Allusionist 25: Toki Pona

There's a language which is said to be the smallest language in the world. It has around 123 words, five vowels, nine consonants, and apparently you can become fluent in it with around 30 hours' study. It was invented by linguist Sonja Lang in 2001,

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There’s a language which is said to be the smallest language in the world. It has around 123 words, five vowels, nine consonants, and apparently you can become fluent in it with around 30 hours’ study. It was invented by linguist Sonja Lang in 2001, and it’s called Toki Pona.

And Nate DiMeo, from the Memory Palace, decided we should learn it together.

FURTHER READING:

• tokipona.org is your first stop for Toki Pona information, such as Sonja Lang's book and the Facebook group.

• This is the article that first piqued Nate's and my interest in Toki Pona. I also enjoyed reading about this two-day Toki Pona learning binge.

• A Finnish psychiatrist experimented with getting his patients to record their thoughts in Toki Pona every day.

• Hey, linguistic size queens: here's a piece comparing number of words in different languages, and here are some stats for you.

• I need to read In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent, who appeared in this early episode of 99% Invisible about Esperanto.

• There are a lot more invented languages; here are a few mentioned in this episode: Kēlen, Ithkuil, Blissymbols, Lojban, Klingon, Elvish, Na'vi...

• Here's the transcript of this episode.

RANDOMLY SELECTED WORD FROM THE DICTIONARY:
kobold

CREDITS:

• Nate DiMeo makes the beautiful podcast The Memory Palace thememorypalace.us.

• This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks to Eleanor McDowall.

• Martin Austwick provided all the music apart from the instrumental version of Survivor's 'Eye of the Tiger'.

• Communicate with me minimalistically at facebook.com/allusionistshow, twitter.com/allusionistshow and twitter.com/helenzaltzman.

- HZ