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Radio-Canada interview (Le réveil) |
Radio-Canada, première chaîne (Atlantique)
Michel Doucet, host of Le réveil, interviews Sonja Elen Kisa about Toki Pona
August 27, 2007
MP3 audio file in French (13:41, 15.2 MB)
English translation by Sonja Elen Kisa
| Michel (0:00): | It's 9:33 a.m in the Maritimes, 10:03 a.m. in Newfoundland. You're still listening to Le réveil on Monday, August 27, 2007. My name is Michel Doucet. Discovering a new language that consists of only 120 words. I mean this literally, because it's not that easy to imagine. That's what I invite you to discover with the woman who originally designed the Toki Pona language, Sonja Elen Kisa. She's from Moncton. She'll tell us what it's all about, right after this song by Dumas. Here's Fixer le temps. |
| [Musical interlude cut out] | |
| Michel (0:39): | Sonja Elen Kisa, we already know that you're a language enthusiast, but why did you invent your own language? |
| Sonja (0:47): | Well, I've always been a creative person. I love combining the ideas running through my head. There's always something stirring up in my mind. I've studied dozens of different languages. For me, inventing a new language wasn't really an effort. It's something that came to me pretty naturally. In all the ideas that I accumulated in the various languages I had learned, I often saw many patterns, universal features, or similarities between different languages. I created this language, Toki Pona, by combining various different things that were universal to plenty of different languages. |
| Michel (1:32): | We'll come back to that later with some examples... |
| Sonja (1:34): | Sure. |
| Michel (1:34): | ...which you'll explain to us. So is it that you want to bring humanity together, in other words, a universal language to unite men and women? Is there also a bit of that in your approach? |
| Sonja (1:47): | A bit. The main theme of the language, I would say, is one of minimalism. It's really a Zen language, you could say, something very simple. For example, if you take a fraction like 414/828, what does that mean? A mathematician could ask himself this question and realize, "Oh OK , it's one half. It's not that complicated. It's really just one half." I followed the same process in my language. I looked at the universe around me, and I tried to find the real meaning of things by simplifying complex ideas into combinations of simpler ones. |
| Michel (2:31): | This gives roughly 120 words... |
| Sonja (2:33): | Yup. |
| Michel (2:34): | 14 basic sounds, 9 consonants, 5 vowels... |
Sonja (2:37): |
Yup, that's right. |
| Michel (2:38): | Somebody might say, 120 words, that seems pretty simple, really. |
| Sonja (2:42): | Yes, exactly. |
| Michel (2:43): | But you also have to know that these words can mean different things depending on the context that they're being used in. |
| Sonja (2:48): | Exactly. So a word like, I don't know, supa, which means "surface", could be used for a table, a bed, a couch or a desk. The word can have many contexts. So if I say supa lape, which means sleeping surface, then it becomes clear. It's a bed. Or supa monsi, a surface for the behind, then it's a chair, for example. Just to give you a few examples. |
| Michel (3:21): | I found another one here, insa. |
| Sonja (3:24): | Yes. Yes. |
| Michel (3:25): | Am I pronouncing it correctly? |
| Sonja (3:26): | Yeah! That's correct. |
| Michel (3:27): | It can mean inside, interior, centre, but also stomach! |
| Sonja (3:31): | Yup, that's right. In other words, the internal organs. |
| Michel (3:34): | [laughs] That's pretty fascinating. |
| Sonja (3:35): | Yeah. It could also be a womb. When you say a woman is pregnant, she has a baby inside. |
| Michel (3:42): | You've studied dozens of languages. You speak several fluently, I might add. |
| Sonja (3:46): | Yup. I speak, well, French is my native language, or rather Chiac, I should say. [a dialect of Acadian French mixed heavily with Maritimer English, spoken in southeastern New Brunswick] |
| Michel (3:52): | It doesn't show! [The interview was being held in standard French, and most Chiac-speakers have difficulty speaking standard French without language interference.] |
| Sonja (3:53): | Well we're on radio right now, so I'm using standard French. But if I'm talking to my family, I use Chiac. Having grown up in Moncton, English has also been with me since my childhood. I did a bit of Spanish at Mathieu-Martin High School. I learned Esperanto at the age of 16. I'm 28 now, so it's been 12 years that I speak Esperanto. |
| Michal (4:20): | Did Esperanto inspire you, the kind of language that it is, along the whole process that led you to create Toki Pona? |
| Sonja (4:37): | Well, yes and no. Maybe the biggest inspiration with Esperanto is to see that... uhm, let me put it this way. Toki Pona is not really related to Esperanto, but the idea that you can create a language, and that the idea can really take off, and that there can be hundreds of people speaking the language, it really shows that yes, it's possible. It's an artform. It's a culture you can create and develop. |
| Michel (4:54): | Regardless of their language, how do people react when you tell them, "I've created a language." |
| Sonja (4:59): | It's interesting, because I don't really do much advertising for the language myself. I'm not usually the one who brings it up first. It's often somebody else who says, "Hey, did you know that Sonja created a language?" and then I have to explain what it's all about. But, I think most people are a bit curious, because it's not that often you hear about that. I think a lot of people, when they're young, maybe when they were kids, liked to play around and invent new words, new sounds. I think everybody has a creative spirit like this inside them, but it's not often that a constructed language blossoms like this and has hundreds or thousands of people interested in it. |
| Michel (5:43): | This interview with Sonja Elen Kisa will continue shortly. First, let's hear a song by Françine Poitras. She sang in the original version of Saltimbanco by Cirque du Soleil, in a language that she invented. |
| [Musical interlude cut out] | |
| Michel (6:03): | Was it or is it ultimately your goal that as many people as possible speak Toki Pona around the world? |
| Sonja (6:10): | Not necessarily. The basic inspiration for Toki Pona was very simple philosophies, Eastern thoughts like Taoism or Zen. So my goal is not really to take over the world with my language. It's just to be present in the here and now. And if somebody shows up in my moment and wants to learn the language, then I can share it with them. I would say it's a rather humble language. |
| Michel (6:39): | You called it a Zen or minimalist language. Some people even call it a form of yoga for the mind. |
| Sonja (6:45): | Yeah, that's a good way to call it. |
| Michel (6:48): | I should also mention that this language is now taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, isn't that right? |
| Sonja (6:54): | Yeah, that's true. There's a Toki Pona activity that takes place at MIT every year. It's not part of the official curriculum, but there's a sort of extra program for people who want to increase or expand their knowledge in various fields. |
| Michel (7:13): | I'm also told that there are or were night classes in Russia. |
| Sonja (7:16): | Yeah, it's a bit all over the world, in Europe, in Russia... |
| Michel (7:22): | But, you... |
| Sonja (7:23): | It really surprised me. When I created the language, it was a bit of a personal exploration for myself. I was looking for the meaning of the universe. I was suffering from depression, and often when you suffer from depression, and even when you don't have depression, you look for the meaning of life and where you are. And so I looked at the complexity of the modern life we live in and tried to simplify ideas into smaller parts, to go back to the achetypes, the primitive ideas that all modern things come from. I tried to touch all those universal aspects, and maybe that's why many people around the world are interested in Toki Pona, because you can really interpret in it what you want. |
| Michel (8:10): | As you said earlier, it's not really you who necessarily does the advertising for the language yourself. |
| Sonja (8:16): | No, not really. No. |
| Michel (8:17): | So how did it end up in Russia? Just by chance or...? |
| Sonja (8:20): | Well, at some point in time, some people, some active fans took up the language, decided it was good idea, and then told their friends, who themselves told their friends about it, and so on. There's also been a lot of coverage in the media. For example, since you mentioned Russia, there's an article that was published in a computer science magazine, Computerra, in Russia several years ago. That generated a lot of interest within Russia. It's an article about the speed of thought, how to change your thinking. Toki Pona was cited as an example of how to optimize your thoughts towards a simpler state of mind. |
| Michel (9:04): | With 120 words, is it a language that's easy to understand in writing? Can you read it as easily as you would understand it [orally], assuming of course that one already knows the language? |
| Sonja (9:14): | Yeah. |
| Michel (9:15): | Does intonation or oven gestures come into play at a certain point? |
| Sonja (9:18): | Well, every language, every culture has somewhat different ways of intonating. But when I wrote the language, I included several basic rules. For example, there is a rule stating that the first syllable of every word is stressed, for example, TO-ki PO-na. So there's a rule for that. But other than this, it's fairly free. When I chose my 14 sounds, the only sounds that would exist in Toki Pona, I chose them very carefully to be universal sounds. For example, I made sure it didn't have both L and R, because there are some languages for whom these sounds are a bit too similar, so there is only L. For example, the French vowel sound [y] is not used, as it poses problems for English-speakers, so there only [u]. |
| Michel (10:06): | It's written "u" but it's pronounced "ooh". |
| Sonja (10:08): | Yeah, exactly. |
| Michel (10:09): | Do you have many speakers? Do you often have conversations in Toki Pona? |
| Sonja (10:13): | Yes, well, nowadays all kinds of crazy ideas like Toki Pona enjoy a great deal of success on the Internet obviously. There are places where you can go chat in Toki Pona. There are forums to discuss in or about Toki Pona. There's also been a conference this year and last year — this year was the second one — about constructed languages. There were lecturers that spoke about Toki Pona. It's a bit everywhere. There's people in various cities organizing Toki Pona gatherings with their friends. |
| Michel (10:55): | Recently the Robert French dictionary, in its 41st edition I believe, has added some new words that are now accepted in French. With Toki Pona, it's 120. Is it limited to 120? |
| Sonja (11:08): | Yes, well it's not a limit. It's an approximation. I think if you currently look on the Toki Pona website, languageofgood.com or simply tokipona.org, there are about 119 or 120 words. |
| Michel (11:27): | More words could be added later on. It's not... |
| Sonja (11:28): | Oh yeah, I you have to be careful. I have to be pretty conservative, because it's a slippery slope. If a certain word is added for this, and another word added for that, the language could easily lose its original goal of being focused on the centre, on what is universal. It's possible to express a great deal of things with just the basic words, and that's really the practice of Toki Pona, to express the most using the least. There's a certain elegance. But currently there are many people interested in Toki Pona. There's hundreds of people who are asking me questions, who want more information. So I am in the process of writing a book about Toki Pona that thoroughly explains everything, all the rules, all the words, with some comics too, a music CD to throw a bit of fun in there. |
| Michel (12:27): | When might this project, the book, the CD, be released? |
| Sonja (12:29): | Well, there's no official date, but I imagine I'll be done some time next year, in 2008 maybe. |
| Michel (12:36): | What are your ambitions, Sonja Elen Kisa, with regards to Toki Pona? |
| Sonja (12:39): | With regards to Toki Pona? I don't think I have any. Really, my only ambition would be to finish the book, to manage to express with clarity how the language works, how to express yourself correctly in the language and to provide information to the Toki Pona-speaking community. |
| Michel (13:00): | Sonja Elen Kisa, I looked in my word list but couldn't find the expression "thank you". |
| Sonja (13:04): | Ah, it's pona! |
| Michel (13:06): | pona! |
| Sonja (13:06): | Yeah, which means "good", but also means "thank you" when you want to wish someone well. |
| Michel (13:11): | P-O-N-A. |
| Sonja (13:12): | Yup! |
| Michel (12:13): | Sonja Elen Kisa, pona! |
| Sonja (13:15): | Thank you! |
| Michel (13:17): | To obtain further information, there are two addresses: languageofgood.com and www.tokipona.org. Thanks again to Sonja Elen Kisa, who was born in Moncton and graduated in 1996 from Mathieu-Martin High School in Dieppe. |
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