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 film
reviews , fanfic comments , and tarot notes in toki pona.
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. I've linked to that
core set of words (as well as listed the words I have removed from it and why) in the Vocabulary page.
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 .
pali: work, build, labor, action, task, function, project, effort,
performance, behavior ante: change, different, alter, modify, edit, transformation, distinction,
another, adaptation, adjust toki: communication, conversation, hello, thought, speech, language,
discourse, dialogue, expression, story, answer
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.