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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3Archive 4

Notability

It's probably better to leave the notability tag on until the article is properly referenced. None of the sources cited so far appear to meet WP:RS criteria. The benefit of the tag is that editors reading the article might feel inclinded to (1) read the notability guidelines, (2) add sources, (3) then remove the notability tag. The benefit is that the article will be on much better footing if its ever re-nominated for deletion. - Aagtbdfoua 03:38, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

  • my mistake, I wrote the above reply as if I had tagged this for notability, and this is one of the conlangs I prodded. Same argument applies. Please source this better. - Aagtbdfoua 03:41, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

I doubt that Toki Pona will be mentioned in any third-party literature for many years to come, if ever. Beyond Esperanto, linguistic publications virtually never discuss conlangs. For example, in a search of an academic index of linguistic abstracts, I found only two references to Quenya, a well-known conlang that was used frequently in the Lord of the Rings movies. If even Quenya has so few mentions in credible journals, it seems unreasonable to ask for references for Toki Pona when the language was only created in 2001 and hasn't been used in any blockbuster movies. Despite the lack of third-party references, Toki Pona is notable; in a short period of time, it rose to be a well-known and popular conlang, developed a following that very few other conlangs can match, and is very unique with its intense, deliberate minimalism. Furthermore, this article has been suggested for deletion before, and by a wide margin, users voted to keep the article. -- Bknight009

I agree with Bknight009 that Toki Pona is notable: The huge amount of activity on the Toki Pona Yahoo Group together with the numerous websites rich in content in or about Toki Pona establish Toki Pona' notablity beyond doubt. I therefore remove the notability tag now. Marcoscramer 22:49, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
At the First Language Creation Conference last year there was a talk which was partly about Toki Pona (see the conference's program). I guess that that already counts as a reliable source, and thus contributes to the subject's notability. Marcoscramer 00:50, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
This is better than the Yahoo! groups, but WP:RS requires "reliable, published sources". I'm also not sure what to make of this conference. The speakers are two graduate students (in linguistics), a sound engineer, an author with a PhD (unclear what field), a Philosphy professor (with some training in linguistics), a linguistics professor (thankfully), a database programmer / massage therapist, and an author with a linguistics degree (likely bachelor's). - Aagtbdfoua 19:31, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
I have now found three mentions of Toki Pona in really reliable sources:
  • The popular Serbian magazine Politikin Zabavnik had an article about constructed languages in its 15-Dec-2006 issue with a sub-article about Toki Pona. This can also be read on-line: [1]
  • In its 20-Jul-2004 issue the Russian computer magazine Computerra had an article about fast thinking, in which there were six paragraphs dedicated to Toki Pona. This can also be read on-line: [2]
  • The book "Esperanto - The New Latin for the Church and for Ecumenism" by Ulrich Matthias (published by the Flamish Esperanto League; ISBN 90 77066 04 7) mentions Toki Pona. Even this book can be read on-line: [3]
I hope that these mentions in reliable sources are enough for removing the notability tag. Marcoscramer 20:02, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
It might be nice to update the article to incorporate use of those references, perhaps in support of some of the existing text. -- Bovineone 01:13, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
I'm concerned that none of those sources satisfy WP:N, and most importantly that no reliable, independent sources seem to be available to ensure that this article is verifiable. I've tried searching Google News's archives and my university's LexisNexis but have been unable to find any additional sources. For these reasons, I've opened an AfD discussion for this article. Krimpet (talk) 05:28, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
The LA Times just had an article about ConLanguages in which Toki Pona was featured prominently. The LA Times even mentioned that MIT regularly gives seminars about Toki Pona, and many psychologists are interested in trying it to treat depression. That link will break in a day, so the article is called In Their Own Words -- Literally, by Amber Dance, 8/24/07. To me this seems to resolve the notability issue. Even if the article itself didn't make it notable, the fact that the article indicates it is one of the most popular and well known conlanguages, possibly with a practical use, which attracts adademics to it, I would say its notable. 68.6.47.210 06:12, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
I agree that the Los Angeles Times article demonstrates notability, which is no doubt why your comment was the last comment in the thread. Now, thirteen years later, an editor who was recently blocked from editing this page / talk page for COI editing is arguing that this discussion means that this page is not subject to Wikipedia's notability requirements[4] That's wrong. This discussion shows that this article meets Wikipedia's notability requirements. --Guy Macon (talk) 09:01, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

Panlex 4.0 code

In the Panlex project Toki Pona has received the code art-007 , see http://panlex.org/u — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.23.151.187 (talk) 14:08, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Linguistic mention anno 2009

The Routledge Linguistics Encyclopedia Kirsten Malmkjaer Routledge, 4 dec. 2009

Toki Pona mention:

"Toki Pona is a language exploring the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, designed to encourage positive thoughts."

