How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language (2015)

Re:How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language... by sago on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @11:43PM (#14200276)

> agglutinative

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?

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Re:How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language... by mcphage on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @12:01AM (#14200343)

> 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).

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Re:How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language... by khedoros1 on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @01:53AM (#14200761)

Those languages also have more than 123 words. Sophistication implies complexity, and Toki Pona was designed to be simple, even to a fault.

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