pink › ~emily › log › ido-and-toki-pona.gmi captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
i'm really bad at learning languages. i barely know how english (my first language) works! after trying to learn russian (i got the cyrillics down, but sort of burnt out after that), latin, french, and cree, i found that they all have a lot of... weird grammatical fluffs to them. little things that make me go "huh, that doesn't need to be in there".
after trying my best shot at cutting cree down to a reasonable set of rules, i found that it would be easier to construct a simple language from scratch, and, like every idea i have, someone more capable had already done it! many people had! that's good.
ido is an "auxiliary language", meaning that if you speak english, and your friend speaks italian, instead of learning italian or getting your friend to learn english, you can *both* learn ido, which has much simpler rules and simpler structure than english *or* italian! 'that's cool', i thought, 'i want to learn that!'.
ido is based on esperanto, but is supposed to be a bit simpler, and that appealed to me, as someone who's too lazy for complex things.
after a little bit of reading up on it from the ever so helpful webpage (no js/light css, don't worry):
i got a pretty good grasp of the language within the hour! maybe if i get better at it, i'll post a little similar guide here on gemini.
an interesting thing about ido is that an adjective can be used before or after a noun, so "big dog" could be either:
'granda hundo' *or* 'hundo granda'
the grammar and vocabulary of ido takes hints from english, spanish, german, italian, russian, and french, so i like to think that learning ido would be a good entry point to learning some other languages, as well!
hopefully i can continue learning ido, and hopefully it helps me understand linguistics in general a bit better!
while searching for "fun conlangs", i saw the name "toki pona" quite a few times. toki pona is an artistic, philosophical conlang from 2001. it consists of just over 120 words (that's fewer words than the original pokemon list!)
i read through the official pu book by sonja lang, but i found this page to be where i spent most of my time trying to learn toki pona (again, a very lightweight webpage):
similar to how we say "bookshelf" as a compound word consisting of "book" and "shelf", toki pona can be used similarly to describe things. "kili jelo" is "yello fruit", which could be a banana or a lemon. to destinguish between them, one might say "kili jelo ni li suwi" for "this yellow fruit is sweet", as apposed to "kili jelo ni li nasa", for "this yellow fruit is strange".
the above example could be way off. i haven't spent much time in toki pona, but i think it's an adorable language and i definitely want to experiment with it more!
toki pona takes elements from english finnish, tok pisin, dutch, georgian, french, crotian, chinese, and esperanto!
ni toki lili li pona mute a!
("this little language is very good!")
both these languages are super cute! i'm going to continue trying to learn italian/latin/russian/french/whatever, whenever i can, but so far i'm probably enjoying these two the most. maybe because, being constructed rather than evolved languages, they just feel a bit more organized and complete. more well thought out. i appreciate that!
march 4, 2021