"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler"
-Albert Einstein
Tokaja is a spoken language designed to be simple to learn. It achieves this by making each of its words sound familiar to the most people possible.
It only has around 360 words. Concepts which would be expressed in a single word in other languages, are expressed in Tokaja with a phrase. Unnecessary details are left out, but can be added with further phrases.
The collection of letters/sounds (the "word-form") to represent a given concept is chosen by what would be recognisable to the most people globally. Each word has been translated into the top 20 or so most widely-spoken languages, and the word-form that:
- occurs for the most people, while
- being recognisable when converted to Tokaja's phonology
is chosen.
This is not necessarily always the word from a single language with many speakers. due to the shared history of some languages, and also due to cultural cross-pollination (both in our modern world and historically), many languages with relatively fewer speakers individually may collectively have enough speakers to "out-vote" other language(s) with more speakers.
Tokaja is a language that aims to be as easy to learn as possible, for as many people as possible. It does this with the following design:
- Accessible Phonology: Tokaja only has 13 sounds, each of which almost everyone already knows how to pronounce
- Small Lexicon Tokaja only has a total of 360 words in it; few enough to remember, many enough to express fine distinctions and concepts
- Small grammar a relatively simple, well-defined grammar. No conjugation!
- Recognisable vocabulary for many: most word-forms (how they're spelled and spoken) are recognisable to the most number of people possible, by comparing the word in the top-25 most spoken lnaugages across the world.