[p.34 s.v. "artificial languages']

"The+Routledge+Linguistics+Encyclopedia"+Toki+Pona&source=bl&ots=Dn_sBlEnsR&sig=BGED1LHU58Y5bpKELdZJxBZ6hBc&hl=fr&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwizqsqLhNbdAhXEZ1AKHe2UCr8Q6AEwAHoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q="The%20Routledge%20Linguistics%20Encyclopedia"%20Toki%20Pona&f=false Google Books Link

Jansegers (talk) 12:04, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

Question

Hi, i've just started looking at Toki Pona so this might be ignorant, but shouldn't the phrase:"jan pona lukin" really be "jan pona li lukin"? Many thanks (i hate confusion when learning something new) Andrew

Not in this case, it gets translated into English as "a friend watching" or "good person looking" and is to be understood as a nominal phrase, like "a friend who is looking". The word lukin is used here as a modifier for the noun phrase jan pona, so you can understand it as "a person which is good, which is looking". The phrase jan pona li lukin means "a friend is looking". — N-true 00:09, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Wikia turns into Fandom

Thus Wikipesija is now findable at https://tokipona.fandom.com/wiki/lipu_lawa ... it keeps moving around so it seems. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jansegers (talk • contribs) 15:01, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

Toki Pona coming to a newspaper near you?

I have it on good authority that there will soon be a news article about Toki Pona posted in a major Canadian news outlet. I will post a link on the talk page when it arrives. Perhaps that might be reason enough to reconsider that it is indeed encyclopedic? Queerwiki 14:56, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

If and when the article is published, let us know, and we will review the deletion. At least this is better than the justifications by the "undelete NEDM lol" crowd. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 21:03, 4 July 2007 (UTC)
Okay. I expect the article to come out within the next week. I noticed that Toki Pona's still got an article in the Wikipedias of 20 other languages, so evidently some are still of the opinion that it's noteworthy. Queerwiki 17:18, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

The article is going to be posted in the Globe and Mail, a national Canadian newspaper, on this upcoming Monday (07/09/2007). They did a photoshoot with Sonja, at least according to her Livejournal. Once the link gets up, I'm sure there will be a rush to post it. (crtrue)


in today's globe and mail (canada's largest newspaper) http://tokipona.org/tokipona-globeandmail.jpg

I have already started the review process. Marcoscramer 22:02, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
alt link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070709.wllanguage09/BNStory/PersonalTech/ Queerwiki 17:03, 10 July 2007 (UTC)


Title/author of Komputerra article?

Can someone who reads Russian give us a proper transliteration of the author, title, date, etc. bibliographic info for http://offline.computerra.ru/2004/550/34762/ ? We need this information rather than the bare URL in the references section. (And it would help to summarize what information, if any, can be sourced to this article which isn't available from other third-party sources in English.) --Jim Henry 23:05, 15 July 2007 (UTC) 

[http://offline.computerra.ru/2004/550/34762/ Скорость мысли (The Speed of thought)]，Компьютерра Online (Computerra Online), Станислав Козловский (Stanislav Kozlovskiy), [[20th July]][[2004]]

[http://www.politikin-zabavnik.co.yu/tekst.php?broj=2862&tekst=04 Вештачки језици-Токи пона (Constructed language-Toki pona)]，Политикин Забавник (Politikin Zabavnik), 2862nd issue, Тијана Јовановић (Tiyana Yovanovich), [[15th December]][[2006]]

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070709.wllanguage09/BNStory/PersonalTech/ Canadian has people talking about lingo she created], The Globe and Mail, Siobhan Roberts,[[9th July]][[2007]]

--70.21.4.207 03:57, 16 July 2007 (UTC)


See my reply below.--Sonjaaa 02:33, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

To do list?

We should probably make a list of the edits needed to clean up the unverifiable statements and add in new information from the recently available sources (The Globe and Mail article and the Komputerra article). What specific parts of the article are considered controversial or startling and especially in need of reliable-source support? --Jim Henry 23:05, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

I have now markes all claims that still need to be verified by some source by the "fact"-template (displayed as [citation needed]). This doesn't meant that I doubt these claims, but just that we need to find sources that support them (or else remove them from the article). Marcoscramer 14:46, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Direct object

The verb section currently reads: "Some verbs, such as tawa = "to go", which in English govern prepositions, do not take e before their direct objects." I would just say that "tawa" doesn't take a direct object, which is also supported by the official word list (which lists it as intransitive). I propose to just remove this claim. Marcoscramer 14:46, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Objects of tawa correspond roughly to English indirect objects. I've rewritten this paragraph. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 18:32, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
Further, according to the jan Pije lessons, tawa can take a direct object. It’s only that, when it does, it acquires the meaning of “to move”; e.g. ona li tawa e poki → she moved the box. 200.138.145.233 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 19:53, 31 January 2011 (UTC).

