What do y’all think of conlangs? Anyone here know toki pona? I personally speak it, and am wondering.
Not familiar with Toki Pona, though it sounds interesting after skimming the Wikipedia page.
I’m currently teaching myself Esperanto. I don’t think that just knowing esperanto is ever going to significantly benefit me, and I’ll admit that I picked it up on a lark. I like the philosophy of having a universal auxiliary language, though I doubt it will ever get to that point. Mostly I just do it because I’m enjoying the experience, and someday it may be a nice little fun fact about myself.
My previous experiences with learning a second language haven’t gone great, but Esperanto is going pretty smoothly. I’ve probably learned more in about a year and a half playing around in Duolingo than I did from 3 years of high school french class, and I’m kind of hoping I can build on the skills I’m learning here to learn another language somewhere down the line, and I think that may be the real strength of a lot of conlangs, they help you learn how to learn a language.
There’s definitely niche roles that they can play, I’m certainly no expert in this area, but I feel like a lot of the autistic community would benefit from being able to communicate in lojban, and people with learning/language/speech difficulties could probably use something like Toki Pona to sort of get the most bang for their buck with a more limited vocabulary. Of course that would require either a lot more adoption of those languages by the general population, or at least a decent network of interpreters/translators to facilitate communication with people who don’t speak those languages.
I like the philosophy of having a universal auxiliary language, though I doubt it will ever get to that point.
At the present moment, I believe that the closest human beings will get to a universal auxiliary language, is probably something like Interlingua. It’s probably easier to get people who are interested in languages, to learn a language which was specifically created to help them to communicate with speakers of multiple languages at once (such as Interlingua for Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese), rather than try to do the opposite by trying to convince the whole world to learn a new language. With a language like Interlingua, you won’t be wasting your time even if you can’t find other speakers, since it’ll help you understand other Romance languages more.
As for Toki Pona, I’m not sure how long the simplicity will last if the Toki Pona community keeps adding more and more words.
toki pona is brilliant and I wish there were more of us here. There was no active toki pona community (only ones that were inactive on other instances), so I made a new one: !tokipona@lemmy.world.
mi jan Kasikusa! ni li lon suli. mi kama tawa ma !tokipona@lemmy.world.
toki! kama pona!
mi wile e ni: jan mute li kama lon li kama sitelen e ijo lon lipu ni. tenpo ni la mi mute li jo e sitelen tu wan taso lon kulupu pi toki pona.
I recall finding Lidepla easy to read (a few years ago ) , like the principle of balance of roots.
I don’t know anything about this one in particular but I have some familiarity with Esperanto. I think they’re interesting academically as someone interested in languages, but I don’t see myself learning one. I just don’t see how it’s worth the time investment versus learning a language spoken natively by other humans, realistically.
