If Toki Pona and Esperanto are so easy to learn, what’s stopping the government from learning/translating it too?
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GentlemanLoser@ttrpg.network 11 months ago
Cockney slang exists for this reason.
Toki Pona is a constructed language that can be learned in a day, as well.
Also Esperanto.
abuttifulpigeon@lemmy.world 11 months ago
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Lack of need to do so to track dissidents deemed dangerous to the function of the state
The closest esperanto ever got to revolutionary usage was that some esperantists taught it to others in Gulags and Concentration camps while pretending it was another language to avoid the suspicion of Nazis and Soviets, who both regarded it as subversive because it was a language explicitly designed to be “easy” to learn and to encourage international cooperation
Toki-Pona was invented in the 2000s and achieves it’s low word count by basically just reducing itself to a pre-civilizational language without concepts for most colors and not having a proper numeral system, things that might be necessary for use in inspiring and carrying out an ideologically motivated revolution.
The closest America has to a language usable as a code language used by a dissident underclass is AAVE, which is a dialect of english that’s been trending towards american standard english as time has gone by and is even easier to learn to understand than Toki-Pona or Esperanto if a man in a suit was determined enough to spy on its speakers.
Decoy321@lemmy.world 11 months ago
… Incompetence?
AnarchistsForDemocracy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
But isn’t cockney slang very easily understood due to it’s popularity? Was it at one time difficult to understand for outsiders? I had no idea about this.
xantoxis@lemmy.world 11 months ago
There’s millions of examples of this. Everywhere there’s an oppressed minority group, that group eventually develops its own dialect that mutates quickly to make it easier to identify in-group members and to confuse authorities of the majority group.
That isn’t a secure comms strategy though, it’s just something that happens organically. All the oppressing group needs to do is recruit a defector from the oppressed group and they can understand everything.
Cryptography is how you do it. And cryptography exists and is easily accessible, unless you truly believe everything electronic has government spy tech in it, which is the realm of actual paranoia.