Hey, jan Tokawi here, and we're going to be talking about languages.
Natural languages and constructed languages.
jan Tokawi is my Toki Pona name. Toki Pona is a language that I had not heard about until three weeks ago. It's a Conlang, a constructed language, meaning that it was created by, in this case, basically one human being and then a community formed around her.
The entire language consists of somewhere around 140 words or so.
And as I'm learning Spanish and dealing with 50 or so different forms of each verb, there's something very appealing about a language I can learn in a weekend.
When I encountered the Toki Pona community, I became intrigued about the implications of communicating using such a limited vocabulary.
What's it like trying to get complex ideas across? How do we make sure that our conversation partner or reader understands what we mean?
And then I thought, Gee, I've got that same problem in my native tongue. Maybe there's stuff I can learn here that can make me a more effective communicator in English.
I reached out to jan Usawi, who is a proficient speaker of Toki Pona, and also a musician who write lyrics in the language.
In our conversation, we explore lots of philosophy and epistomology and other long Greek words.
To my delight, we even tied it into transformational healing and the linguistics of radical mindset shifts.
And — and this will make sense if you watch the video — we explored the function of jan Usawi's antlers.
Enjoy!
h/t to @robwords for his excellent video that first introduced me to Toki Pona. If you enjoy languages, you'll love his channel.