A whole language built from about 120 words

Boing Boing reports on Toki Pona, a constructed language with about one hundred twenty words and fourteen sounds. Created by Canadian translator Sonja Lang in two thousand one, it emerged from her own experience with depression — an intentional effort to distill her thinking down to essentials. Unlike most invented languages, which try to express everything possible, Toki Pona asks a fundamentally different question: what if we spoke only what truly mattered?

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