Computerra article in certified English translation

http://www.tokipona.org/computerra.html

--Sonjaaa 02:32, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Can you also get a translation of the politikin-zabavnik article? Being able to incorporate that as a reference in support of another specific portion of the article would be good. -- Bovineone 17:08, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

What next?

Okay, what happens now? There seems to have been a flurry of edits to this page. Is it not in satisfactory condition to be restored now? It's certainly a better-written article than many that have never been deleted before. Do we need another round of votes or can it just be restored? Queerwiki 06:08, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

It looks good now (to me at least, and I was the one who nominated it for AfD); I've gone ahead and moved it back into mainspace, and restored the deleted image. Good job! =) Krimpet 06:20, 25 July 2007 (UTC)


Sounds Like Canada

I was interviewed for 14 minutes on Canadian national radio today. See http://www.tokipona.org/tokisuli.html for MP3 clip. --Sonjaaa 04:35, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

ISO 639-3

I believe the proposed ISO 639-3 code is TOK. --Sonjaaa 20:28, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Very cool. Here's the proposal for the new code[5], but it doesn't look like it's been approved yet. I've added it to the article anyways. -- Bovineone 21:22, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
It's been rejected, but that page lists no explanation and the comments PDF is missing.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:55, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

News stories

Someone pointed out ? this LA times article (requires registration, dammit!) to me. This isn't the first article that's been done about or mentioning Toki Pona. Shouldn't there be a section in the external link or bibliography for these things? --Iustinus 05:43, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

The LA Times article is already used as a supporting source for the article and is listed in the References section (see link). The LA Times article loads fine once you have registered for their site. -- Bovineone 05:58, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't want to delete an external reference without explaining why, so here's why.

Tokipinglish is not a "constructed language". At best, it's a half-baked suggestion for a creole. The web site says that if you can't figure out how to say something in Tokipinglish, "just say it in English".

The linked web site had fullscreen BraveNet advertising pop-unders and the poll linked from the main page had a total of three votes, two of which said that Tokipinglish was "terrible". (Yes, one of those votes was mine.)

It's my impression that no one reads the Tokipinglish pages, and that people who see the main Tokipinglish page immediately understand that it is not what it claims to be. I only explored the site myself to see if there was any reason it should be kept in the Toki Pona article.

--Rick MILLER 18:37, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

rules?

Just jotting down probs I have with the rules, in case it turns out they're wrong

  • li isn't a conjunction, it marks a duplicated predicate after a subject. Not the best way to present it. (Course, machine rules generally aren't the best way to present rules to humans.)

kwami (talk) 11:16, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

new roots?

I've found one of the two new roots, pan, but not the other. This is just the kind of thing someone might come here for. Anyone know what the other one is? kwami (talk) 22:15, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

From Sonjaaa's talk page:

pan is from Chinese for rice. esun is from Akan. I forgot the other ones.--Sonjaaa (talk) 09:55, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! (Silly me, I thought pan was from Spanish bread.) kwami (talk) 19:44, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Is esun just market/shop/store, or can it also be a verb buy/sell/barter? Also, do you have the Akan form? The closest I can come is a verb 'to value', but it's not a good match. Thanks, kwami (talk) 18:28, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi again. I've checked out another Akan dictionary, but still can't find anything that resembles esun. Do you remember the Akan form? kwami (talk) 07:07, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Ah, I found edwam 'at market', from edwa 'market'. Could this be it? Thanks, kwami (talk) 07:02, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

I dunno. My source was a taxi driver, and he said something like "edjum" ;) --Sonjaaa (talk) 22:20, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

I bet that's it, then. The full form is e-dwa-mu, where dw is approx. [dʒ], and one person I asked said this does get shortened to something like [edʒum]. (mu is the locative; I don't know what the e is.) kwami (talk) 23:01, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

I've just found out that there are now 125 words in Toki Pona, so 5 more new ones - the first time I came around there were only 118 words, but it seems she's working on a English-Toki Pona dictionary at the moment (Basic English also altered during the dictionary making phase)PieterJansegers —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.244.136.230 (talk) 10:19, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I see 124, assuming noka and pini have not been dropped: alasa 'to hunt', namako 's.t. extra, accessory, seasoning' (still in the draft stage), and kipisi, pu with no defs that I can see. I say we hold off until these are established. kwami (talk) 18:21, 5 November 2009 (UTC)
Yes, 124 words are listed in Sonja Lang's Official Toki Pona Dictionary on p. 125ff. of her book Toki Pona. The Language of Good. In the preface on p. 7 she talks about 120 words (those shown in File:Toki pona sitelen pona.png, which is based on the Hieroglyphs chapter p. 104ff.) because she considers kin, ali, oko, namako mere variants of a, ale, lukin, sin. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 21:43, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

obsolete roots

It would be nice to get the obsolete roots too: where are iki and kapa from?

