Parrot Time Magazine

Toki Pona and Tok Pisin

What comes to your mind when you see these two words? Do you think that they are languages from the same country? Both have the acronyms of TP, so they should be related, right? I have learnt both languages separately at different time, and my choice of learning one does not affect the decision to learn the other one. Whether they are related or no, the answer could be yes and no, let me tell you more.

Toki Pona: The Language of Good
I started to learn Toki Pona seriously last year, on October to be precise. However, I have read about it many times on the internet. I still don’t have any Toki Pona speakers living nearby and have never met any of them in real life. Neither do I have communicated completely in Toki Pona. No worries, Toki Pona was not created to be an auxiliary language.

"Created", you say?! Right, Toki Pona is a constructed language (conlang) created by a Canadian linguist named Sonja Lang, and it was introduced in 2001. The creation of Toki Pona is inspired by Taoist philosophy, which focuses on simple concepts to express maximal meaning with minimal complexity. Believe it or not, it has only 120 words (this number does not include loanwords, such as names).

Now, let’s take a look at the next language.

Tok Pisin: The Language of Papua New Guinea (PNG)
Tok Pisin, English, and Hiri Motu are three official languages of PNG. You may wonder why the word "Tok" sounds like the English word "Talk". They are indeed referring to the same meaning. Tok Pisin is an English-based creole used as a commercial and administrative language by over 2 million people in PNG.

If you know English quite well, Tok Pisin can be extremely easy for you to learn. I started to learn Tok Pisin at the end of March. Much to my surprise, Toki Pona helped me in learning Tok Pisin. In other words, I see similarities that are incorporated into Tok Pisin and Toki Pona.

How do Toki Pona and Tok Pisin resemble each other?
1. Simple concept
In English, we have different words that refer to pretty much the same but slightly different object, such as mansion (a big living place), house (a general living place), hut (a small living place). Why on earth an English learner need to know 3 different words if they actually can use simpler way to describe that object.

A "house" in Toki Pona is "tomo", a car is "tomo tawa". You see there is an extra word of "tawa" that means "to move, moving, or anything related with motion". So, "tomo tawa" actually means "moving house" or "car", with the adjective comes after the noun.

"Laik" is a verb in Tok Pisin means "to like, to want, to love". When you use this word with an object, the verb gets a suffix "-im", for instance "mi laikim yu tumas" means "I like you very much". You can also notice that "tumas" sounds like "too much" but here, it means "very much", which is still pretty similar. Many words in Tok Pisin are pronounced the same or similar with its corresponding words in English but written as how it is pronounced. What I mean here is when OO in English is pronounced as U, it is written as U in Tok Pisin.

2. Grammar
Toki Pona has a word "li" that is put between any subject except "I" and "you" and its verb. Tok Pisin has "i" which function the same way with that in Toki Pona. Since Toki Pona is a constructed language, the creation of "li" may be inspired by Tok Pisin.

Compare these sentences that mean "He is a good person".
(Toki Pona)
Ona li jan pona (He li person good)

(Tok Pisin)
Em i gutpela man (He i good person)

The possessive pronoun comes after the noun in both Toki Pona and Tok Pisin. Tok Pisin puts an extra word of "bilong" in between the noun and pronoun. Guess what, "bilong" is "belong" in English but written as how it is pronounced. For example, here are the translation of "my house".

(Toki Pona)

Tomo mi (house me)

(Tok Pisin)
Haus bilong mi

3. Limited Vocabulary
The vocabulary of Toki Pona and Tok Pisin is quite limited, so it will be quite difficult to discuss about heavier topics, such as science or engineering. Toki Pona was deliberately created with limited vocabulary because it was not meant to be an auxiliary language, so real life communication can’t really be done with this language. Meanwhile, Tok Pisin lacks a lot of professional terms because it is meant to be a simple language that is more suitable for daily conversation.

4. Resources
Both languages have quite a lot of online resources, making it easy to learn. Here are what I usually use.

A. Dictionary
(Toki Pona)
http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/dictionary.php
(Tok Pisin)
http://www.tok-pisin.com/

B. Articles
(Toki Pona)
http://tokipona.wikia.com/wiki/lipu_lawa
(Tok Pisin)
http://tpi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran_pes

C. Songs
Believe it or not, there are songs in Toki Pona but almost everything is created by Toki Pona fans instead of a real singer, so please don’t mind the quality. You can find quite a lot of songs in Toki Pona and Tok Pisin on YouTube by using the keyword "Toki Pona song" and "Tok Pisin song".

Teddy is an avid language learner, blogger, engineer, and a collector. He has a dream to make this world a better place through language learning. Apart from learning languages, he also likes reading and playing ukulele. You can speak with him in Medan Hokkien, Indonesian, English, Chinese Mandarin, Spanish, and Esperanto. Visit his blog at www.neeslanguageblog.com