Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
surprisetalk · 2023-07-20
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Toki Pona is really neat!
Here's a great [unfinished] video guide:
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQwIDV7FBkA...
If the video tickles your interest, purchase the two official books:
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Toki-Pona-Language-Sonja-Lang/dp/0978...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Toki-Pona-Dictionary-Official/dp/0978...
I made some online flash cards and a baby sign language guide:
[3] https://taylor.town/tpbsl-flash-cards
[4] https://taylor.town/tpbsl-guide
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O kama e kulupu toki mi :)
Yes, this is how Toki Pona dictionaries work. For example, there is a surprisingly thick two-way English - Toki Pona dictionary, "ku", which includes more than 11k entries such as "tomo tawa" for "car" or "ilo kalama" for a radio. See https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51n8JCdFlQL.jpg or other images from https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978292367/
Note that as it is descriptive rather than proscriptive, each translation has a superscript indicating what fraction of English-speaking Toki Pona speakers used that particular translation when the book was written. I don't have my copy on hand but I recall that there was a community survey and Sonia Lang used some kind of scale such as 4 for a universally accepted meaning down to 1 or 1/2 as a highly idiosyncratic/fanciful translation only used by a small number of people.
I suspect if the language evolves some people may compress these further so that "tomo tawa" becomes "tomo-tawa" becomes "tomotawa" which may help with parsing written text. Perhaps fluent speakers do not have this problem, but I typically have to read a sentence more than once to parse it correctly.