I have no source on leko, kan, pata. Are they correct? Pata I assume is from Tok Pisin brata, the others I can't ID. — kwami (talk) 20:43, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

How saying?

How saying the number "1,234" in toki pona? --77.125.10.21 (talk) 13:05, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk pages are not forums unless you are discussing something that you plan to add to an article. In that case, it'd probably be mute for "many", possibly with some adverb. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 17:47, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

comment

The degree of detail in this article is way out of line for an encyclopedia. It really should just give the basic facts about Toki Pona, not teach us how to speak it. However it does no harm to anyone, and it does sound like people are having fun with it. Redddogg (talk) 02:00, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Is it maybe time to spin off some detail to sub-articles like Toki Pona grammar as has long since been done for the longer natlang articles? --Jim Henry (talk) 17:42, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
The article isn't particularly long, and isn't likely to get any longer. I think it's a pretty good read as it is. kwami (talk) 19:02, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

particles

Copuld mention that some of the grammatical particles seem to be inspired by languages like the Polynesian languages. AnonMoos (talk) 13:16, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Says who? Can you cite a third party who has written that they seem to be so inspired? --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 17:39, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

nasa

nasa is supposed to be from Tok Pisin nasau, but Tok Pisin speakers I've asked don't recognize it. Could be a local form, but we need to verify. kwami (talk) 23:54, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Tok Pisin, Motu, English Dictionary translates the English word stupid in Tok Pisin as "a., longlong,nasau." http://www.pngbd.com/dictionary.php?word=stupid&src=english&translate=Translate PieterJansegers (talk) 16:40, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Sonja Elen Kisa

Doesn't Sonja Elen Kisa deserve an article for her own (as a different entity to Toki Pona)? Much to my dismay, trying to create one I discovered there is a redirection that cannot be overridden. Can anyone explain why, or act to change this? 92.6.255.179 (talk) 05:19, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Here. Pi zero (talk) 13:06, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
Thanks! 92.6.255.179 (talk) 17:41, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
The link is not working any more, does anyone have a working link to the explanation? Greenman (talk) 16:11, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
The author is not notable, the conlang is. Sometimes remarkable conlangs that get newspaper and academic journal citations are created by ordinary people.--Matthewdeanmartin (talk) 17:34, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Lord's Prayer

Someone has changed the last line to "tenpo ali la sina jo e ma e wawa e pona. Amen." Is this valid, seeing that the translator is mentioned? The revision does seem better to me.—Jchthys 22:41, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

I like this variant, but I would say "toki Amen". However, I like the variant "ni li nasin", too. Paulos22 19:36, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
"Amen" is a loan word, so it isn't valid. toki pona is the language of 125 (or so) words, so you can't borrow words at will like you do in Esperanto. Proper modifiers are only appropriate for people, places, language names, company names, and rarely, a species. Another way to look at it is that tp has a closed morpheme set, like Klingon, that expands only rarely when the original designer adds to it. The community by in large respects this convention, as you can verify yourself in the corpus search tool.--Matthewdeanmartin (talk) 11:52, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

syntax questions

posted as comments in the article by User:Gatewaycat:

A predicate may be (b) verb phrase [prepositional phrase] — CAN VERBS PRECEDE MULTIPLE PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES, IE, "[PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE]*" ?
I dunno, but I suspect not. DOs are prepositional phrases, but are not classified as such. The only reason I can think of offhand is so that you can limit them differently, with multiple DOs allowed, and DO plus PP, but no multiple PPs allowed. But I haven't found that said explicitly. kwami (talk)
A noun phrase may be (b) simple noun phrase pi (of) noun plus modifier* — CAN MODIFIER* BE OMITTED, IE, "[MODIFIER]*"?
No, it cannot. "pi is used to separate a noun from another noun that has an adjective. ... (noun 1) pi (noun 2) (an adjective that modifies noun 2, but NOT noun 1). Note that there must be an adjective to describe noun 2. If not, pi is not used at all, and you get this: (noun 1) (noun 2)"[6] kwami (talk) 20:56, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

additional question by User:Fusiongyro:

the sub-clause rule has [taso] explicitly mentioned, but the "dark teenage poetry" ends with "tenpo ale la pimeja li lon" which does not appear to be permitted by this grammar. Is the rule outdated or is the poetry not grammatical? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fusiongyro (talk • contribs) 03:13, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
Not much wrong with the text. tenpo X la S is a valid construction, the X is a modifier indicating time. Also, you'll get better answers to syntax questions on the toki pona forum. --Matthewdeanmartin

Silly

This is so Wikipedian. How does 'Toki Pona' get its own page, an extensive talk page, and links from other pages to boot? It's a joke, a game, a non-scientific experiment. It's not encyclopedia-worthy. Heck, it doesn't even have a "Toki-Pona in Popular Culture" section. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.53.91.109 (talk) 20:24, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Either you don't know much about Wikipedia or nothing about Toki Pona. Can't quite figure it out. If you have a valid argument against anything, state it and stop trolling. — N-true (talk) 23:00, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
How is it trolling to tell you what you're missing and how ridiculous what you're doing is. Also, the statement "Although it was not intended as an international auxiliary language,[10] it may as well function as one." at the start of the article shows what this is, subjective statements from Toki Pona fans.--Bronze Messiah (talk) 23:24, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Trademark?

