Skip to main content
Full-text links:


Current browse context:

new | recent | 1712

Change to browse by:

References & Citations


BibSonomy logo Mendeley logo Reddit logo ScienceWISE logo

Computer Science > Computers and Society

Title:Basic concepts and tools for the Toki Pona minimal and constructed language: description of the language and main issues; analysis of the vocabulary; text synthesis and syntax highlighting; Wordnet synsets

Abstract: A minimal constructed language (conlang) is useful for experiments and comfortable for making tools. The Toki Pona (TP) conlang is minimal both in the vocabulary (with only 14 letters and 124 lemmas) and in the (about) 10 syntax rules. The language is useful for being a used and somewhat established minimal conlang with at least hundreds of fluent speakers. This article exposes current concepts and resources for TP, and makes available Python (and Vim) scripted routines for the analysis of the language, synthesis of texts, syntax highlighting schemes, and the achievement of a preliminary TP Wordnet. Focus is on the analysis of the basic vocabulary, as corpus analyses were found. The synthesis is based on sentence templates, relates to context by keeping track of used words, and renders larger texts by using a fixed number of phonemes (e.g. for poems) and number of sentences, words and letters (e.g. for paragraphs). Syntax highlighting reflects morphosyntactic classes given in the official dictionary and different solutions are described and implemented in the well-established Vim text editor. The tentative TP Wordnet is made available in three patterns of relations between synsets and word lemmas. In summary, this text holds potentially novel conceptualizations about, and tools and results in analyzing, synthesizing and syntax highlighting the TP language.
Comments: Python and Vim scripts in this repository: this https URL
Subjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:1712.09359 [cs.CY]
  (or arXiv:1712.09359v3 [cs.CY] for this version)

Submission history

From: Renato Fabbri [view email]
[v1] Tue, 26 Dec 2017 18:43:32 UTC (422 KB)
[v2] Mon, 2 Jul 2018 14:10:05 UTC (460 KB)
[v3] Wed, 4 Jul 2018 00:18:33 UTC (461 KB)