Conlangs as Tools — Toki Pona and ten thought-experiment languages
Work-in-progress research. Edition v1.2; first written 2026-05-28, published here 2026-09-27. About 30,000 words across 24 files.
Directed and edited by Peter Kaminski. Briefs drafted by Doruga; deep dives researched and written by Freya bg-sphinx (Claude). See How This Was Built.
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© Peter Kaminski · CC-BY 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International)
Project files: this page · how this was built · the brief for the ten · Toki Pona deep dive · all files (.zip)
What this is
A deep dive into Toki Pona, and thence, ten thought-experiment languages — each one a small machine for paying attention to something English doesn’t make easy.
Sonja Lang’s Toki Pona is the seed. She built a language with ~120 words to find out what would still be sayable, and the answer turned out to be more than anyone expected. The ten that follow are not finished languages. They are what-if-vocabulary-could-train-attention sketches, written as if a designer were prototyping a thinking tool rather than founding a community.
Read it the way you would read someone else’s notebook: pick what you like, ignore the rest, chew on what surprises you.
This started as a gift for two friends, written in May 2026. It’s published because people keep asking about it — and because constrained languages turned out to be useful well beyond the gift. In Agents in Polyphony, five of these languages became instrument lenses for AI agents: a persona asks for a different mind; a constrained language refuses the default one.
Reading order
- The seed: Toki Pona — deep dive, what’s actually known about the language and its community; then the brief for the ten, the framing that sets up the ten new languages.
- Then the ten, in any order. Each language has a brief (the design move) and a deep dive (a worked instance — sometimes a lexicon, sometimes a story, sometimes a grammar sketch, depending on what fits).
The ten
| Language | The design move | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Taso | the language of what is not there | brief · deep dive |
| 2 | Kipona | every sentence is a timestamp | brief · deep dive |
| 3 | Ren | things are slowed-down verbs | brief · deep dive |
| 4 | Maku | one utterance, two readings | brief · deep dive |
| 5 | Sito | the hands know the words | brief · deep dive |
| 6 | Olu | the lexicon as cohort marker | brief · deep dive |
| 7 | Vesi | hold the seven before you choose | brief · deep dive |
| 8 | Korē | what you feel is what you say | brief · deep dive |
| 9 | Drosa | how you know is part of what you say | brief · deep dive |
| 10 | Hesi | words are expensive; spend them well | brief · deep dive |
What it is not
- Not a proposal that any of these should be built. They are design provocations.
- Not a claim about strong Sapir-Whorf. The ten are deliberately small and partial, in the spirit of Lang’s “language as instrument,” not “language as cage.”
- Not finished. Treat it as a compostable prototype. If something here is useful, pull it out and use it; if something is wrong, please say so.
Provenance
See How This Was Built. The short version: Pete asked, Doruga drafted the ten briefs in a single working session, a background Freya wrote the deep dives, Pete edited and is signing for the result. Three agents, one human, one gift.
Acknowledgments
To Sonja Lang, whose work is the actual gift and who has nothing to do with this remix. To the Toki Pona community, who have been more inventive with 120 words than most of us are with 60,000. To a friend whose work on what she calls “epistemic workflow” is the closest thing I have seen to a working theory of how language becomes a tool. To Christopher, who keeps asking the right question, which is almost always “what does the structure want?”
Changes
- v1.2 (2026-09-27) — Citation corrections from a link audit of every source. Replaced one link to a Wikipedia article that never existed (Sito). Corrected three labels that credited the wrong author or work (Vesi’s Oxford Handbook chapter is Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk’s; Ren’s Salish and Wakashan handout is Seth Cable’s; Drosa’s Aikhenvald link is Heiko Narrog’s review of her book). Updated a retitled arXiv paper (Toki Pona). Added archived copies beside two links that have since gone dead (Ren, Toki Pona).
- v1.1 (2026-07-02) — First distributed edition, with the copyright and license line.