 Why hello there all and welcome to one of my late night musings once again this might actually become a theme where I just sit in the dark. You might think it's because I want to make myself look mysterious and all that but realistically the darkness just hides all my imperfections. Anyway today I was stumbling around through various subreddits just doing what I normally do which is like completely wasting time and I ended up in the Tokipana subreddit and before you ask me what Tokipana is it's a constructed language I'll get in some more detail about it later but I wanted to bring this up because while in there I then happened to cross another thread and then that thread led me down a rabbit hole into the way back machine and it led me to what looked like someone trying to build a Tokipana computer which is by God the most coolest thing I have seen in so long. Now what is Tokipana for those who don't know I'm assuming at least a portion of my audience knows what it is but this is what it is according to Wikipedia so Tokipana is the language of good that's literally how it translates so Pona and then Toki so Pona means good Toki means to speak your language and it says it's a philosophical artistic constructed language known for its small vocabulary simplicity and ease of acquisition and what it's most well known for is the fact that it has like 137 essential words. Now I have a long on and off love hate relationship with Tokipana that goes back a very long time so something like five plus years ago one of my friends who speaks Esperanto was also fluent in Tokipana he he introduced the language to me and tried to convince me to learn it and when I had heard that I had 137 words I was like that sounds like really interesting in one way but how does that work in another so I went and did a couple of courses online and I learned to I would say the real basics of the language but I never utilized it in any way shape or form and realistically I actually found the language to be quite difficult now I say difficult because at the beginning it's very easy to get the basics because it's like 137 words or whatever and like basic conversations about the most basic of things you could learn within a day so it's really easy to pick it up but then it gets difficult with the the fact that it's such an ambiguous language see Tokipana due to its limited number of words requires a lot of stacking to create precision and like a lot of stacking so instead people resort to just kind of context and ambiguity to get their thoughts across which to me is difficult because I'm a person who prefers precision over ambiguity maybe that's from my programmer background I don't know but that's just how I am so a language like Esperanto which allows precision attracts me but it also allows ambiguity when I want it now then you've got other languages like Lojban which is a self-constructed language which is basically the equivalent of a spoken computer language in some ways interest me but it's over precise and then don't even get me started on like equal or however it's pronounced equal equal I can't remember there's another constructed language which is like precision to the next level of insanity you once you go down that route there's no coming back you're gone okay so you've got to be careful that's like if you look at the conlang community as if they were like hard drugs type of thing you got Esperanto which is like your version of marijuana it's like your entry into the world it's nice it's soft it's cuddly it won't hurt you too much and then you move on to Lojban which is things are starting to get a little bit violent and then once you're at the if cool you're lost man you're just a zombie on the street type of thing anyway I've sidetracked quite a bit I wanted to talk about this random computer that someone was building in Tokipana so check this out so this is the page I found okay and if you have a look right here that is the computer thing that they've built now it doesn't look like much but if you go check out the video that's at the end of this and you watch it which I have a few times so let me just hit play on this bad boy now because this isn't the way back machine it takes forever for this video to load like I've been sitting here because I'm cutting obviously around this I've been sitting here for like a good two minutes waiting for it to load and it's the the anticipation to show you is killing me so while that is attempting to load I guess I'll continue on with my um my random story about Tokipana so when I saw this article the problem is it's in Tokipana so my ability to speak Tokipana is highly limited there's space on knowledge from like five years ago but I'm going to try and break down what I'm seeing on this page okay this video is not loading right now but basically what happens in the the video is that this guy likes he's typing away on this like little machine and you see these glyphs that are appearing on the screen here they're actually a form of written Tokipana because there's a glyph based system that exists for it anyway we'll come back to that at the end we'll come up here so what do we got here so the first part says me will we let Pali SMS so I want uh to do what so that's like what what am I wanting to do il osana so that's like a knowledge tool ale which I believe means everything I've actually got a dictionary open on here let's have a look so abundant countless everything life universe number 100 oh okay so um ale li will it toky kepeken toky in li so everything li is like is will it toky kepeken want to talk by means of and then toky in li in li what is in li let's have a look in li oh there's no reference to it well maybe it's lin li no oh man I'm gonna miss the most important word in this sentence I just know it okay I can't figure that one out guys like I said I'm relying on like five years old knowledge of Tokipana right now so clearly that's not something I remember nili iketawa me so that is this is disgusting or bad to me so he's saying this this is bad to me whatever this thing is here it's bad to him ah mi will it palli as il osana so I want to do a knowledge tool he's like I think of of Tokipana Tasso so Tasso what is Tasso let me have a look particle but however or adjective only okay so only a good talk like only good talking to I don't know but anyway let's have a look what we've got so he's got illa looking that's obviously the screen because means looking to illa sit tell and sit tell and I believe that was like a box or something let me have sit sit tell and a picture oh okay so it's like a picture so picture tool okay well I guess this is like a diagram then um and then we've got super men I don't recognize either of those words but here's the the keyboard that they've built out the design and then you've got illa palli so that'd be like doing tool I'm guessing that's what the usb is and Tokipana it's like it's something for doing uh okay and then they've got here's the glyphs this is what I was talking about so this is sit tell and panna um so this is interesting because when Tokipana first came into existence um it used a latin script for Tokipana but recently I've seen this more and more randomly that people have started using this glyph based system which I think is really cool and if I was to get back into Tokipana and actually start learning and properly because like clearly I don't speak the language I would totally be using the glyph based system because why wouldn't you use glyphs for such like a limited number of words it just makes things so much cooler anyway let's see if we can get this video up and running well this one work come on man I know these videos work because I watched some of them today anyway so as you can see it's got a little pieces he's put it inside the box and if we come down here it's like all taped it up it's ready to go he's printed it out like full-on 3d printed the the actual keyboard and everything and then you've got the actual tool and I'm going to try attempt to play that again one last time this actually sparked an interest in me to possibly actually go back and start learning Tokipana again because Tokipana to me is just ambiguous like it's a it was a little play thing but seeing something like this makes it so much cooler and so much like geeky because this type of stuff to me shows that there's there's actually growth of a considerable degree in the community which then actually made me interested like is the community growing so I started searching and I found a couple of articles so apparently there was a Tokipana census done which is kind of cool and it's going to give us a bit of an idea about like the language and its current state because with con lanes it's super rare that anyone speaks them apart from their creator so as you can see here let's just jump down where we are because I'm interested in numbers I'm a numbers man okay I think that's what was this why do people learn Tokipana so look at this like Tokipana seems to be experiencing some insane growth over the last few years which is really quite fascinating because we've got now people like 785 responses compared to like 2020 so I first bumped into it probably around 2015 or something or 2016 so as you can see the community was quite small back then and then I pretty much never touched it again although I saw references to it here in there specifically within the Esperano community but this this was really fascinating for me so and that that's another thing for me I like learning con lanes and the fact that there is now actually a community for this language makes me want to learn it so much more maybe you know jump to the dark side wait no that doesn't make sense because Tokipana has always got like this happy smiling face type thing so that would be like jumping to the light side which means that as an Esperano speaker I must be on the dark side which then means I'm the bad one oh no no joking but anyway yeah this is pretty much the only ever like conlang apart from volapu which I'd seriously like jump into actually learning at this stage that's pretty much it I'm just rambling now so I'll talk to you guys next time and I hope you've enjoyed this video