I'm always collecting things in my head to blog, and once in a while two seem to match up in an odd way, forcing them to the front of the queue. Today's tidbits are about minimal languages, Toki Pona and K, minimal verbal and programming languages, respectively.

My friend, Pigdog's Mr. Bad, recently introduced me to the wonderful language of Toki Pona. Unlike Esperanto (another of Señor Bad's hobbies), Toki Pona is a constructed language that favors simplicity over clarity, and touts itself as "the language of good. The simple way of life."

The Toki Pona language consists of 119 words. By virtue of Toki Pona's extremely small vocabulary, and order-independent syntax, the language is good at talking about feelings and simple relationships, but not about the finer points of politics or silicon-on-insulator microchip fabrication techniques. Tokiponists believe this is exactly as it should be.

It only takes about a day of effort to learn, though the trouble comes when you have nobody to speak with but yourself. Mr. Bad himself admits that he has onl had Toki Pona conversations in email and instant message conversations which, sadly, rips away the simplicity latent on the very phonemes and the way the mouth moves to pronounce them.

Perhaps Toki Pona will become my Chinese as it's used in Firefly, the underlanguage for muttering under my breath. Then again, what place does a happy language have as a muttering language. Well, it could be an interesting experiment anyhow.

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On the other side of the minimalist coin is a programming language I only found out about this morning called K. There's an excellent K introduction and primer on (appropriately enough) Kuro5hin.org.

I haven't played with K, but it seems to be for lists what perl is for well, big files. And, um I thought Lisp was the language for lists... But this looks pretty cool anyhow. The interesting part is the syntax of K, a language where operators are called verbs, objects are nouns, and linguistic analogistic structures like adverbs take the place of more traditional looping structures.

Sadly, they don't have a version for the Mac yet, just windows, Solaris, and Linux, but a port can't be far behind.

At any rate, if you're a programmer, the primer is a good read, if it serves no other purpose than to be a reminder that just because so many of the coding languages we use have such a similar structure (Is concatenation done with '+', '.', or '&' in [language I'm coding in today]?) that doesn't mean that entirely other syntaxes exist and can prove valuable tools for specific problems.

the part that's amusing to me is that both of the above examples seek to distill existing languages down to core elements, but for entirely different reasons. Toki Pona strives to shape emotion by carving away parts of a language that breed stress, while K tries to distill languages down to core atomic components so that more complex questions can be answered with less chaff.

Either way, an interesting look at how narrowing a vocabulary can change the message conveyed.