> The point is simplicity. And in Toki Pona, simple is literally good. Both concepts are combined in a single word: pona.
That's how you end up with words like English "cool", which means low(-ish) temperature, except when it's about people, or "blue", a particular color, except when it's about feelings.
It's anything but simple, and honestly it doesn't sound good to me, either.
I have read the toki pona book. Its interesting but cheaty.
You can't get rid of complexity by squeezing a balloon and pretending the enormous bulging out shared dictionary of nouns is "not really words".
English only has 26 letters, its really simple to learn English! Well, sure, sometimes you have to string together quite a few of those 26 letters in the correct order to get the point across, but its not really hard to learn English.
Likewise toki pona is an exercise in what amounts to stringing together long winded syllables.
It was disappointing, I was interested in the language with the idea of fooling around with natural language processing, which is complex, so a simpler language should allow easier to write simple toys. Perhaps I've found a silver bullet? Yet its actually a very complicated language because of the balloon analogy, you can't squeeze the complexity somewhere else and declare victory. It requires all kinds of memorization and life experience and humor and creativity and judgment calls about stringing together it's sylableWords into what in English would mostly be one word.
Even if its not a silver bullet, its still kind of cool. I ended up having more fun, while continuing to accomplish nothing, with a pidgin englishs. I ended up with a reasonable parser for butler english. I thought it would be funny to write a parser that turned butler english into coq and then replied back to me with what coq thought of my statements. Then I realized I was bored and moved on to something else. For at least awhile recreational natural language processing can be a lot of fun and is a wide open area where whatever you do, its probably a newly trodden path, at least if its weird enough. Here's a strange idea if I get back into the hobby. Can I make a butler english to toki pona automated translator? Hmm.
It's interesting that you're not the only person here who's approached toki pona from a NLP perspective.
toki pona is about the worst case for an NLP language, I would think. It puts all the communication burden on the semantics and pragmatics of the language. It doesn't make human expression, feelings, interests, creativity or community simpler, just the language.
There are other conlangs designed to be unambiguous. toki pona was designed to be the opposite: maximally general.
On the specific point of having to learn a compound lexicon - that is true a little, but not as much as you'd think. Sure there are conventional compounds for saying certain things, but you are very welcome (and aesthetically encouraged) to find other ways of expressing the same thing. You might find 'ilo nanpa' defined as a computer in a compound lexicon, and I use that sometimes, but my 'ilo nanpa' is also my 'ilo musi' and my 'ilo pali' (and sometimes my 'ilo pakala'). The key insight is that the language doesn't have to describe what a thing is, but what it means to you. That changes, it cannot be properly documented, and is almost impossible to parse. I take that as a feature, not a bug. Part of the pleasure of toki pona is the endless poetry of it: the joy of finding curious and evocative ways of expressing yourself.
The language is simple (a few words, even fewer grammar rules) but obviously communicating with it is _very_ complex.
The problem with Toki Pona is it doesn't serve a purpose and journalists often can't convey exactly what it is because... it's nothing. If you try to explain Toki Pona in the context of natural languages, which are meant to communicate somewhat-precisely, of course it seems complex (because concepts are complex, no matter how much you try to simplify the language).
Do you actually use this much, though? I had to double take because I'm not familiar with the phrase and I'm a native speaker. Typically you might use cool to in this way to describer an action or gerund, or with a prepositional phrase, or as an adverb.
Heck, if anything, I'd say a "cool attitude" is a calm attitude—as in, the person played it cool.
Maybe not that exact phrasing but "he gave me a cool look" can mean exact opposites. Depends entirely on dialect / register. The direct metaphorical version ("he gave me an unfriendly look") is reasonably common in English. The other reading of it isn't so much, but is perfectly understandable (probably incorrectly).
> If you are a native speaker, rarely. Otherwise, all the freaking times (for the first ten years or so).
Not a native speaker. Not my experience at all. In fact, from my experience watching people learn English around me (and teaching some of them), reusing concepts like this actually helps them get the meaning because they can relate to words they know.
Maybe it's because such metaphors are pervasive in my native language too?
> E.g., consider the difference between a "cool guy" and a "cool attitude". If you think about it, they describe almost totally opposite situations.
I don't see how they're opposite. Hot-headed people (see how the metaphor is still at play?) aren't considered cool at all.
> Or consider "No, it's cool." After all, "it's hot" means the temperature is high.
