Today I gave my first attempt at actually learning a bit of toki pona. I already knew it was a language from a while ago watching some youtube videos, but today I decided to see how it looks like. I was pleasantly surprised to know the vocab was based off of multiple languages around the world, which personally already makes me more fond of it than esperanto, which heavily based itself off of European languages, most influenced by romance languages. It was never fit to be a universal language in the first place (my opinion).
Toki pona however, wasn't constructed to be one in the first place. It's mostly a trial to see how minimal of a language can we make, in a way that it's still functional (seems like nowadays it has about ~137 words in overall usage, naturally it has dialects), but that's where it would be a nice auxiliary language. It's good for conveying simple ideas, but I've heard their dictionary contains more than 10 thousand words, so I'd love to see how those words are written using compounds of the root toki pona words.
Sonja Lang, the author of toki pona, also developed a writing system for the language, which is called sitelen pona. As far as the writing system goes, it makes sense to have one symbol for each word, considering there's barely a hundred. A webpage showcasing most of them is found here. Most of them are very nice, and pictographic, but I'm a bit uneasy about how non-uniform they are. If we look at luka, pali, moku, kepeken, pana they honestly look like a completely separate writing system to lon, poka, anpa, monsi, sinpin, insa.
Naturally, if I also decided to analyze the oracle bone scripts of ancient China, I would also provide the same type of feedback by saying "some characters feel out of place", but we all know Chinese evolved to be a real, well-established (and might I say with very nice looking characters) language. So perhaps toki pona just needs to evolve. I've already noticed in the wiki that many people had the same thought process, and made syllabic alphabets derived from sitelen pona, which look much more homogeneous and cohesive.
The real question is: Can I write about math using it? That's probably a challenge I'm willing to tackle. I expect to completely fail, but when I joined their discord, I did notice there are roles to get pinged about essays and research, so who knows.