There seems to be a minor edit war going on about the claim that Toki Pona is trademarked. What are the sources for that claim? Is it stated anywhere? Kwamikagami claims, that a (constructed) language cannot be trademarked. Is that really true? As far as I know, Klingon is trademarked (or at least copyrighted) as well — isn't this a similar thing? I'm interested in your arguments and the result. Please discuss. — N-true (talk) 12:47, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

User:Sonjaaa is reasonably active on this wiki ... perhaps she can settle the debate for us. I notice that on her old website there was a notice at the bottom reading

:::This is the official website of the Toki Pona language.

© Toki Pona was designed, created and developed by Sonja Elen Kisa, 2001-2007.
but that on the new website, which seems rather like Wikipedia, there is no such notice (that I can see). Klingon is definitely copyrighted, by the way. I don't see any reason why a language couldn't be copyrighted if it was created by a person; it's a work like any other. -- Soap Talk/Contributions 13:09, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
AFAIK, the Klingons as characters were copyrighted, as well of course as particular dictionaries of Klingon. Sonya can copyright her description of Toki Pona, such as that website, but not Toki Pona itself. Also, copyright is automatic; whether she actually claims it is largely irrelevant. (That's why we have copyleft: one must actively deny copyright for it not to take effect.) Sonya has been active on WP in the past, and never made an issue of the lack of copyright notice here. It's also not the only such language: Schleyer claimed ownership of Volapük, and there have been others, all largely ignored.
There is discussion along these lines at Commons: scripts and languages are treated similarly by copyright law. Scripts, like Tolkien's tengwar, cannot be copyrighted, but individual fonts can. We can freely copy material in tengwar or other invented scripts, as long as the text itself is not copyrighted, though if it's in a copyrighted font the copy needs to be an svg, png, or other distorting format so that the font is not copied in full detail.
Anyway, I read the (c) notice above to correctly state that the website is copyrighted, not the language. kwami (talk) 20:46, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

There is a reference to the article documenting the trademarked status of the language. It is well documented in multiple well regarded online articles. Please do not just remove this edit without any discussion please. Also note the text on the bottom of the pages of Sonja Elen Kisa own work: © Sonja Elen Kisa 1996–2009 Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Licence: You may copy, share, adapt or reuse the text on this specific page http://kisa.ca/index.php, but you must credit me as the author, provide a link to this page, and not making any money from it. For other uses, contact me for permission. Other pages on this site may be using a different licence.Erikev (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 22:07, 6 October 2009 (UTC).

What a minute. We're talking about two different things. Sonya is copyrighting the text of her webpage. Even if she didn't, it would still be copyrighted to her. She can't copyright the language, though. But that's not what we're talking about: the claim was that the name Toki Pona (not the language Toki Pona) is trademarked, and she does not claim trademark on her site. In the US, using the TM mark establishes Trademark. I don't know about Canada; in many countries one must register (R) the trademark. Trademark registration is public access, so if it is tradmarked, we should be able to document it. I've failed to find a db with Toki Pona so far; maybe s.o. else here knows better where to look? kwami (talk) 22:13, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
Nothing like "toki pona" or "tokipona" is registered with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO), nor with the US Patent & Trademark Office (TESS db). "Toki" and "Topona" are TM, but that's as close as it gets. So all we have to go on is an unreferenced website which may or may not know anything about intellectual property law. kwami (talk) 22:34, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

I am not going to spend more time on this. I just added this based on reliable sources: Toki Pona – The only language with a trademark http://www.languagemonitor.com/number-of-words/millionth-word-finalists-announced/ . At any rate, you should distinguish between copyright and trademark. To suggest it is nonsensical that a language can be trademarked is clearly something the US supreme court disagrees with you on. Se Lexmark printer language.

Also an expression in any language can be trademarked as we all know, That is what a trademark is e.g. "Getting there is half the fun. ™" or "A mind is a terrible thing to waste. ®".