What do you mean? "It's cool" = "the situation isn't hot". You don't have to worry about being burnt (again, same metaphor) by the situation.
Maybe your native language has metaphors similar to English, or maybe your friends are better at learning English than my friends. :P
But my point is that many metaphors look "natural" only after you learn it: you have to memorize them, and you think it's natural only because you've been doing it all your life.
E.g., "hot-headed" is a decidedly English metaphor. In Korean, "his head is getting hot" would mean he's getting annoyed/angry at the present situation, not that he has a propensity for getting annoyed in general (which is what English "hot-headed" means).
Similarly, English "cool" doesn't just mean "the situation isn't hot."; it also implies a positive situation. In contrast, you can say "The show only received a lukewarm reception.", but you can't say "It's OK, he was lukewarm about the mishap."
As another example, in Korean, you "turn blue" when you're shocked/aghast, not when you're gloomy. All this stuff is basically a minefield of subtle misunderstandings.
Yeah but, once you memorize them, the metaphors are pervasive and follow common patterns. I think having a similarly-metaphorical language helps taking cues from context. I haven't seen it taking ten years or so to memorize them.
Phrasal verbs on the other hand? A nightmare! I've been speaking English "fluently" for more than 15 years and I still struggle with them.
There's definitely some overlap of metaphors in western languages though, and English culture influence over western media helps establishing those metaphors too (we don't use "blue" as "sad" in our language, but it's not hard for us to relate to it since it's in so many songs).
> consider the difference between a "cool guy" and a "cool attitude"
I always thought the ideas were conflated. That to be 'cool' originally meant to be unflappable in the face of adversity which was akin to having a cool attitude.
If context is missing (paper is torn, parts of conversation are missed) then "overloaded words" can easily be misinterpreted. People have various techniques for correcting these communication errors: make an assumption based on one's own knowledge of speaker, make an assumption based on one's own knowledge of the topic or beliefs or reconfirm the meaning with the speaker. I am sure there are a lot more.
For non-native speakers overloaded words can be challenging to deal with. Overloaded words and close sounding words are also a common source of language games and art. All human languages have ambiguity at some level.
What about the word "mai" in Thai? Depending on tone, it has at least five different meanings.
"/Mai \mai ^mai vmai mai" (tone marks added) is literally a meaningful sentence in Thai — and not one that's obviously constructed for lulz like "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo".
To a Thai speaker, "/Mai" and "\Mai" sound as different as English "sit" and "seat", although much of the world would insist that the two in English sound nearly the same, just as English speakers insist that "/Mai" and "\Mai" sound nearly the same.
You don't think there are differences in tone between many homonyms in English? No, it's not a "tonal" language, but that absolutely doesn't mean they don't exist, or aren't widely used.
Or is your assertion that "Buffalo buffalo..." is pronounced by repeating the exact same pattern of sound eight times?
I think if you say the phrase "to buffalo" and "a buffalo", you'll pronounce those words in the same way. It's only when putting a sentence together that you'll stress them differently to indicate their usage in that sentence.
In tonal languages, you always say the word with the given tone, regardless of context.
British English (and American English?) sometimes uses stress to distinguish between nouns and verbs written the same way, eg. "record a record", "permit a permit", "present a present". It's possible that "buffalo a buffalo" should ideally have this difference, but buffalo is so rare as a verb that the difference has been lost.
This reminds me a lot of a natural language processing tool called word2vec. It reduces words into vectors, where each dimension represents something about the meaning about the word. E.g. whether it's a place, or if it's male or female.
And these vectors are not designed by humans, but learned from data. It's optimized so that words that occur in similar contexts have similar vectors. E.g. places tend to occur near words talking about places, like "there" or "go", and male names tend to occur near "he" and "his", etc.
You can do really interesting things with these vectors. Like 'King'-'man'+'woman'='queen'. Recently a computer program beat the word analogy part of an IQ test using this. It's useful in computer translation. Take two languages and constrain a few identical words to have the same vector. Then all the other words also end up with similar vectors.
Anyway, with something like this, the actual words and symbols don't matter, just the 100 or so dimensions needed to accurately represent the meaning of every word. Of course speaking a 100 dimensional vector is way less efficient than a single word or symbol.
But perhaps using this, we could come up with an absolute minimal set of symbols necessary. And some rules for combining them to get all words.
