There’s a daughter language called Ido that’s done away with gender, iirc. And I believe there’s some gender neutral ways to get around it in the community, but it’s been a long time since I’ve attempted to do anything with it

The whole idea behind it was radical unity, internationalism, and bringing disparate people together on equal footing. Instead of me speaking a language I’ve known since birth, and you speaking a language you are just capable of understanding, and both of us trying to plead our case to the government, the idea is that we would all have an auxiliary language to compliment (not replace) our mother tongues, and we would both be capable of making yourself understood equally.

Those ideals don’t really jive with hard nationalism and pseudoscientific ideas around superior races

Congratulations, you managed to get offended by a historical tidbit about a constructed language!

Oh, and pissing off fascists is always good. Period. Full stop. If you don’t think that’s true, perhaps it’s time for some introspection!

Haven’t heard of it.

Woa

Such a pretty language. I should learn it someday!

Mé fresin.

Yeah Ogham would be fucking awful for modern communication but I thought it’d be really funny. In a more serious sense I actually think it’d be super interesting to see how humans adapted to it and adapted it to their needs.

Anyway I also picked Gaeilge because it makes for great lyricism

Hey, can you translate this to English?

Because what Google gives me doesn’t make sense:

This self- Dutchifying culture apparently still has to look up to the language, while the main country is currently sliding further towards fascism.

This is only partially true. Very early on, this was the case - Chinese characters started as pictograms representing objects and concepts. But this was fairly limiting in how much complexity you could capture without creating an unmanageably large set of unique pictograms. So the system evolved to use compound characters (characters made up of 2 or more components) incorporating phonetic (i.e. pronunciation) information into the writing system.

Most Chinese characters used in past 2000 years are made up of parts related to their meaning or category of meaning, and parts related to the pronunciation of the spoken word they represent (at least at some point in time, typically in Old Chinese) - these are called phono-semantic compound characters. The first comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters that was created almost 2000 years ago already classified over 80% of all characters as phono-semantic compounds. This percentage also went up over time in later dictionaries as new compound characters were still being added.

As an example the character for book (書) - is made up of 2 parts, the semantic part is 聿 (brush - in its original form a literal picture of a hand holding a brush) on top (so the word is related to writing or painting), and 者 on the bottom (the meaning of 者 is not important here (it was a picture of a mouth eating sugarcane originally, but lost this meaning long time ago), but 者 in Old Chinese was pronounced similar to the Old Chinese spoken word for book, so it serves a purely phonetic function here)

When Chinese writing was adopted in Japan, it wasn’t really used to write Japanese - it was used to write Classical Chinese. Literate people would translate from Japanese to Chinese (which they would have been fluent in) and write it down in Classical Chinese grammar and vocabulary, not spoken Japanese grammar. They could also read it back and translate on the fly into spoken Japanese for Japanese speaking audience. They also brought in the Chinese pronunciation of the Characters into Japanese (in fact several different versions of this over time - see Go-on, Kan-on, etc.) so the phonetic hints in the characters were still useful when learning the system.

Attempting to write spoken Japanese using Chinese characters was difficult, initially they would actually use Chinese characters stripped of their meaning to represent Japanese syllables. These were later simplified to become modern kana

Spoken Chinese itself evolved beyond the monosyllabic written Classical Chinese (which remained quite rigid), so for a long time, Chinese also wrote essentially in a different language from how they spoke. It was only fairly recently that vernacular Chinese began to be written (rather than Classical Chinese) with it’s polysyllabic words (most words in modern Chinese have 2 or more syllables, and require 2 or more characters to write, further distancing modern words from the original simple pictogram meanings)

So while the idea of some kind of universal abstract concept representation divorced from phonetics sounds intriguing, in practice it is a poor way to capture the complexity and nuance of spoken languages, and all languages (including Chinese) that attempted to adopt it ended up having to build various phonetic hints and workarounds to make the system actually useful and practical for writing.

China has an extremely high literacy rate, so the difficulty in learning the system is, at least, provably surmountable.

The strength of being able to unite communication historically across East Asia and potentially around the world is a pretty big plus. Offering such a strength impossible in other systems, ideograms are hardly equivalent to imperial units.

I stopped believing in toki pona when I heard somebody say that “watermelon” would be “kili telo” (fruit [of] water). It goes without saying that “kili telo” would not be understood as “watermelon” unless they had heard it in English before, or heard someone use the English-derived “kili telo”.
If you’re going to use English-language ideas to form words, then English is a prerequisite language for speaking toki pona, and toki pona becomes useless.

I think if toki pona is developed as you describe, it could be much more useful than it is today.

Isn’t toki pona supposed to be an art language?

Is Esperanto similar to what you’re talking about?