RE: Fw: JBR''s analysis Sonja Elen Kisa | Wed May 15, 2002 Very intelligent comments. sina toki sona. > The phonology looks fun. It makes my name pretty tricky to tokiponaise, > though: Justin Rye = [dZVstInrAI] = ? I would suggest: Satenwa or Satenwawi (See my comments below on how to handle vowel sequences like "ai".) The r in most languages becomes l in TP, but I generally convert the English approximant r to TP w. > And who needs words for numerals when there are words for "one" and "and"?! > (But what I do want to know is: are the numbers European-style pseudoadjectival > things, or what?) The standard numerals are: wan = 1 tu = 2 mute = 2 or more The "advanced" numerals, used when it is absolutely necessary to add specifics, are additive: wan = 1 tu = 2 tu wan = 3 tu tu = 4 luka = 5 luka wan = 6 luka tu = 7 luka tu wan = 8 luka tu tu = 9 luka luka = 10 luka luka luka luka luka luka tu = 32 And so on... Here is how to use them in sentences: I have two kids. mi jo e jan lili tu. The first house is black. tomo nanpa wan li pimeja. November is beautiful (good-feeling). tenpo mun nanpa luka luka wan li pona pilin. (Note that "pi" is not necessary with the compound numbers.) > Oh, and I'm surprised by the reduplication of effort in having both > sentence-initial adverbs and a divider particle before the verb - wouldn't it > have been simpler to make

the default form of a verbal auxiliary, > *replaced* by any such adverb? That's a really great idea. Unfortunately, it wouldn't work in practise. tenpo nanpa wan la jan utala lawa li moku lili e kili jelo. First, the general (lead warrior) nibbled on a banana. If we were to replace "li" by "tenpo nanpa wan", everything would become quite confusing, and where the subject, verb, etc begin and end would become blurred. > The part I'm really waiting to find out about is what kinds of phrasal > syntax it has - and particularly subordinate clauses. Or maybe it treats > them as too complex and does everything coordinately? You guessed right. Subordinate clauses are broken into a separate sentence. I saw the man whom you love. mi lukin e mije. sina olin e iki. > The nouns-for-pronouns thing could be cute... in fact, abandoning first > and second person in favour of personal names is _too_ cute. Very cute and Tarzanesque. But maybe not so practical. :) I'm here. Jan Sasenla li lon. mi lon. Words like "mi" and "sina" are universal and useful. > Well, except that that's (trivially) nesting, isn't it? Anyway, > how does TP do stuff like the following? Colin said that he was happy. jan Kolin li toki e ni: li pilin pona. Colin person said this: he feels good. (It is not necessary to repeat the subject, because it is still the same. As long as "li" is there.) I want Colin to be happy mi wile e ni: jan Kolin li pilin pona. I like the present which Colin gave me. I like the present. = ijo pana li pona tawa mi Present from Colin is good for me. ijo pana tan jan Kolin li pona (tawa mi). Or, much better, you could say: jan Kolin li pana e ijo pona tawa mi. Colin gave something good to me. The "pona" with "tawa mi" properly translates the "liking", and the "pana e ijo" properly translates the gift (giving). Comparisons Comparisons are difficult to pull off in Toki Pona. And not without reason: TP is a "percieving" language, not a "judging" one. (Hey, I'm an ENFP!) Comparing people and criticizing are very un-pona. :) Toki Pona focuses on what "is", not on what things "should be" or how they are better or worse than something else somewhere else. But here is indeed a way to say something is better: Joe is taller than Mary. jan So li suli mute. jan Mewi li suli lili. = Joe is more tall. Mary is less tall. Or if Mary is short, then simplify to: jan So li suli. jan Mewi li lili. = Joe is tall. Mary is short. Colin likes his dog as much as I like my cat. soweli pi jan Kolin li pona tawa iki. sama la soweli mi li pona tawa mi. Colin's animal is good for him. Samely my animal is good for me. > Well, the Toki Pona pages aren't all that bad, I just took a long time > finding the contents-list page. But even during office lunchbreak surfing > expeditions on umpteen-megabit connections I've found the one-paragraph-per-page > format irritating for anything that naturally forms one long text; I'd almost > always rather hit the "Page Down" key than click the "next page" link, if only > because there's no need to hunt around for it! Thanks for the design feedback! Are you suggesting I reduce the font size on tokipona.org? >> Every letter is always pronounced the same, regardless of what comes >> before or after it. > Er, except for the exceptions. Still, I suppose monoglot anglophones are > going to find this concept of a biunique grapheme/phoneme mapping amazing > enough that you're entitled to leave the concept of allophony until later. Yes, like in any natural language, there are allophones. For example, syllable final n can be assimilated to any nasal consonant (m or ng), but pronouncing it as n is just as fine (only maybe not so easy). So really there is no harm either way. > Watch out, "stew" is a bad example-word, since some people pronounce it with > lip-rounding and some with palatalisation ([stu]/[stju])... That's a good point. >> The first syllable of a word can begin without a consonant. > But otherwise vowel sequences aren't allowed? That's right. The reason I wanted to avoid Toki Pona words like "tei" is because speakers of some of Earth's languages (Anglophones