on ido and toki pona

i'm really bad at learning languages. i'm bad at english to begin with. i tried learning some russian and french, but i didn't have russian or french friends at the time. i pick up some nehiyawewin here and there from my family and local circles, but it's a slow process..

i recently learned about ido and toki pona. conlangs that are meant to be intuitive to learn. ido is supposed to be easy to learn for any germanic speaker. toki pona only has 120 words in it.

ido

ido is an "auxiliary language", meaning that if you speak english, and your friend speaks italian, instead of learning italian or getting your friend to learn english, you can *both* learn ido, which has much simpler rules and simpler structure than english *or* italian! 'that's cool', i thought, 'i want to learn that!'.

ido is based on esperanto, but is supposed to be a bit simpler, and that appealed to me, as someone who's too lazy for complex things.

after a little bit of reading up on it from the ever so helpful webpage (no js/light css, thankfully):

i got a pretty good grasp of the language within the hour! maybe if i get better at it, i'll post a little similar guide here on gemini.

an interesting thing about ido is that an adjective can be used before or after a noun, so "big dog" could be either:

'granda hundo' *or* 'hundo granda'

the grammar and vocabulary of ido takes hints from english, spanish, german, italian, russian, and french, so i like to think that learning ido would be a good entry point to learning some other languages, as well!

hopefully i can continue learning ido, and hopefully it helps me understand linguistics in general a bit better!

toki pona

while searching for "fun conlangs", i saw the name "toki pona" quite a few times. toki pona is an artistic, philosophical conlang from 2001. it consists of just over 120 words (that's fewer words than the original pokemon list!)

i read through the official pu book by sonja lang, but i found this page to be where i spent most of my time trying to learn toki pona (again, a very lightweight webpage):

similar to how we say "bookshelf" as a compound word consisting of "book" and "shelf", toki pona can be used similarly to describe things. "kili jelo" is "yello fruit", which could be a banana or a lemon. to destinguish between them, one might say "kili jelo ni li suwi" for "this yellow fruit is sweet", as apposed to "kili jelo ni li nasa", for "this yellow fruit is strange".

the above example could be way off. i haven't spent much time in toki pona, but i think it's an adorable language and i definitely want to experiment with it more!

toki pona takes elements from english finnish, tok pisin, dutch, georgian, french, crotian, chinese, and esperanto!

ni toki lili li pona mute a!

("this little language is very good!")

march 4, 2021