Cookie Thread Act 1: A Cookie in Time

for example, in toki pona, names are considered to be adjectives; the word “jan” means person, and by putting a capitalised noun afterwards you construct a name

so I would be jan Isi, which translates roughly to “the person who is Ici” but is far quicker to say, and is relevant because it means whenever you use a proper noun for something, because they’re proper adjectives it’s still clear what type of thing you’re talking about

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to my knowledge no natural language has that feature, and certainly doesn’t combine those features with various other cool things going on with toki pona, such as how it gets around its’ limited vocabulary with an extremely clever system by which words change meaning based on what you, as a person, value

“toki pona” translates to “Good Language”, or possibly “Simple Talk”, or in many other ways depending on what traits you personally consider to be pona, though pona is usually translated as either simple or good

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is it going to be as valuable in terms of allowing conversation with more people as learning another natural language? absolutely not, but it also provides a different type of value, which is not mutually exclusive with learning like, Spanish, as well

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the value of conlangs is that they change your perspective on language and grant you a deeper understanding of it, as well as them being just cool as fuck for worldbuilding reasons in fiction

sure, you aren’t going to be able to converse with more people, but that’s not actually necessarily the goal of every single language. yes this is a shadepost against IALs i think they’re stupid

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I have a friend from Argentina that speaks Quechua and I found that to be impressive.

Oddly, there’s alot of interesting individuals on the wikipedia discord server

i see absolutely no value in a language that isn’t used as a primary means of communication

It’s very tempting for me to not call Argentina as Argentine

I wonder how would be the world if we all share the same language?

also, to be fair
german is effectively a conlang

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French could benefit from some language reforms :sob:

modern german was codified so heavily from disparate parts that it essentially qualifies as being constructed, we just don’t think of it as that because it shares a lot of natural language features, and also nobody speaks hochdeutsch in actual day to day conversation

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i mean like
toki pona is a philosophical artlang, it exists to make a Point rather than to exist as a means of primary communication, but rather as a supplementary language for the communication of values

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the point is that if you can confidently communicate with only 137 words, you can use that to communicate value fluently in a way that is far harder to do in a second natural language, even if it’s not made for day-to-day communication

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sure, nobody’s going to order shit online in toki pona, but you can have a philosophical discussion in toki pona, even if otherwise the slight language barrier presented by a second language would make that impossible

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in essence, conlangs have a vital purpose in the field of linguistics even if they aren’t of the same kind of use as a natural language. with that said. yeah they are kinda silly i will admit that

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to be fair there does seem to be an obvious reason why people would be happy to memorize 137 words and not happy to memorize All Words Commonly Used In Portuguese

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like I am not learning Toki Pona but if there were a normal language with only 137 words I would absolutely go study it

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Anyways I actively don’t value simplicity so based on what Ici said I might just not be able to speak Toki Pona :joy_cat:

or else the words for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ would be switched??

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well no you would, it’s just for you, pona would mean “exactly as complicated as it needs to be to be good” instead of “simple”, as well as good

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Counterpoint

In english we just say “Ici”

Checkmate

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