I know a lot of the comments here are complaining that this doesn't make a good natural language. But that's not the point of an auxiliary language. The main thing auxiliary languages should optimize for is how easy it is to learn. Simpler is better. Reducing the words and grammar is hugely important.
Another advantage of such an approach, is that it might be more amenable to machine translation. Which is another advantage for an auxiliary language.
That may be the way to reduce duplication and bloat in the Lojban [1] root-word list. Currently, about 1300 root words exist. A lot of them have overlapping or redundant meanings, and it has already been proposed to (manually) unify them and reduce their number.
Combined with the already existing rules for word composition, and the grammar, it could make a very nice language.
The idea is still very far from possible completion though. One (of several) things to look at is: how do we characterize word composition? word vector adding? averaging? I guess the operation could be learned too.
[1] Lojban is an artificial language based in predicate logic http://lojbo.org/ .
Cool. There's a similar project put forth by linguists in the early 70s called Natural Semantic Metalanguage, with about 70 "primes" that all other words can be factored out as, like you would have to do if you wrote a dictionary without circular definitions.
Unlike Toki Pona or the other languages mentioned in the article, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is mostly used for thought experiments and to analyze existing languages for ambiguities and double meanings.*
*"Double meanings" may not be the right word, but is there a word to describe what happens when a system is non-orthagonal and the same piece winds up with multiple responsibilities?
But within NSM scholarship, overloading is probably more descriptive than words that happen to sound the same but have well-known distinct meanings. In blurb form:
"This book is based on two ideas: first, that any language--English no less than any other-represents a universe of meaning, shaped by the history and experience of the men and women who have created it, and second, that in any language certain culture--specific words act as linchpins for whole networks of meanings, and that penetrating the meanings of those key words can therefore open our eyes to an entire cultural universe. In this book Anna Wierzbicka demonstrates that three uniquely English words--evidence, experience, and sense--are exactly such linchpins. Using a rigorous plain language approach to meaning analysis, she unpacks the dense cultural meanings of these key words, disentangles their multiple meanings, and traces their origins back to the tradition of British empiricism. In so doing she reveals much about cultural attitudes embedded not only in British and American English, but also English as a global language."
Toki Pona has a five-color palette: loje (red), laso
(blue), jelo (yellow), pimeja (black), and walo (white).
Like a painter, the speaker can combine them to achieve
any hue on the spectrum. Loje walo for pink. Laso jelo
for green.
I wonder if there's a reason for using the pigment color combinations instead of the light combinations of color.
Of course, one of the problems with colours is that different cultures have different colour values.
The Celtic languages like Scots and Irish Gaelic distinguish between dearg, which is the red of paint or blood, and ruadh, which is the red of hair or heather. To them these are completely different colours, and a native Gaelic speaker would be really confused to find that English translates them both as the same word.
Toki Pona's limited root vocabulary really just demonstrates its cultural biases.
I learned paint mixing as a child, but the only color mixing I do now is with RGB sliders. I find subtractive color much more difficult. And I know more people who make computer art than who use traditional media. I wouldn't be surprised if additive color systems have surpassed subtractive in popularity.
There is no arbitrary skill ceiling, but I think you underestimate how much long term immersion matters. I've lived in the UK fo 16 years. I started learning English at 7 and in school from I was 10, and used it daily from about 14 (I'm 41 this year).
Yet living in the UK I still regularly come across idioms and words that are second nature to people who grew up here that I haven't heard before.
E.g. I have a six year old son in primary school here, and through that now come into contact with expressions that people that grew up here experienced in primary school, and that most of them may not have used since then but are aware of, but that are totally new to me.
And I think this matters much more when translating into a target language than in the source language. While you may fail to recognise some idioms, it is easier to recognise something that sounds odd or words you don't know, than to recognise that you are missing vocabulary you didn't think was necessary (e.g. the word "mufti" was entirely new to me when my son started school; prior having him in school, if I was asked to translate anything about coming in out of school uniform, I'd have never known I was "missing" a word, and would have used a longer expression instead).
I can kind of see the logic. It's certainly possible for an adult to learn to speak another language indistinguishably from a native speaker, but in practice there's a surprisingly large gap between that and a person who can speak fluently on complex subjects with no fear of being misunderstood, but makes occasional minor errors--or even usages which are grammatically correct, but sound stilted--that betray them as non-native.