The name of the language itself can be trademarked, e.g. -"PostScript Language (tm)" and -"TCL™ Printer Language". -"Lexmark printer language" The list goes on. This is established US law.Erikev (talk)

We don't know that that is a reliable source for legal claims. You have provided no reason for thinking it is.
I didn't say the name of a language cannot be trademarked here. I said a language cannot be copyrighted. (I see I did say that in one of my edit summaries. My bad: I don't know whether a language name can be trademarked or not.)
Lexmark and PostScript are not languages. They are merely trade names with the word "language" in them, and thus irrelevant to the topic at hand. kwami (talk) 23:26, 6 October 2009 (UTC)


Inasmuch as there are no hits for "toki pona" as a trademark, in either the USPTO or CIPO databases, and the languagemonitor site provides no documentation/support for that claim, then it is a pretty safe bet that toki pona is not a trademarked languages. I'll also point out that if the LanguageMonitor claim that it is trademarked is true, then PostScript Language would fall into the same category, and their claim that it is the only trademarked language is false. IOW, regardless of the actual situation, LanguageMonitor demonstrates that it is not a reliable source for either languages, or legal issues, at least for this specific example.jonathon (talk) 18:32, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
Postcript Language is not a language, so that point is irrelevant. kwami (talk) 17:20, 9 October 2009 (UTC)
Postscript Language is a Turing Complete Computer Language. 24.2.68.165 (talk) 20:16, 9 October 2009 (UTC)
I am not sure of the difference between copyright and trademark, but I would like to point out that Logban is copyrighted, which is why its child, Lojban, had to be reinvented from scratch. See Lojban#History. -- Soap Talk/Contributions 16:16, 9 October 2009 (UTC)
Copyright covers the content, trademark the name. Do you mean Loglan? Loglan claimed trademark, which was rejected by the US Patent Office (it's still noted in Logban 1, but not Logban 3), but I don't see anything about copyright. kwami (talk) 17:20, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Totally ridiculous

This article is an embarrassment to Wikipedia. A half-baked, glorified-baby-talk conlang worked out over a hungover weekend is obviously, self-evidently, undeniably a private project; TP is not even a good example of a conlang (assuming we needed such), much less is it a a valid topic for a Wikipedia article. The language-creator's claim that a "hundred" people speak this "language" fluently, uncritically cited in the article, is highly dubious. Proof? A handful of people cobble together TP posts on a Yahoo group. That's it. See for yourself.

Toki Pona is the pinnacle of non-notable. I move that we delete this article, and remove mentions of it from other conlang articles. (Alas, the TP lunatics, running amuck, have put TP references everywhere in conlang-related articles!) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.0.36.230 (talk) 07:16, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Actually, she only claims 3 fluent speakers. The newspaper cite needs to be corrected. kwami (talk) 07:42, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
The GlobeMail cite (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/article770141.ece) dated 2009-04-03 10:03:00 EDT states: ", Ms. Kisa ... estimates several hundred people have dabbled in it - and at least 100 speak it fluently." Considering that it is a quote by the creator, I suggest it accurately represents the creator's current estimate. The cite of "3 fluent speakers" is both old, and contradicted by the last sentence in that section, which mentions a conference with 12 participants.jonathon (talk) 18:25, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
There is no contradiction. "Twelve participants" does not mean 12 speakers, let alone 12 fluent speakers. Given the generally poor accuracy of newspapers in quoting people, I'd take the words of a long-time user of the language over a paper any day, esp. when it's clear he isn't exaggerating for propaganda purposes. For all we know, she might have said that at least a hundred use it online, and the GlobeMail took this to mean "fluent": unless they quote her directly, that cite is pretty much worthless. (And even if they do quote her directly: I've been quoted by papers, and it's amazing how far off they can be.)
I do agree that TP is pretty minor as far as conlangs go, but then they're almost all pretty minor.
As for being a personal project, which conlang isn't? Klingon, maybe. Esperanto certainly was. The question is whether it ever develops a community, which this has. A small community, but one nonetheless. kwami (talk) 18:44, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
From what I can tell in the Esperanto community, Toki Pona is actually one of the most famous conlangs nowadays, right along with Esperanto, Volapük, Ido, Interlingua and Klingon.—Jchthys 19:48, 8 October 2009 (UTC)
No way. Toki Pona is socially and linguistically irrelevant; if it is ever mentioned, it is almost exclusively to ridicule it, either directly or indirectly to compare it to something else in a pejorative manner. It has no value as a conlang.81.34.134.222 (talk) 12:33, 25 July 2013 (UTC)
I second that and would like to add Lojban, Sindarin and Quenya to that list as well. — N-true (talk) 16:13, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

(outdent) I have no opinion on notability, but the citing overall ere is below standard. The writing also needs big improvment (too many floating single sentence paragrahs etc). I'm doing GA checks for all the language articles, and will reassess this soon. If it remains as is, i think it would be delisted.YobMod 09:43, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

‘leko’ unknown?

