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Comment by leipert | Hacker News Reader

Oh. Toki Pona is fun. I learned it a while back and the limited set of vocabulary really leads to two things:

a) Local dialects, similar to sign-languages. e.g. "good fruit" might mean "mango" in one Toki Pona community or "apple" in another

b) It felt kind of freeing, because a lot of words convey a very broad concept. It is actually really interesting to talk about certain emotions, because "a bad day" is "a bad day" and one doesn't really need to go into specifics into _what exact kind of bad_ in order to be consoled by the other person. This is not super helpful if you need a problem solved or need to describe what kind of pain you feel to a doctor, but just for the every-day venting it was kinda nice.

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I was reading somewhere that most Americans have an extremely limited working vocabulary of emotions. For instance "I feel bad" can mean guilt, disappointment, abandonment, sickness etc etc.

There are dozens and dozens of possible emotion words but very few actually used in practice, which supposedly limits people's ability to introspect and manage their emotions.

"English is easy - only 26 letters!"

If you’re reading, the capitals are different, so that’s 52 letters. In the real world you may encounter cursive, so that’s 52 more letters.

So to read English, you’re looking at 104 distinct characters, and that’s before you discuss diphthongs and digraphs.

eh, I don't know. Cursive is pretty rare nowadays. You also in my opinion do not really need the capital letters, and many of them look like their lowercase counterparts, but I take your point. I definitely think English can be tricky to learn, though, and feel lucky to speak it natively given that it is the lingua franca in many (perhaps most) contexts.

How many fonts are there? A couple hundred? Plus bold and italics.

There is some common base though.

E.g.: If you’ve seen the letter “o” in one variant, you’ve seen it in other variants too.

I don't think letters being in cursive is semantically important. Letter case is, somewhat.

I think Cyrillic doesn't even have letter-case, which I've often found interesting.

But it does. Most of the lower case letters are simply very similar to the larger upper case ones. Upper case, or majuscule, is used as the initial letter of a sentence and for proper nouns just as in English. At least that's what Wikipedia says.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets, https://learnrussianstepbystep.com/en/capitalization-in-russ..., etc.

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