toki pona, languages
It's so weird and cool how using the glyphs actually improves my reading comprehension
As an English speaker, noun-adjective feels super unintuitive to me, and when I first started writing I was constantly putting the adjective before the noun without realizing it. But when I look at the glyphs I immediately recognize when I make the mistake. I'm like "oh, nimi is the subject, it's the most important thing, of course it comes before luka luka"
I think it's not unreasonable to suggest that learning toki pona might stretch out my brain-putty and give my language acquisition centers enough of a workout to make it easier to learn a natural language later. I'm excited
toki pona
My original idea for the name of the game was to use the same format as "pico, fermi, zilch", but I decided it's unnecessarily complex. I didn't like the word "o" appearing in the title with another character that looks like the letter O. There's not a huge corpus of works written in toki pona, so I can use a very simple title without conflicting with anything, and simple is good
toki pona
I can't figure out a way to clarify in the rules that the knower shouldn't let the guesser know *which* words are ijo, ala, and o, because the guesser having that information makes the process of elimination too easy, but that's not the easiest concept to communicate in English either
The finished zine is going to have a page showing an example game, hopefully that'll be enough
toki pona
Glyphs, pronunciation and translation for the game I posted the other day. I'm not 100% sure about the grammar, but I think it's close. There's no real convention for referring to a word as a word as far as I can tell, so I made up the convention of using square brackets as quotation marks
(words like "lizard" and "paper" are more specific than the glyphs but "non-cute animal" and "flat and bendable thing" wouldn't fit in the infobox)
This toki pona font is pretty mind-blowing https://github.com/janSame/linja-pona
Not only does it use ligatures to replace the ASCII characters with glyphs as you type, you can use a plus sign between them to combine glyphs. There's 120 words and the font accounts for over 6000 possible compound words
For example, if I wanted to write my surname, "bluelander", I could type "jan pi ma laso" and it converts it to the top four glyphs. But if I want to make a signature for myself, I type jan pi+ma+laso [_ma_akesi_e]
The first part means "person of the blue land" and the part in the cartouche is "ma akesi e", a phonetic representation of "matt" in the toki pona syllabary (mae pronounced as two syllables, like "mah-eh"). So cool!
toki pona
mi sitelen musi Toki Pona. nimi musi li "Ijo Ala O". https://www.lander.blue/wiki/Ijo_Ala_O
Ask the snail beneath the stone, ask the stone beneath the wall:
Are there any stars at all?
procyon montani (they/them)
Favorite mashup: Slamming Like Jagger All My Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCDRcwONKNY