pali pi ante toki

2025/05/31

What is pali pi ante toki?

pali pi ante toki (or "Thought Untangling Effort") is a project I'm undertaking between June 1st and August 31st in which I try to write my personal notes toki pona-first.

toki pona's limited vocabulary means it works by using terms that occupy a vague semantic space and then clarifying context for the terms that one is using in separate sentences. This forces the speaker to challenge their assumptions about the purpose or identifiable characteristics of everything, combining introspection (analyzing one's internal landscape) with communication (conveying it to external parties with their own set of signifiers and assumptions).

Let's take pali [pi] ante toki as an example. pi is a particle with a grouping grammatical function in clauses; it has no direct semantic translation, but it basically means that ante and toki operate together to apply to pali.

pali: work, build, labor, action, task, function, project, effort, performance, behavior
ante: change, different, alter, modify, edit, transformation, distinction, another, adaptation, adjust
toki: communication, conversation, hello, thought, speech, language, discourse, dialogue, expression, story, answer

I could roughly translate pali pi ante toki as an effort to change thoughts, but that's one of many ways to pin down the complete meaning of what I'm trying to express with these words.

I want to convey that the project is something that takes energy, that is active, that serves a purpose, and that interfaces with something beyond myself. I want to express that the thing that is undergoing a sort of detangling isn't just my thought patterns, internal and habitual, but also the ways in which I use language to convey them, the ways in which my language is used narratively and explores causality, and how I use language to interface with other people, whether that's my internal thought process or the shapes it takes when expressed. I want to clarify that it's not that it's tangled, as in, confusing, unusable, messy, but that the act of detangling is simply understanding what threads are the same and what are different, separating them for the purpose of weaving them again in different ways so that they may read as different, or produce different results, or adapt to different contexts more flexibly.

Thought untangling effort has a lot of assumptions attached. pali pi ante toki leaves room for ambiguity, which can be very enlightening.

Principles of pali pi ante toki

wile sona (curiosity)

Artistic consumption is a process that combines introspection and communication with the creator of the art, since creation and projection are also points of contact between someone's subjectivity and the subjectivities of others. In this way, it's just like communication in toki pona. I want to apply the cognitive disruption of toki pona grammar and vocabulary to my interpretation of the symbolic expressions of others' subjectivities, but I need to strike a balance between challenge and enjoyment.

I don't want to rewrite analyses or analyze source materials that I'm currently so obsessed with that the metaphorical tangle of neural pathways is raw and overstimulated. I want this project to serve as an encouragement to watch and read things that I haven't experienced before or that I experienced a while ago because those are the pathways that are more susceptible to examination and in need of change: how to face the uncertain and how to uproot the certain.
I think the only way to engage with media that I'm currently interested in, at least in the ways intended for this project, has to be through transformative works. I don't want an excuse to revisit the source material, but I can see other fans' interpretations of the work and their own spins, which is a new subjectivity on the board. That's why fanfiction comments are something I want to encourage, since it's a good balance of familiar subjects and new forms.
I enjoy reading poetry, not analyzing it. Also, I feel like the translation of poetry is a very delicate art, and I'd much rather read the originals in the natural languages I know than focus on conceptualizing them in toki pona.
If I'm reading a technical or political text, I want to focus on understanding the concepts. The added pass of commenting on them in any way in a language that is meant to be auxiliary rather than a primary driver is a certain way to burn myself out.

alasa luka (interfacing)

I want to make the baseline of enjoyment of this project personal, not social, which means that there will be a focus on expressing myself in toki pona.

The main text of the entry (review, comment, journal) must be originally written in toki pona.
All annotations in English are for the purpose of recording my thought processes primarily for my own reference, and if shared will assume baseline toki pona knowledge from the abstract reader.
Proper names of people and places will not be phonetically tokiponized.

awen pali (sustainability)

I want to see this project through; 3 months of routine is more than I'm used to keeping, and this principle is about making this routine easier on me in the long term as well as encouraging technological sustainability by making the site accessible, compatible and easily maintained.

No indexed lists of pages until the project is over. I don't want to use a static site generator, which means I would have to handwrite every link list and tweak it any time I changed a link slug, and it would be simultaneously tedious and a very enticing time-waster. So I've decided I'm handwriting this code, and I'm just linking to the entries in the corresponding review, comment or post.
The palette must be high-contrast black-and-white and adapt to user-end dark mode and light mode preferences. All the colors are set with CSS variables so that they switch automatically, and the stylesheet can be easily modified to make your own palette. I also tend to get lost in the sauce when it comes to tweaking style over substance, and this is a way for me to avoid that pitfall.
No JavaScript to avoid bloat and ensure functionality in text-only interfaces
Semantic HTML structure and elements will be the primary components of the page to make navigation easier on screen readers and browsers' reading mode. All styling must be applied to these elements.

Words used in pali pi ante toki

To avoid unnecessary bloat and make maintenance easier on myself, I'll link to the list of core and common toki pona terms on Linku, a community dictionary that formally polls the toki pona speakers periodically to gauge how widespread usage of each word is.

Disclaimer about jan

I will be using it to refer to agents and use modifiers if it requires clarification for the species or role. As a head noun, it will refer to human beings. I have a preference for contextual head nouns, though, so the emphasis is on the agency rather than the species.

Proper names in toki pona are usually made out of a head noun and a modifier. A head noun is a word that expresses what kind of thing the modifier is or what function it serves, while the modifier is the proper name as one would understand it in English. Usually the second part is phonetically transliterated into toki pona sounds, but I've decided to omit tokiponization in this project. In the following example, to showcase the usual format, I will tokiponize "America" as Mewika

ma Mewika: (land, space, territory) America = USA, the country
jan Mewika: (person, human) America = American, a person that lives in the US or that is a citizen of the US

There is an active debate among toki pona speakers on whether jan's original definition as bound to humans (as homo sapiens) is in line with the philosophy behind toki pona and the implications about personhood being equated to humanity both as anthropocentric and in conversation with the dehumanization certain groups of humans experience. I think it's a very important conversation, and in toki pona-speaking spaces I avoid defaulting to jan as a head noun unless explicitly requested and generalize the audience as ale, sina/ona, ijo.

For human fictional characters, unless their name in a specific sentence serves a purpose that would suit another head noun better, I will use a default jan for purely linguistic clarity.

Disclaimer about kili

While the standard widespread definition is simply "fruit," "mushroom," or the edible part of a plant, I find that the lack of terms to describe offspring without implying their youth or smallness in casual toki pona is a pain in the ass. I think kili as the child/product/creation of mama (whether that mama is a plant, an animal, an intellect, or a machine) is a solid alternative.

Words omitted in pali pi ante toki

pu/ku/su, meta words for interacting with the Toki Pona books: I'm not here to write about toki pona, I'm here to write in toki pona. Sorry, jan Sonja.
jelo/laso/loje, terms for colors with a saturation value (yellow-ish, blue-ish, red-ish): I'm keeping walo (white, bright) and pimeja (black, dark), but I want to challenge myself to write about color without combining words that may specify a shade to avoid cultural associations and to convey visual information verbally in a way that honors the medium of words over image. To think of translation as not mere localization, if you will.
tonsi, a term to express the concept of gender non-conformity or trans genders, as well as genders outside of the man/woman binary: To me, gender is constructed and performed; it's something that you do or is done to you rather than something you are, some essence you possess. I find value in talking about trans identities in terms that aren't easily flattened into a modifier, and I want to avoid this shortcut to do justice to my own understanding and experience of my trans existence.

#blog #meta