There's a big jump between 99.9% and 100%, is what I'm saying, and if you want a really professional translation job, you're not going to settle for 99.9%. And the thing is, you can't tell the difference between 99.9% fluent and 100% fluent without being 100% fluent. So if you want to be sure you're getting 100% fluency, a native speaker is your best bet.
>but in practice there's a surprisingly large gap between that and a person who can speak fluently on complex subjects with no fear of being misunderstood, but makes occasional minor errors--or even usages which are grammatically correct, but sound stilted--that betray them as non-native.
Well the purpose of translation is communication, not hiding your nativeness, do I don't see the point of this.
>There's a big jump between 99.9% and 100%
Well the jump is between 0.1%
>and if you want a really professional translation job, you're not going to settle for 99.9%.
That's like saying if i wanted to hire an engineer to build me a nuclear reactor im gonna pass everybody who scored 99.9% on a test in favor of the magical unicorn who by virtue of being born in the beautiful blue glow of a reactor is the only being capable of scoring 100%.
Either the gap is actually bigger then 99.9-100 as you say, or the gap is so small as to be insignificant.
People can vary greatly in english skill if they are not native and while you can most likely figure out whether or not they were born where by their accents and their way of speaking, a sufficiently skilled speaker would give you no more trouble in communicating to you whatever complex ideas they might have in their mind.
The only reason I can think of of this restriction is protectionism, i.e. a translator union located in England would want to protect its members from competition and find it most convenient to claim a special status on nativeness without coming off as obviously anti-competitive.
Imagine a translator who is 50% fluent in source language and 100% fluent (native) in target language. He would often misunderstand the source text and, even though he can produce target language natively, the translation would be incorrect.
Now imagine a translator who is 100% fluent in source language and 50% fluent in target language. He completely understands the source text and, using only simple sentences, can accurately convey the meaning in the target language.
This thought experiment demonstrates that the knowledge of source language is far more important for the accuracy of translation.
Both of those people would be equally unacceptable as a professional translator. It's true that #2 would be better if those were your only two options, but that's an unrealistic limitation.
A guy who is 99% fluent in source and 100% fluent in target will generally produce a flawless translation--if he happens across a word or idiom in the source that he doesn't quite understand, it will stand out to him, and he will pause to research it before continuing.
A guy who is 100% fluent in source and 99% fluent in target will produce a perfectly clear but very slightly stilted translation, because he's not aware of the few mistakes that he makes.
If you're translating a commercial product and you have my two guys to choose between, you would want #1.
>A guy who is 100% fluent in source and 99% fluent in target will produce a perfectly clear but very slightly stilted translation,because he's not aware of the few mistakes that he makes.
Why isn't the reverse true? It is only that the lossyness of the conversion process is invisible in the result, so somebody reading it would not know that it's wrong, it still produces the same quality of translation i.e. that its not perfect (or as good as can be).
Additionally, there are so many words in english that it's not possible to know them all, and so one has to assume that all people are at most 99%. But my english alarm doesnt go off everytime a word like 'mellifluous' isn't used. So I even doubt the claim that a guy who is 99% in the target language will make a 'stilted' translation. There exists a skill level where a person can produce a text that won't read as 'wrong' but won't be as good as it could possibly be and this skill level is sufficient to not have a text feel stilted. Not to mention most people do not have the same writing skills, and a very good high school student writer writes a much more pleasing text than his schoolmate who is not very good.
Case 1: SRC->TGT (fluent) gives you a grammatically correct text that may have bits that are lost in translation. Misunderstood idioms and connotations. A reduction in nuance.
Case 2: (fluent) SRC->TGT gives you an incorrect text that contains errors of syntax and semantics, that doesn't use natural sentence construction. It'll reads like it was written by someone with less than a perfect grasp on the language, which will be true. They won't be able to accurately convey the meaning because they won't have an accurate grasp of the target language.
Also in case 1 you can consult expert quality reference texts to make up for your lack of knowledge in the source language. Not so in case 2.
I think fluency in the target language is more important for the reasons PhasmaFelis and igravious say. Or to put it more bluntly, because understanding is generally an easier task than speaking/writing.
For example with my level of English (a lowish C2), I can understand all kinds of texts, including literary texts (I read lots of novels), but there is no way I can write English at a literary level. I would tell the facts of the story just fine, but the special "feeling" that good writers give to the text would be lost.