are a good example) tend to diphthongize many of the basic vowels. Thus somebody may accidentally say "kutej" or "kutei" instead of "kute". I didn't want this to impact the universal intelligibility of my language. I didn't want "kute" and "kutei" to be minimal pairs. Therefore, when Tokiponizing a word with a vowel sequence such as "sue", we have two options: 1) insert a euphonic glide (suwe) 2) drop one vowel (su) > Are there ever arguments like the ones I've seen in Esperantoland > about whether inter-word glottal stops are compulsory/optional/prohibited? The glottal stop is not a phoneme in TP. Whether you want to add them between words beginning with a vowel (such as "wile e") is totally irrelevant. Just like with plosive voicing/unvoicing, neither way is incorrect. ale li pona! > How about "Oh dear, you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright?" ike a! sina tawa anpa pi lupa suli! sina pilin pona ala pona? Oh bad! You went to the bottom of a deep hole! Are you feeling OK? >> the food was good >> eating rocks > Ooh, eating rocks, youch. Eating rocks is just colloquial for "eating is great". > What's the TP for "root canal job"? jan li pona e walo uta. Somebody is fixing (making better) the teeth (white of the mouth). > Of course it's slightly cheaty that "ni!" is more of a determiner > than an adjective (in fact if it means both "this" and "that" it's > more or less a generic determiner), and determiners naturally tack > on to complete noun phrases. What would mean? "jan ni suli" sounds ungrammatical to me. If you wanted to say "this big person", I'd say "jan suli ni". > Ah, there it is. The exercises have been assuming I knew the word "appear" > right from lesson one. Yes, and I apologize for this. I am in the process of rewriting the lessons. As a result, there are currently certain gaps where certain words are used before they are properly introduced. This will eventually be fixed. >> jan li jo e kili sin tawa sina >> Somebody has fresh veggies for you. > Unfortunately TP's sloppy categories make this structurally ambiguous > could be "your mobile fresh vegetables". You are right that "tawa" can create the syntactical ambiguity of "going" (verb) or "moving" (adjective), but in practise this never happens. In complex contexts, "tawa" is almost always a verb. Although gramatically possible, the idea of "mobile vegetables" is just illogical in real usage. A TP speaker would naturally simplify such an idea to just "vegetables", since vegetables are always assumed to be mobile. > Part of the problem is that takes an object as a verb but not as a preposition. Because "tawa" is above all a preposition, even when it is used as a verb, no "e" is used with the object. >> tool, device, machine > Is this allowed to be a verb? Yes. Although it has never come up yet in usage, it could transitively mean "to use as a tool" or "to make a tool". mi ilo e palisa sina. I tooled your stick. I turned your stick into a tool. Intransitively, of course it means "to be a tool". ni li ilo. This is a tool. >> en can also be used to combine multiple one-word nouns: > What about multiple multi-word subjects? I see an example in the en-tp > lexicon (under "and") where they're split up by , but that only works > if there's an adverbial phrase at the start! Another way to unambiguously combine multi-word subjects is with "en" markers: en tenpo suno en tenpo pimeja and sun-time and dark-time day and night > How about "must not come" (and "needn't come")? wile ala = don't want to, don't have to, don't need to ken ala = cannot, not allowed to, must not >> >> That crazy guy doesn't do things well. > But he does do things - note that the negation is localised to the "well", > not applied to the entire phrase. The negation in this case is applied to the whole verbal element "pali pona". >> Note that jo to have, contain can also express location. > This wide range from abstract ownership to physical containment > ( and ) seems risky... I don't think so. mi jo e tomo. I have a house. I own a house. tomo li jo e mi. The house has me. The house contains me. I'm in the house. It throws Western concepts of possession out the window. If I think I own something, I should also remember that it also owns me. The idea is parallel: If I "have" a book, it is in my hands at the moment. If a house "has" a person, he or she is in its rooms at the moment. The truth is there is no real "abstract ownership" in TP mentality. Everything is shared. Maybe it's my book at the moment, but in a few days you will bring it to your house and it's now your book. That is also why there are no words for buy, sell, steal in TP: pana = give, sell kama jo = come to have, obtain, get, take, buy, steal Note that there is no single root for "take". You only "come to have" things in life. It is encouraged to give and share. The "come" is the random flow of life. If I happen to come across a book, then it is mine at the moment. Or I can go out of my way to obtain one, which is still "kama jo" (succeed in having), but I must remember that it is ultimately fate or Tao that dictates what is given to me in life. >> >> Large mammals are allowed in your house. > The same "can/can" as in English? What do you mean by can/can? There is already a section for "can" in http://tokipona.org/en-tp.php#c I hope it will answer your question. Best regards, pona tawa sina Sonja/Marraskuu (Language Designer)

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