It seems pretty obvious to me that the now obsolete word leko came from the trademark Lego, used for toy building blocks.—Jchthys 16:17, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, that seems likely. kwami (talk) 19:04, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
It's certainly quite plausible. What it lacks, however, is a reliable source, without which saying it in the article would be speculation, and therefore original research. --Pi zero (talk) 21:50, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Talk:Toki Pona/Archive 3/GA2

Is an archived reference to an old version of the inventor's website reading "leko TM Lego" proof enough ? http://web.archive.bibalex.org/web/20021001230309/http://www.tokipona.org/etym.php PieterJansegers (talk) 21:08, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

'kan' unknown?

Kan most likely comes from Esperanto kun. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Quintus314 (talk • contribs) 18:49, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

It's possible, and kun seems to come from Latin cum or Spanish/Italian con. But 1st, it's unsourced, and 2nd, the vowel change from kun to kan is unexplained, and there's no logical explanation for it, as far as I can see, unless kun was spoken with an English accent. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:42, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Native speakers?

The sidebar mentions three native speakers, but the cite is for fluent speakers (who absent further details one should presume acquired it later in life). In conlangs, the distinction is a rather important one... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.109.186.253 (talk) 21:23, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

There are no native speakers of toki pona. Fluency is really overstating things because fluency is usually used (by the man in the street) to mean native-like-fluency. No one is that competent. The only objective measure I've found of this sort of thing is that about 50 people have published to the web more than a paragraph of valid toki pona in the last ten years. There isn't anything similar to the exams that the KLI administers for Klingon to check competency levels for toki pona. --Matthewdeanmartin (talk) 15:44, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

I'm unsure on how to measure fluency for a language only containing vocabulary comparable to the level of a baby or a young infant. I actually would feel the "fluency" criterion more fit for a language such as Klingon (where apparently some speakers have been known to maintain basic conversations). 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:33, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

The vocabulary of phrases you need to memorize is way over 125-- "jan pona" is a good example-- in the corpus of texts it means "friend", but from the constituent parts there's no particular reason to think anyone would interpret that as "friend", so one must memorize it. Toki pona when used by people trying to use it as a real language use lexicalized phrases. One list of such phrases runs over 3000 entries and is comparable to the core vocab of other conlangs. As I've said elsewhere on this page, unless you're mulling over how to make an edit, the toki pona forums are a better place for discussion. -- Matthewdeanmartin

It has always been my conviction in the case of constructed languages the issue of speakers is moot, simply because there is no way at all of gathering and verifying this kind of information. Except for Esperanto, the only two constructed languages that have ever had native speakers are Volapük and Klingon (in both cases one, AFAIK), so "speakers" are almost by definition people who have learned it to some degree as a second language. And numbers are a real hornets' nest here, because:
  • How fluent must a person be for being considered a speaker?
  • How and by whom can this fluency be measured?
  • Since L2 speakers are not likely to show up in any census, which sources can be used for numbers? Not every speaker is necessarily a member of some club, Internet forum, etc.
  • If any data are available at all, they originate in all likeliness from creators and/or other insiders, who may have a vested interest in making it seem more than it really is.
  • You don't really have to know a conlang very well to be able to write a few reasonably decent sentences in it - a grammar and a dictionary can do miracles.
  • Even a person who is able to write, is not necessarily able to speak as well. Acquiring any degree of fluency requires a lot of practice, which in the case of a conlang is almost impossible to realise.
As a result, estimates are doomed to be extremely rough. Not surprisingly, in the case of Esperanto they vary from tens of thousands to several millions.
Instead of "speakers", I would rather use the term "users". After all, how proficient a person really is, is hard to establish, and in this particular context perhaps not even relevant at all. Counting people who write (regularly/substantially) on the Internet in a given language is a lot of work, but at least doable: all it takes is browsing through fora, mailing lists, wikis, Facebook groups and the like. That way you can at least get an idea how many people there minimally are, about whom we know for sure that they use the language. Obviously, counting members is not enough, since members of such groups also include interested bystanders, people who registered themselves one day but never came back, and even spammers. Thing is only, who is willing to do that kind of research, and present it in such a way that it can be used as a reliable source? —IJzeren Jan Uszkiełtu? 00:25, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
I did that sort of research for toki pona. Last I counted, as I mentioned above, there are ~50 people who've written a paragraph or two or more and posted it to a public location. Of that 50, about 5 write dramatically more and better than the others. There are 0 fluent speakers in either the man in the street or the professional linguist's sense. But I don't edit articles, I just participate on the talk page. Finding the upper bound of people who might have written on toki pona on napkins or spoken it in the privacy of their bedroom isn't really interesting. Maybe a better measure of a conlangs size is the corpora word count, regardless to the number of people who use it as a home language and speak it to their children or significant other. Not all conlangs are home-languages, it would unfairly exclude things like Damin. Last I counted, there's about 50,000 or so published words of toki pona text. What could be more objective than a published word count? Beats this pseduo-statistic of X fluent speakers. Sorry I haven't figured out how to property mark a reply, I do much better discussions on forums. Maybe some editor with better media-wiki skilz than me can fix the native speaker's statistic. Matthewdeanmartin (talk) 20:12, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
You certainly have a point. Although instead of word count I'd rather apply character count. Being a translator of Polish and Dutch, it is my experience that the number of words in the same parallel text is always ±120% higher in Dutch than in Polish (Polish has cases, doesn't have articles, tends to use participles rather than subordinate clauses, etc.). I agree that corpus size could be an important criterion, but there are a few ins and outs. First of all, there is a difference between, say, a published book and a chat session. Secondly, there is a difference between translations and original material. Thirdly, the number of authors does matter IMO - it makes a difference whether or not all texts have been written by the author of the language. So I suppose a short description of the corpus would be probably more useful than just a number of words/characters. Just out of curiosity: what do these 50,000 words encompass? Is that including bilingual texts or oneliners, for example? Cheers, —IJzeren Jan Uszkiełtu? 23:36, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