Curiously, this notion (that the best translator is one who is native or 100% fluent in the target language) is widely accepted in Western cultures, but someone told me that in China is the other way around. When they hire Chinese to English translators, they especially value their knowledge of Chinese, not English. Which may partially explain the "Engrish" phenomenon...
Well, if I wanted a Chinese text explained to me, I'd rather have a native Chinese explain it to me than somebody who is fluent in my own language and studied Chinese.
I see it all the time with translations from English to Russian. Because I know English better than most translators, I can spot all sorts of mistakes. I'm pretty sure a native English speaker, even with mediocre proficiency in Russian wouldn't have made those mistakes.
Translation also requires you to produce a style that is consistent with the source material. Professional translation is used to produce a similar quality document as the source material.
If you translate english legalese into Spanish, you expect Spanish legalese output.
Writing skills and specific domain experience is necessary. That is easier to achieve that level in your native language living in the target country.
Nowadays, translator are rarely used for "meaning translation" ( like translating journal article for the managers ) as there is always some foreigner guy speaking that language and able to "explain" rather than translate the material. Except for less common language like Hebrew, Japanese, ... or big governmental organisations.
BTW I think the requirement is reversed for interpretation. You need to be native of the source language, because you need to convey the meaning regardless of the form.
Translating is often more than mechanically trying to convey the rough meaning. You want to capture the rhythm and flow and poetry (or lack of) in the original. You want to try to map idioms an word play from one language to another, and so and so forth. This requires a near-native level of understanding of the language you are translating to
I have a friend who is a translator and one of the hardest things for him in the beginning was not to act as a editor. If the original has a long, badly structured sentence with a misplaced comma, then you have to try to translate that into a long, badly structured sentence with a misplaced comma.
You're correct, and that's not a universal restriction. But it is true that there are a lot of translation & interpretation jobs which do require that the translator only go into their native language, especially for large-scale operations that only need to communicate one-way (like simultaneous interpretation for speeches).
I used to be a DE>EN and ES>EN translator. Although there's no skill ceiling, it is still a professional etiquette among translators to translate into their native languages.
It seems odd to me too considering my native language is my weaker language. English is my second language but I flow better in it than I do Spanish... Odd. I'm better translating Spanish to English than the other way around, and yet still so many words lose me in Spanish so it gets harder for me.
I think the requirement is that ONE of the languages be the person's native language. Because language is so much more than just language, its also about culture. As another commentator pointed out , "cool" can mean so many things, which are in both similar and different at the same time. You need to understand culture to understand these differences.
Yes, English isn't my native tongue but I understand it just as well as a native would, but how many non-native languages can I have such a deep understanding of? I can translate from my native tongue to english and vice versa, but translating between two non-native languages perfectly seems like too difficult a task. Even if I am great at it, its possible that a native speaker of one of the lanugages would be better at it than me
So it's like the vi of languages? I.e. memorize the relatively few meanings of the "words" and then customize/combine them to the context. Seems like with languages there would be a lot more room for ambiguities though.
No. vi has a grammar, like all natural languages, including this one I guess. vi's is simple, mostly combining a noun with a verb, plus some simple modifiers. It sounds like the interesting thing about this language isn't that it has a grammar, it's that it has so few (and well chosen?) words that virtually every noun and every verb must be expressed by combining these building-block words. vi doesn't seem like that to me.
Possibly a strained analogy - but for a very simple system that is Turing-complete there is always Combinatory Logic which only needs two very simple functions (S & K):
Toki Pona isn't meant as a universal language to be translated from nor to translate into (unlike e.g. Esperanto). When you translate from/to, a lot of subtleties are lost (which is exactly what Toki Pona intends).
Toki Pona is just a "toy" language (for lack of a better adjective), somewhat like yoga for the language (for lack of a better simile). Each person uses Toki Pona in their own way: for some it's pushing language to the limit, for some it's just fun, some others consider it an experiment in psychology, an experiment in language construction, an introspection tool, a challenge, poetry in and of itself...
Obviously it's not the best to communicate precisely, just like yoga asanas aren't meant to walk.
Perhaps 'recreational' rather than 'toy' is a better word. :) The analogy with yoga is good, or plenty of programming languages. They make you better as a person, stretch you, widen your knowledge, and expand your mind, without necessarily being directly useful. For me it is enjoyable, definitely poetry. Though the opportunities to actually speak it is very limited.
sina sona ala sona e toki pona? (do you know it?) ... if so: sina kama sona tan seme?
