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Toki Pona is a minimal language that focuses on what Kisa believes to be the good things in life. It was designed to express maximum meaning with minimum effort. The language has 14 phonemes and 118 words. It was not designed as an international auxiliary language, but instead designed around Daoist philosophy.
As a language designed to shape the thought processes of its users, it relies on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and somewhat resembles George Orwell's Newspeak language featured in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Toki Pona is phonetically minimal. Its system sounds similar to that of Japanese but lacks distinctive voicing, geminate consonants, long vowels, and palatal clusters. (This is not how the syllables are presented in the official lessons, but it shows the parallels to better-known CV(n) languages.) It also lacks diphthongs.
a e i o u Toki Pona 'u' may be rounded or unrounded. ka ke ki ko ku Obstruents (stops and fricatives) sa se si so su may be pronounced voiced or unvoiced. ta te to tu 'ti' has fallen into 'si'. na ne ni no nu pa pe pi po pu ma me mi mo mu ja je jo ju 'j' == IPA [j] (EnWithin a word, syllable-final n cannot precede a nasal consonant (n or m), and a syllable without an initial consonant can only appear as the first syllable of a word.
Sandhi effects change the pronunciation of np (but not its spelling) to [mp] or [mb].Generally, words are accented on the first syllable.
Tokipona does not use proper nouns. Instead, names of people and places are modifiers of the common nouns for "person" and "place."
Toki Pona noun phrases are head-initial, meaning that the modified word comes before the modifiers.
Order of operations is completely opposite to that of LojbanThe artificial language Lojban ( IPA [loban], official full name Lojban: a realization of Loglan was created by the Logical Language Group in 1987 based on the earlier Loglan, with the intent to make the language more complete, usable, and freely availabl. In Toki Pona, "N A1 A2" (where N represents a noun and A1 and A2 represent modifiers) is parsed as ((N A1) A2), that is, an A1 N that is A2. This can be changed with the particle pi = "of", which groups the following adjectives into a kind of compound adjective that applies to the head noun. E.g., jan pona lukin = ((jan pona) lukin), a seeing friend (jan pona = "friend", literally "good person"); jan pi pona lukin = (jan (pona lukin)) = "good-looking person".
Demonstratives, numerals, and possessive pronouns follow other modifiers.
Some verbs, such as tawa = "to go", which in English govern prepositions, do not take e before their direct objects.
The 118-word vocabulary is designed around the principles of living a simple life without the complications of modern civilization. The words generally come from EnglishThe English language is a West Germanic language, originating from England. It is the third most common "first" language (native speakers), with around 402 million people in 2002. English has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the mil, Tok PisinTok Pisin tok means "word" or "speech", pisin means "business") is the creole spoken in Papua New Guinea (PNG). It is one of the official languages of PNG and the most widely used language in that country, spoken by about 2 million people as a second lang, FinnishFinnish is spoken by the majority in Finland and by Ethnic Finns outside of Finland. It is one of two official languages of Finland. Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family and is an agglutinative language which modifies the forms of both n, GeorgianGeorgian (also Kartvelian Kartuli in Georgian) is the official language of Georgia, a republic in the Caucasus. For the origin of the name, see the Georgia article. Georgian is the primary language of 4,150,000 people in Georgia itself (90% of the populat, DutchDutch is a West Germanic language spoken worldwide by around 21 million people. The variety of Dutch spoken in Belgium is also informally called Flemish . The Dutch name for the language is Nederlands or less formal Hollands and Dutch is sometimes called, Acadian French, Esperanto, Croatian, Chinese ( Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese).
Some words have archaic synonyms because they were changed to avoid a potentially confusing minimal pair. For instance, ona = "he, she, it" used to be iki (which sounds a bit like ike = "bad")
See also: Common phrases in different languages, toki pona dictionary