Tula: Evil Toki Pona (pt. 1)

i haven't like formally learned linguistics so some terms might be off - this is based off of a textbook i got at goodwill and a thirst for chaos.

so if you're the type of person to read my blog, you're at least probably somewhat aware of toki pona. the 'good language', like one hundredish words, and very interpretive. like most of my bad ideas, this started with a "what if". in this case: what if i made a language with a very small lexeme but made the conjugation and compound words so fucked it could carry as much meaning as possible? of course, this likely wont be a pracitcal language but eh, who cares

i started with the world building aspect. i wanted this language to belong to a tribal society (part of a larger worldbuilding project), and one of the concepts i played around with was no I pronoun. instead, you would talk about we as a tribe, as the tribe sort of functioned as an organism that worked together. there would be a you, however, so the pronouns i set out were: we, you, you pl, he, she, 3rd gen, animal gender, object gender, person unknown, animal unknown, object unknown, and then a dual world/dummy pronoun, just for fun.

it should be noted at this point in time i hate myself. i made unique conjugations for every single pronoun and sometimes different conjugations on a verb by verb basis, with, of course, irregular conjugation every now and then. the language's lexeme is also ambiguous to word form, and as it follows a strict SOV order, word form is determined by placement in sentence.

we chillin so far?

Let's make an example sentence to understand what's going on so far. ma menatibek natiam. "We ate all of the food". The word 'ma' is the word for 'we'. Pretty simple. "Menatibek" is made up of "me-", "nati", and "-bek". "Nati" is the root word for food, which is the object of the sentence. "Me-" is a suffix that means the (conjugated in the object gender), and "-bek" is a size suffix that means all (The size suffixes are "-bene", "-beto", "-bel", "-bevi", and "-bek", for "none", "a little", "an average", "a lot", and "all" respectively). Finally, "natiam" is made up of "nati" and "-am". Nati as previously mentioned means food, and in this context is a verb, which implies eating. The "-am" signifies that it is "we" who did the eating. This situation in theory allows pro-drop (we don't need to say ma at the beginning since it's already conjugated), but because of the strict SOV order, it becomes harder to understand, especially when we get to insertion. in casual speak, you could still probably drop the ma and have it be understood.

now here's the thing about languages that require a lot of interpretation. all we know is that the concept of food has been verbed here. that could mean eating, but it could also mean, say, cooking. there are two ways to address this.

number one is context in response to a question. I could ask le menati lanidalgi, in which case responding ma menatibek natiam would recontextualize to mean "we cooked all of the food". Oh yeah, let's break down le menati lanidalgi real quick. "le" is you, and in verbs, the suffix is (usually) "-al" (see lanidalgi). You know what "menati" means. "lanid" means creation (or in this case, to create), conjugated with "-al" to mean "you create". "-gi" is an emotion particle signifying a question. Easy, right? Now since you're asking if you(subject) made(verb) the food(object), the response will probably be about if it was made/cooked.

the second way to address this if there's no question is to use what i'm calling insertion. this is the way you add more complexity to the sentence. let's say i want to say "we ate the food that came from the animal". since Tula tries its hardest to follow the SOV order, how would you achieve the added information?

lets go back to the sentence "we ate the food", in tula, ma menati natiam (-bek suffix removed for now). Now "menati" (the food) came from an animal, so lets after "menati", lets write "hu ohi medabhi cawidomhi", making the full sentence ma menati hu ohi medabhi cawidomhi natiam. That seems normal right? Okay lets break it down

"hu" starts the insertion. putting "hu" after any word creates a sentence within a sentence (this can be layered). "Ohi" is the object pronoun, so putting it after "menati" means it refers to the food. The object in our inserted sentence, "medabhi" is the word for animal. Well, it's the word for being conjugated with the animal gender noun suffix. You know, normal stuff. Then finally, our verb in the sentence is "cawidomhi", or just "cawi", conjugated in object gender, meaning it (object) originates from. So our inserted sentence is it (food) originates from being (animal). "-omhi" is a pretty obvious suffix and even with less obvious ones, it is typical to drop pronouns in inserted sentences. we can say "we ate the food that came from the animal" in tuli by saying ma menati hu medabhi cawidomhi natiam, which is like three less words. amazing, right?

using some really helpful modifiers, we can turn a really small lexeme into large sentences. for example the prefix "i-", which negates or creates the opposite of. i could say ga ohi lanidaga (he makes it), or i could say ga ohi ilanidaga (he breaks it). by adding on modifiers to verbs, even more information can be conveyed. ga ohibevi ilanidagazhen[woah compound word!] would mean "he breaks most of it" and the "-zhen" suffix means the speaker feels negatively about that. look at that, built in tone tags!

those tags btw also function as adjectives. adjectives aren't their own category, and more are built off of size, emotion, and time suffixes as well as others. there are tenses too, based off of the root word "vereji" for the concept of time. you got ruju, rujen, reji, rejol, reke, rejen, and reg for long ago, in the past, recently, right now, soon, in the future, and far in the future respectively. they function as such: ma laj tanam hu reke (we will go soon).

actually, that sentence introduces some new concepts so lets break that down as well. "ma laj tanam" is pretty straightforward, just with some new words. "ma" of course means "we", with "tanam" being move (tan) conjugated with we (-am). "laj" functions as a dummy pronoun, since the sentence is not specifying a location that is being gone to. "hu reke" is an irregular insertion. "hu", of course, is an insertion particle, the insertion affecting "tanam", and reke simply means "soon" as a time word.

now look at that! with only six words (and 13 pronouns+conjugations per word in each form + like 30 modifiers that we will ignore when counting words) we can basically talk about anything a small tribe could need to talk about, from migration patterns (tanbek hu rereben) to how large an animal that you cooked for food was.

this is pt. 1 of this blog post. as the language evolves pt.2 and maybe 3 might come out. anyways, enjoy!

back to top

Flag Counter