toki pona has a reduced vocabulary. It builds more complex concepts that other languages have lexemes for as compounds, and these are somewhat standard, though more flexible than in other languages ('tomo tawa' is almost always the way to say 'car'). All languages do this, of course, e.g. a firefly / lightning bug, but toki pona does it more.
Most people would understand 'tomo tawa li utala e mi' to mean a car hit me, unless the context indicated otherwise (e.g. we're discussing trains). If it really mattered that it was a private passenger vehicle and not a bus, or some other kind of vehicle, you'd have to say more. But if I said 'I was hit by a vehicle', you wouldn't necessarily need to know exactly what kind. You would probably infer that I didn't mean an aircraft.
Part of the zen of toki pona is realising how little you need to specify.
And again, this happens to a lesser extent in other languages. You typically don't specify pronouns with Japanese verbs, relying on the context, with the occasional explicit pronoun as a topic marker (which Japanese language learners from, say, English, use much more often than native speakers).
Just don't think I can get as excited about adults wearing diapers for fun.
Maybe "tomo tawa kulupu" 'group travel space'
> train,
Maybe "tomo tawa linja" 'long stringy travel space' (or alternately "tomo tawa pi kiwen linja tu" 'travel space of two stringy solids')
> airplane,
I've previously used "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space'
> elevator,
Maybe "tomo tawa anpa" 'downward travel space'
> shipping container,
Maybe "tomo tawa esun" 'commercial travel space'
> bobsled...
Maybe "tomo tawa pi telo lete kiwen" 'hard cold water's travel space'
I'll also add that there's been some debate between "tomo tawa" 'travel building, travel space' and "ilo tawa" 'travel tool' for vehicles. I would certainly regard a bicycle as an ilo tawa because you don't enter inside of it. (A problem with "tomo tawa" is that "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space' is arguably ambiguous between an airport and an airplane!)
Although toki pona is super-bad for any kind of precision, you can often figure out how to express more than you might first think. :-)
That's the problem with all of these—they're all ambiguous. Which is fine if the person you're talking to knows which you mean, but when you're talking about something new, you have no way of actually making clear what you mean. It seems like the best you can do is reinvent agglutinative languages, badly.
?!
Do you really mean that?
All languages have compound lexemes. And all languages can use description to disambiguate.
The balance in toki pona is at a dramatically different point to English, which has a relatively large functional vocabulary. But it isn't a difference in kind. And most conlangs, in my experience, rely more on compounds than English.
The "Badly" at the end seems to drop your comment from curious bafflement to prejudice. Why would it be bad?
Because agglutinative languages have much more sophisticated systems and morphemes for expressing complicated ideas. This reads more like Mark Twain's satire about German (https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html).
I was just pointing out that your analogy with Perl was not a very fortunate one. What was being criticized about the language is that it is so simple that it needs too much composition to express ideas (which in my opinion should be the main goal of a language).
In your analogy, you make it look like if the problem was that this (hackernews? an internet forum? written language?) is not the right medium to communicate using Toki Pona, as a phone is not the right medium for Perl programs. My question is: what would the right medium be?
You should consider taking up Toki Pona as a hobby. You should try and take meeting notes in Toki Pona at work. You'll be surprised at what you find yourself thinking—even though you won't be able to use the notes in the way you would your normal notes.
In Brazil, even the formal word for 'thing' (coisa) became a verb (coisar), informally. Meaning you can 'coisar a coisa' (thing the thing). There's even an informal masculine version of 'thing' (coiso), which serves no purpose but to say 'coisa'.
Furthermore, regarding 'thing', one can also use 'troço' (which also means a useless person), 'treco', 'negócio' (business), and 'parada' (stop).
You don't.
So then how would you tell other people that you were struck by a car? Would you say you were hit by a "kiwen utala"? "I was hit by a hard object". Okay, does that mean a book fell on your head? Or someone bumped into you?
And if "towo tawa" is a "space used for movement", then how would you distinguish it between any of the other spaces used for movement, like a bus, train, airplane, elevator, shipping container, bobsled...
One of the values of a word like "car" is it can be used to refer to something independently of how it's being used, which is helpful when things can be used in more than 1 way, and you want people to understand you're talking about the same object in each case.