i have noticed a number of links that do not bring the page, e.g. ^ Toki Pona: nimi li tan seme? / etymological dictionary / etimologia vortaro or ^ Roberts, Siobhan (9 July 2007). "Canadian has people talking about lingo she created" and ^ Станислав Козловский (Stanislav Kozlovskiy) (20 July 2004). Скорость мысли (The Speed of Thought) (in Russian). Компьютерра Online (Computerra Online). Retrieved 2007-07-20. English summary of the Computerra article with translated excerpt The link ^ "Second Language Creation Conference 2007" opens, but there is no mention of toki pona there. I do NOT suggest to delete the article, although in my opinion tp is no language, but the links should be reorganized, basically they are lessons links, they should put all together, and tokiponists personal site links, which should be brought together. Links that do not work or do not bring toki pona mention, should be removed or placed in a special category.888gowinda (talk) 13:14, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

If they're worth keeping, we link to archives of the links rather than deleting them. — kwami (talk) 18:02, 22 October 2013 (UTC)
The point of references is to make statements verifiable. In other words, it is actually a good thing that the grammar bits are provided with references, even if this means links to lots of individual lessons. The Компютерра article is online and Toki Pona (among many other projects) is discussed in it, so there's no need to remove it. The English summary is inaccessible, and since the original article is a better source than its summary anyway, I've removed that link. —IJzeren Jan Uszkiełtu? 21:12, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

"from January to July 2006, [luka] was used 10 times more often...as a number"

This is very interesting! If nothing else it seems to be a bit of a counterexample to the Sapir-Whorf-like shaping, at least for numbers! Making it impractical to communicate large numbers when large numbers are often needed seems to mean that people expand and repurpose words of the language to make it practical! Has any RS commented on this repurposing, even in the face of deprecation? Double sharp (talk) 17:26, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

Sonja Elen Kisa is quoted in a Zompist listing of how to say the numbers one to ten as "wan , tu, tu wan, tu tu, luka, luka wan, luka tu, luka tu wan, luka tu tu, luka luka" [I believe that was back in 2002] and this practice did survive to this day - as found back in the official toki pona book (aka. 'pu') by (now) Sonja Lang under the section advanced numbers. PieterJansegers (talk) 15:57, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

I imagine that if it actually magically gained native speakers, a decimal or vigesimal system would soon emerge. One of the most revealing comments I saw on the forums after a brief search was along the lines of everyone already adding new words to Toki Pona, in a hilarious reversal of the entire idea of the language: if you stop people from expressing complex thoughts, people will find a way to do it anyway. Double sharp (talk) 07:27, 15 January 2017 (UTC)

The Lord's Prayer

Hello, was just reading through the Our Father 9or "lord's Prayer) on the Toki Pona Page and noticed this:

Line 2: nimi sina li sewi. - _ you _ will - thy will be done? Line 3: ma sina o kama. - country your _ _ - thy kingdom come?

Obviously, I'm not very familiar with the language, but I'm pretty sure these two lines should be the other way around (even in the protestant version).

Any thoughts?

Grizato (talk) 13:02, 28 April 2015 (UTC)


Line 2: nimi = "name/word"; sina = personal pronoun "you"; nimi sina = "your name"; li = subject marker; sewi = "high/holy/hallowed"

nimi sina li sewi = "Hallowed by thy name"

80.233.42.189 (talk) 22:58, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

French provenance

Since the creator of Toki Pona is a French speaker, I am surprised to read that none of the words come from French. One source I saw says that kute comes from the French écouter, which seems likely. I also assume anpa comes from the French en bas. Is this section original research? I agree with the GA Reassessment that this section needs a reference. --seberle (talk) 23:12, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

As I reread the article, I see that some words are attributed to "Acadian." It should be made clearer that this is French. More importantly, this section needs a reference, or else it should be deleted as original research. --seberle (talk) 01:43, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
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