32 lines
1.2 KiB
Markdown
32 lines
1.2 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Parsing Toki Pona
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date: 2019-07-21
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---
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# Parsing Toki Pona
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Language is annoyingly complicated. English in particular is a nightmare. English
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is so hard to understand that humans regularly fail to figure out what other
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humans are saying in it. Even if they are native speakers of English, which
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usually have a bit of an easier time figuring this stuff out.
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What if there was a language that had less going on? What if it was simple enough
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that we could have a _computer_ tokenize, parse and understand it? This post is
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an attempt to show that [Toki Pona](http://tokipona.org) is a potential candidate
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for this.
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Toki Pona is a constructed/planned language created by the professional translator
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Sonja Lang as an attempt to try to break things down to their core essence. Toki
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Pona is tiny (only about 120 words depending on who you ask), requiring only a
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few days to learn and a month or two to master. Because there are so few words,
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many ideas or concepts that normally span multiple words in languages like
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English are represented in only one Toki Pona word.
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- basic grammar
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- tokenization
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- implementation in Nim
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-
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- talk about future parsing into phrases
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- structure of phrase
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- implementation in Nim
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