Linguistics and conlanging

We currently know English, Toki Pona, and some Spanish (and bits of other Romance languages).

We want to learn ASL, Luka Pona Sign Language, written Chinese (probably through Mandarin), Japanese, and probably more.

Our existences are inextricably tied up in linguistics and conlanging. Language gives form to our identity. Language grants access to the deepest, most psychotropic recesses of our mind, and to euphorias that have upended our sense of self in an instant.

Language has also been a mental cage of prescriptivism, self-loathing, and unwanted treatments. It can be a fearsome outer to contend with every day. The way you speak instantly sends so many messages about you. Popular framings of language lead to their own forms of masking, don't they? As the sense of scrutiny has abjectly failed to end, competing urges have risen: either just shutting down and going nonverbal, or fully embracing ourselves to the point of undoing speech therapy somehow. We want to know if anyone out there feels the same way.

Let us offer some vignettes into our history with language and our attempts to wrangle it.

WordWorld

WordWorld is still one of our favorite television shows for how deeply it affected us. It's a deceptively difficult-to-explain educational series, where letters are physical material, and spelling them transforms them into "WordThings", the shape of the word enveloped and extruded into that of the object it refers to.

It is quite possibly the most horrifying fictional universe: the laws of physics are English orthography.

To memory, we didn't need WordWorld. We'd already known how to read for many years. What it offered us was a vision of a universe where the way language worked made sense—where words weren't arbitrary. Of course they should look like what they represent. (Is it any wonder we'd later fall in love with Sitelen Pona?)

Perhaps the show attained this vision in reverse, only meaning to offer visual mnemonics like a ⟨bed⟩-shaped bed. Still, we were obsessed with how cleverly and seemingly effortlessly it fudged words into their proper shapes, subtly drawing on different lettering styles. We filled a notebook with what can only be described as WordWorld fanart one day. It fueled an enduring appreciation of lettering, typography, and logo design.

We always believed this show had a winning idea that no one else seemed to recognize. It could be extended to other languages, numbers, music… At long last, we got a taste of this when we learned of the Portuguese adaptation, Planeta Palavra. We watched a few episodes out of lifelong curiosity for how things like accent marks would be handled in the show's format, and walked away having learned way more vocabulary than we expected. Either our mind is just wired for this somehow, or this needs to be investigated as a serious language-learning strategy and adapted to dozens of other languages.

Spelling reform

TBA

Splatoon

TBA

Toki Pona

When we first heard about Toki Pona, we were kinda frustrated with language. Scrutinizing the English alphabet was enough to make everything seem clumsy and inefficient and arbitrary from the start. We were also grappling with feeling constantly misinterpreted. We still obsess over finding the perfectly clearest wording for anything we write, and can spend hours "optimizing" simple thoughts into terse, hedged, preemptive paragraphs. So a conlang with ten dozen words, no pesky synonyms, no registers of formality, self-documenting phatics, as few grammatical structures as possible, a philosophy of simplifying your thoughts, and so on, had a definite appeal.

The Sitelen Pona writing system is why we actually learned the language after months of failed attempts. We already loved icon design and the idea of logographies, so assigning a basic symbol to each word and combining them with modifiers had an intuitive appeal. It makes too much sense in our icon-driven world, and it's also fascinating for giving icons to concepts without obvious ones. We're probably still more sitelenponist than tokiponist, the execution is that solid. Eventually, we found the linja sike font and started playing with all the ligature features. This accidentally grew into memorizing the vocabulary by linking correct spellings to meaningful glyphs. We went from having given up on the language, to being prepared and eager to learn the rest of it.

The community stokes our passion in the language. There have been so many analyses and stylistic experiments to think about. A sense of shared culture has unfolded. The tools developed and milestones reached keep getting more exciting. People have accomplished so much since 2021: magazines, censuses, the Linku dictionary and surveys, font standardization, the ISO language code, the sona pona wiki, tools like telo misikeke and ilo Muni, and now an official association to help Sitelen Pona reach the Unicode Standard… It's exciting to feel Toki Pona evolving and coming into its own in real time. It always gives us more to learn, new perspectives and ideas to consider.