Ikigai Daily
Menu
StillnessLanguage insight

Toki Pona is a language invented by the Canadian linguist Sonja Lang and first shared online in 2001, and it gets by with only about 120 to 140 core words. Speakers build everything else by combining them: a friend, for example, is a 'good person'.

Toki Pona: The Language of Good, 2014

LanguageMindPhilosophy

The story behind the card

Lang created Toki Pona partly to simplify her own thinking during a hard period in her life, drawing on Taoist ideas of simplicity. The name means 'good language' or 'simple language'. Most words carry several related meanings: 'moku' covers food, eating and drinking. The word count varies because Lang's 2014 book, Toki Pona: The Language of Good, listed about 120 words, and a 2021 dictionary based on how speakers actually use the language added more. Toki Pona has a small but lively community online, and in 2022 it received its own code, 'tok', in the international ISO list of languages.

Türkçe oku
Toki Pona, Kanadalı dilbilimci Sonja Lang'in icat edip 2001'de internette paylaştığı bir dildir ve yalnızca 120-140 kadar temel sözcükle idare eder. Geri kalan her şey bu sözcükler birleştirilerek anlatılır: Örneğin arkadaşa “iyi insan” denir.
Toki Pona: The Language of Good, 2014

Lang, Toki Pona'yı biraz da hayatının zor bir döneminde kendi düşüncelerini sadeleştirmek için yarattı; Taoculuğun sadelik anlayışından da esinlendi. Dilin adı “iyi dil” ya da “sade dil” demektir. Sözcüklerin çoğu birbirine yakın birkaç anlam taşır: “Moku” hem yiyecek hem yemek yemek hem de içmek anlamına gelir. Sözcük sayısının kesin olmamasının nedeni şu: Lang'in 2014'te yayımladığı Toki Pona: The Language of Good adlı kitapta 120 kadar sözcük vardı; 2021'de konuşanların dili gerçekte nasıl kullandığına dayanan bir sözlük bunlara yenilerini ekledi. Toki Pona'nın internette küçük ama canlı bir topluluğu var; 2022'de uluslararası ISO dil listesinde “tok” koduyla kendine ait bir yer edindi.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Toki Pona
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

StillnessLanguage

The Japanese saying ichi-go ichi-e, roughly 'one time, one meeting', comes from the tea ceremony: every gathering is unique and can never be repeated exactly, even when the same people meet again.

The idea goes back to the sixteenth-century tea master Sen no Rikyū. His student Yamanoue Sōji wrote that guests should treat their host as if the meeting could happen only once in a lifetime. In 1858 Ii Naosuke, a tea master who was also the shogun's chief minister, fixed the four-character phrase in a book on tea, noting that even the same host and guests could never recreate a past gathering. Today it is used far beyond the tea room, as a reminder to value each encounter.

Ichi-go ichi-eRead card
StillnessLanguage

'Nice' comes, through French, from Latin nescius, 'not knowing'. When it entered English around 1300 it meant foolish or ignorant, and it passed through senses such as timid, fussy and precise before 'pleasant' became established in the 18th century.

Dictionaries date the steps roughly like this: foolish and timid by about 1300, fussy in the late 1300s, delicate around 1400, precise in the 1500s (still heard in 'a nice distinction'), agreeable from 1769 and kind from about 1830. Old senses lingered beside new ones, and the Oxford English Dictionary notes that in many 16th- and 17th-century texts it is hard to tell which one a writer meant. Linguists call a rise from a bad meaning to a good one amelioration; the reverse, pejoration, happened to 'silly', which in Old English meant happy or blessed. Jane Austen caught the new 'nice' spreading. In Northanger Abbey, published in 1817, Henry Tilney teases Catherine Morland for calling a Gothic novel 'the nicest book in the world', remarking that the word now 'does for everything'.

Merriam-WebsterRead card
DriveLanguage

Ikigai is a Japanese word that joins iki, 'life', with kai, 'worth' or 'benefit'. It names whatever makes life feel worth living, and for many people in Japan that is something everyday rather than a grand purpose: a garden, grandchildren, a daily walk.

The psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya wrote the best-known study of the idea, Ikigai ni Tsuite (On the Meaning of Life), published in 1966. Much of it grew out of her years working with leprosy patients at the Nagashima Aiseien sanatorium, people cut off from society who still found reasons to live. Japanese researchers have since linked a sense of ikigai with better health in later life. The popular four-circle diagram joining what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for is a later Western addition: in 2014 the writer Marc Winn put the word ikigai at the centre of an existing purpose diagram by Andrés Zuzunaga.

Japanese psychologyRead card
StillnessProverbs

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata: what is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.

This whakataukī, or Māori proverb, from New Zealand is often spoken at gatherings, in schools and in speeches. It is traditionally credited to Meri Ngaroto, a 17th-century woman of the Te Aupōuri tribe in the far north, as the end of a longer saying that asks where the bellbird would sing if the heart of the flax plant were torn out. Repeating 'he tangata' three times is a Māori way of speaking for emphasis.

Māori whakataukīRead card
StillnessCulture

Inemuri, often translated as 'sleeping while present', is the Japanese custom of dozing in a meeting or other social or work setting while still counting as part of it. It is not simply any sleep in public: the sleeper is expected to stay ready to rejoin the situation.

The word is written 居眠り, from 'i', to be present, and 'nemuri', sleep. Brigitte Steger, a Cambridge scholar of Japanese society who has written widely about sleep in Japan, describes it as governed by unwritten rules. The higher someone's status, the more acceptable it is: a senior manager or a member of parliament nodding off in a long session can even be read as a sign of dedication, of someone who has worked to exhaustion, while a junior employee has far less licence. The sleeper should keep a proper posture and stay socially 'present', ready to respond if addressed. It is common on crowded commuter trains, but it is a tolerated custom, not an official workplace virtue.

InemuriRead card
Next card in the archiveThe Armenian alphabet was created around 405 CE by Mesrop Mashtots, a monk and scholar, so that the Bible and church services could be written in Armenian rather than in Greek or Syriac. It is still in use today.Read next →