my general philosophy of language & toki pona
I think I disagree with toki pona philosophically speaking. In my own philosophy of language I think languages should be maximalist and not minimalist.
I think human languages are an abstraction for the purposes of easier expression and I think that making the abstraction too minimalist, stripping it down to the barest of essentials strips the fun out of a very important form of human expression (constructed or otherwise).
I'll note here that this doesn't mean I dislike toki pona or think it shouldn't exist, it has every right to exist as any other language. I just disagree with the stated philosophy of the language's creator and therefore the language that they created.
my general philosophy of language & toki pona
I'll also note that philosophy and linguistics are not topics I'm an expert in any way so these are lightly held opinions and as such I'm open to hearing people's thoughts on it and I may change my mind about it as a result.
my general philosophy of language
to elaborate a little bit more, there are certain language maximalist tendencies that I think are asinine - for example - gendered nouns - I think we should get rid of that concept.
my general philosophy of language
@packetcat gendered nouns are problematic but the more general form—“noun classes”—can be kind of cool
indo-european languages settled on two classes, tied to natural gender—boring
but some languages have as many as 12, and some distinctions are a lot more meaningful—animate versus inanimate, for example (English has this in “it” versus singular “they”)
compare measure words—i’m glad we say “a drop of water”, not “a piece of water”, even tho there’s no reason for it—noun classes are just a further level of grammaticalization on top of this concept
but tying it to natural gender is silly; they should have not done that (there is evidence that the original distinction was “concrete” VS “abstract”)
my general philosophy of language
@packetcat wikipedia has lots of examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class
my general philosophy of language
@Lady TIL about noun classes!