jansegersDoes a natural language as simple as Toki Pona exist?
Samuel Lickiss | Mar 8, 2018
https://www.quora.com/Does-a-natural-language-as-simple-as-Toki-Pona-exist
You can 'learn' Toki Pona in a few days (in fact, you can do this quite easily and for free here Toki Pona courses on Memrise), but learning the words and grammar will not get you very far. The grammar and vocabulary of Toki Pona is simplicity itself. Actually using these principles is a whole other matter. This is where Toki Pona becomes difficult.
Toki Pona can be extremely ambiguous. Global languages like English have vast vocabularies because we need to express a very wide range of concepts. Even languages with a small number of speakers can have large vocabularies, and all languages have specialist vocabularies for concepts unique to their geography and culture.
https://www.quora.com/Does-a-natural-language-as-simple-as-Toki-Pona-exist
There is no specific noun for 'beer' for example. You have to say 'telo nasa'. Literally, this is 'crazy water' (telo - water, nasa - crazy). This doesn't even mean beer; it can mean any type of alcohol.
The Toki Pona word for 'room/building' is tomo. So, to say 'bar' we need to say something that translates as 'alcohol room'. If you're not careful, you can quickly start constructing some odd sentences. Tomo telo nasa (room water crazy) is the logical construction with Toki Pona grammar, but this actually means 'crazy toilet'.
We need to add an extra word in, pi. This is a preposition (sort of) meaning 'of'. It separates a noun from another noun that has an adjective. 'Bar' becomes tomo pi telo nasa, a building of alcohol.
How would you order a beer in Toki Pona? You're going to have to describe what beer is. You could do this with colours - though there's no word for brown. You might try jelo loje, a reddish shade of yellow. Lots of alcoholic drinks are brown/amber in colour - whisky, beer, rum, etc. You could try to distinguish between strong and weak alcohol. You might not like spirits, so ask for delicious alcohol (telo nasa pona). The person behind the bar might hate beer but love whisky...
You might just end up pointing. Then, of course, you have to choose between lagers, ales, stouts, pilsners and all the other types of beer...
A simple matter of ordering a drink involves some linguistic gymnastics. You may have to use a long string of words just to get a beer.
Learning a new noun is probably easier.
https://www.quora.com/Does-a-natural-language-as-simple-as-Toki-Pona-exist
Then you've got to pay for it. There are words for one, two and several. Some speakers may use luka (hand/arm) to mean five. Expressing £2.80 is a time consuming pain.
Can you see that this is not a simple system? It's a creative one, and it's great to see what people can achieve with a tiny lexicon. It's highly contextual and the skill required to both speak and understand it efficiently is significant.
I'd argue that using Toki Pona properly is more complex than the bulk of natural languages.
https://www.quora.com/Does-a-natural-language-as-simple-as-Toki-Pona-exist