Title: Basic concepts and tools for the Toki Pona minimal and constructed language: description of the language and main issues; analysis of the vocabulary; text synthesis and syntax highlighting; Wordnet synsets,
Abstract: A minimal constructed language (conlang) is useful for experiments and
comfortable for making tools. The Toki Pona (TP) conlang is minimal both in the
vocabulary (with only 14 letters and 124 lemmas) and in the (about) 10 syntax
rules. The language is useful for being a used and somewhat established minimal
conlang with at least hundreds of fluent speakers. This article exposes current
concepts and resources for TP, and makes available Python (and Vim) scripted
routines for the analysis of the language, synthesis of texts, syntax
highlighting schemes, and the achievement of a preliminary TP Wordnet. Focus is
on the analysis of the basic vocabulary, as corpus analyses were found. The
synthesis is based on sentence templates, relates to context by keeping track
of used words, and renders larger texts by using a fixed number of phonemes
(e.g. for poems) and number of sentences, words and letters (e.g. for
paragraphs). Syntax highlighting reflects morphosyntactic classes given in the
official dictionary and different solutions are described and implemented in
the well-established Vim text editor. The tentative TP Wordnet is made
available in three patterns of relations between synsets and word lemmas. In
summary, this text holds potentially novel conceptualizations about, and tools
and results in analyzing, synthesizing and syntax highlighting the TP language.