This part of the catalogue brings together my experiments with language, constructed languages, artificial intelligence and the psychology of communication.
It is deliberately broad.
Some books are research-oriented and explore how language systems affect reasoning. Others are literary translations into toki pona. Some document my own visual-language experiments.
What connects them is the same underlying question:
What happens to thought when we change the structure of language?
Toki pona as a long-term experiment
Toki pona is at the centre of most of this work.
I have been interested in it for roughly fifteen years, long before it became connected to my publishing work.
What continues to interest me is not only the language itself, but the psychological effect of using it.
Toki pona has a tiny vocabulary.
That forces the speaker or reader to decompose complex concepts into simpler ones.
A word such as "institution", "strategy", "identity" or "productivity" cannot always be transferred directly. You have to decide what you actually mean.
This makes toki pona useful not only as a constructed language, but also as a kind of cognitive experiment.
And that becomes particularly interesting when artificial intelligence enters the picture.
Language and the machine mind
Several books in this section explore the relationship between constructed languages and AI.
Toki Pona and Machine Mind looks at what happens when a language model has to reason and communicate through a deliberately constrained language.
Modern AI systems are trained on enormous linguistic spaces.
They are surrounded by synonyms, abstractions, specialist terminology and thousands of ways to express almost the same thing.
Toki pona does the opposite.
It compresses.
It removes lexical precision.
It forces meaning to be reconstructed from context.
That makes it a useful environment for asking questions about machine understanding.
Does reducing vocabulary simplify reasoning?
Does it expose ambiguity?
Does it make hidden assumptions more visible?
Can a model preserve complex meaning when the language itself refuses to provide convenient labels?
These are not purely linguistic questions anymore.
They are questions about representation, cognition and AI.
Toki pona and Lojban
Another research direction appears in The Toki Language Protocol and related work comparing toki pona with Lojban.
The two languages are almost philosophical opposites.
Toki pona reduces language toward simplicity, ambiguity and contextual interpretation.
Lojban attempts to make language more formally structured, explicit and logically precise.
One says, in effect:
reduce the number of concepts and let context do more work.
The other says:
make relationships explicit and remove as much ambiguity as possible.
Both approaches are fascinating when applied to artificial intelligence.
If language influences reasoning, then radically different language architectures may encourage radically different ways of representing the same problem.
That is one of the reasons I am interested in conlangs not simply as hobbies, but as experimental environments.
They allow us to redesign assumptions that natural languages usually make invisible.
Psychology of language
The psychology behind language is equally important to me.
People often behave as if words simply describe things that already exist.
But words also create categories.
They make distinctions easier to perceive.
They encourage some interpretations and make others less obvious.
This matters in psychology.
It matters in marketing.
It matters in software interfaces.
And it increasingly matters in AI, because language models work through linguistic representations of the world.
A constructed language gives us an unusual opportunity.
Instead of inheriting the system unconsciously, we can deliberately decide what distinctions should exist and what should happen when they do not.
That is one of the themes connecting much of the research in this section.
Classics in toki pona
Not every book here is theoretical.
Some are simply experiments in what happens when major literary works are translated into toki pona.
These books currently exist as standalone publications rather than as a formal series.
They include The Odyssey in Toki Pona and A Christmas Carol in Toki Pona.
Another recent addition is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Toki Pona.
I find literary translation particularly useful because fiction places different demands on the language than philosophy does.
Philosophical compression can sometimes work naturally in toki pona.
Narrative is harder.
You need characters, actions, environments, emotional distinctions, dialogue and continuity across a much larger text.
A novel therefore becomes a stress test for the language.
How much complexity can toki pona carry?
Where does ambiguity become productive?
Where does it become a problem?
What has to be reconstructed by the reader?
These books are partly translations and partly experiments in those questions.
For now, they remain standalone titles.
If one of these directions develops a larger audience, I may eventually turn it into a dedicated series and continue translating related works.
I prefer to let reader interest determine whether a publishing experiment deserves to become a full line.
Pictiq
My more recent language work has moved beyond spoken and written constructed languages into visual communication.
That project is Pictiq.
Pictiq is my attempt to build a visual protocol that allows people to communicate basic meaning without sharing a spoken language.
The idea is not simply to create a collection of pictograms.
A set of icons is not automatically a language.
To become useful for communication, a visual system needs vocabulary, composition rules, conventions and some way to express relationships between concepts.
That is what I am experimenting with through Pictiq.
The first substantial documentation is the Pictiq Handbook, currently available freely through the project's research repository.
It describes the basic approach, vocabulary and communication model.
More commercial books using Pictiq are planned as the system develops.
Languages as tools, not curiosities
The common thread across these books is that I do not see constructed languages merely as linguistic curiosities.
They are tools for experiments.
Toki pona asks what happens when language becomes radically smaller.
Lojban asks what happens when language becomes radically more explicit.
Pictiq asks whether meaning can move between people visually without a shared spoken language.
AI adds another participant to all of these experiments.
A human speaker has years of embodied experience, cultural assumptions and intuition to fill the gaps in a language.
A machine has a completely different relationship with those same gaps.
Comparing the two can tell us something about both.
That is why this section sits at the intersection of language, psychology and artificial intelligence.
Sometimes the result is a research book.
Sometimes it is a translation of Dickens, Homer or Stevenson.
Sometimes it is a new protocol.
But behind all of them is the same curiosity:
if we redesign language, what else do we end up redesigning with it?