I assume "sina kama sona tan seme?" means "where did you learn it from?". Did I get that right?
A small nitpick: proper nouns have to be preceded by a Toki Pona common noun or noun phrase (in this case toki, language) and then the proper noun in capitalized case. E.g.: toki Toki Pona, telo Coca Cola, etc. I.e. proper nouns must modify a preceding common Toki Pona noun.
---
mi toki e toki Toki Pona. taso mi jo ala e tenpo mute. tan tenpo suli la mi toki ala e toki Toki Pona. mi kama sona tan tan mute. lipu Tokipona.net en lipu Tokipona.org en lipu Reddit.com/r/tokipona li pona. lipu Tokipona.org li anpa. taso lipu Forums.tokipona.org li pali. sina wile la sina ken toki tawa mi lon ni: "el" en nimi mi pi lipu HN, lon kulupu Gmail.
(I speak Toki Pona, but I don't have a lot of time. It's been a long time not talking Toki Pona. I've learn it from many different sources. tokipona.net, tokipona.org, /r/tokipona are good. tokipona.org is down but forums.tokipona.org is still working. If you want, you can contact me at "el" concatenated with my HN username at gmail.)
Nitpicking is welcome! mi toki mute alla pona. I've not seen 'toki Toki Pona' used that way though, I've rarely seen it capitalised and used as a proper noun. So 'sona e toki pona' (nimi pi lipu pi jan Piljin e 'o kama sona e toki pona!'). That said, the rule for the extra verb I end up dropping quite often from carelessness, so 'sina telo allo telo Coca Cola?' rather than 'sina telo allo telo telo Coca Cola?' So it was a good nitpick.
'tan seme' is usually 'why', I think (I learned it as a compound lexicon entry I guess). 'sine sona kama tan seme?' for where from?
Ah! Very true. My Toki Pona is very rusty as you can see. I forgot a lot of compound lexicon and idioms :(
I've always seen 'Toki Pona' used as a proper noun following the proper noun rules to avoid confusion with 'good talk' and the like (which I guess is the purpose of the rule in the first place, as well as discouraging proper nouns). I learnt it a long time ago so maybe the requirement has been dropped? Or lousy usage since it's very common that people forget to follow the proper noun rule. In 'kama sona e toki pona' I'd be inclined to understand "learning to talk well" rather than "learning Toki Pona". Perhaps that was the intent? Anyways, there's so much outdated and non-canonical material, and most of the canon has holes and even doesn't follow its own advice. And actual usage has diverted so much too (plus having zero native speakers everyone has their own usage). "Language-ing" is hard :P Even more so in a vague language like Toki Pona.
The Coca Cola example would require 'e' to mark the direct object ('sina telo ala telo e telo Coca Cola'). I've grown so accustomed to a common noun following 'e' that it missing sounds really jarring.
mi toki e toki Toki Pona tan ni: toki Toki Pona li musi tawa mi. toki Toki Pona li pona kin tawa ali! tenpo suli la mi toki mute e toki Toki Pona. taso tenpo ni la mi toki lili e ni.
Interesting. Eye is "oko" (same as in Polish), a man is Jan ("John"/"Ian" in Polish), a hand is "luka" ("ręka" or "renka" in Polish, "ruka" in Russian), a leg is "noka" ("noga"), a mouth is "uta" ("usta") etc.
But the creator isn't Polish or even Slavic, even though the interviewed language fan (?) Krzeminska is. Go figure
This is straight off the top of my head, but are you referring to 计算机？ I have always considered that best translated as 'calculator', but obviously it is used in a lot of places where the English wouldn't be calculator.
Of all the massively incorrect reporting out there on Chinese language and culture, this seems pretty innocuous.
If you think about it historically, calculator would be a more accurate translation - it was something that computed or calculated numbers for you. In German, calculator and computer are also both Rechner.
I can't see this kind of language used for technical documentation or at any kind of tech workplace. There are already nuances with current languages. This would be terrible.
A fruitful interpretation could be that there is no one language for all jobs. Just as programming languages are chosen for the specific task at hand, you can also choose a natural language by its effectiveness for the current task.
That's how you end up with words like English "cool", which means low(-ish) temperature, except when it's about people, or "blue", a particular color, except when it's about feelings.
It's anything but simple, and honestly it doesn't sound good to me, either.