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pali pi ante toki

What is pali pi ante toki?

pali pi ante toki (or “Thought Untangling Effort”) is a project I’m undertaking between June 1st and August 31st in which I try to write my personal notes toki pona-first.

toki pona is a philosophical constructed language conceived in 2001. It is designed for talking about things by explaining them in simple concepts, with the total number of words in the language originally totaling 120. It has an active community of speakers, though, and as such it changes over time with use, like most natural languages: A lot of neologisms have been coined since Sonja Lang published the first toki pona book in 2014, and the original set of words has a variety of conventional and expanded meanings nowadays. In this project I have decided to mostly stick to the core set.

toki pona’s limited vocabulary means it works by using terms that occupy a vague semantic space and then clarifying context for the terms that one is using in separate sentences. This forces the speaker to challenge their assumptions about the purpose or identifiable characteristics of everything, combining introspection (analyzing one’s internal landscape) with communication (conveying it to external parties with their own set of signifiers and assumptions).

Let’s take pali [pi] ante toki as an example.

pi is a particle with a grouping grammatical function in clauses; it has no direct semantic translation, but it basically means that ante and toki operate together to apply to pali.

I could roughly translate pali pi ante toki as an effort to change thoughts, but that’s one of many ways to pin down the complete meaning of what I’m trying to express with these words. I want to convey that the project is something that takes energy, that is active, that serves a purpose, and that interfaces with something beyond myself. I want to express that the thing that is undergoing a sort of detangling isn’t just my thought patterns, internal and habitual, but also the ways in which I use language to convey them, the ways in which my language is used narratively and explores causality, and how I use language to interface with other people, whether that’s my internal thought process or the shapes it takes when expressed.

I want to clarify that it’s not that it’s tangled, as in, confusing, unusable, messy, but that the act of detangling is simply understanding what threads are the same and what are different, separating them for the purpose of weaving them again in different ways so that they may read as different, or produce different results, or adapt to different contexts more flexibly.

Thought untangling effort has a lot of assumptions attached. pali pi ante toki leaves room for ambiguity, which can be very enlightening.

Principles of pali pi ante toki

wile sona (curiosity)

Artistic consumption is a process that combines introspection and communication with the creator of the art, since creation and projection are also points of contact between someone’s subjectivity and the subjectivities of others. In this way, it’s just like communication in toki pona. I want to apply the cognitive disruption of toki pona grammar and vocabulary to my interpretation of the symbolic expressions of others’ subjectivities, but I need to strike a balance between challenge and enjoyment.

alasa luka (interfacing)

I want to make the baseline of enjoyment of this project personal, not social, which means that there will be a focus on expressing myself in toki pona.

awen pali (sustainability)

I want to see this project through; 3 months of routine is more than I’m used to keeping, and this principle is about making this routine easier on me in the long term as well as encouraging technological sustainability by making the site accessible, compatible and easily maintained.

Words used in pali pi ante toki

To avoid unnecessary bloat and make maintenance easier on myself, I’ll link to the list of core and common toki pona terms on Linku, a community dictionary that formally polls the toki pona speakers periodically to gauge how widespread usage of each word is.

Disclaimer about jan

I will be using it to refer to agents and use modifiers if it requires clarification for the species or role. As a head noun, it will refer to human beings. I have a preference for contextual head nouns, though, so the emphasis is on the agency rather than the species.

Proper names in toki pona are usually made out of a head noun and a modifier. A head noun is a word that expresses what kind of thing the modifier is or what function it serves, while the modifier is the proper name as one would understand it in English.

Usually the second part is phonetically transliterated into toki pona sounds, but I’ve decided to omit tokiponization in this project. In the following example, to showcase the usual format, I will tokiponize “America” as Mewika

There is an active debate among toki pona speakers on whether jan’s original definition as bound to humans (as homo sapiens) is in line with the philosophy behind toki pona and the implications about personhood being equated to humanity both as anthropocentric and in conversation with the dehumanization certain groups of humans experience.

I think it’s a very important conversation, and in toki pona-speaking spaces I avoid defaulting to jan as a head noun unless explicitly requested and generalize the audience as ale, sina/ona, ijo. For human fictional characters, unless their name in a specific sentence serves a purpose that would suit another head noun better, I will use a default jan for purely linguistic clarity.

Disclaimer about kili

While the standard widespread definition is simply “fruit,” “mushroom,” or the edible part of a plant, I find that the lack of terms to describe offspring without implying their youth or smallness in casual toki pona is a pain in the ass.

I think kili as the child/product/creation of mama (whether that mama is a plant, an animal, an intellect, or a machine) is a solid alternative.

Words omitted in pali pi ante toki