Toki Pona Forums

"nostalgic longing for my childhood walks in the woods with my dog Shadow"

a, suno li seli.
mi tawa e nasin kasi sin.

Um, I'll have to work on this. I think it's a poem about 20 lines long. Any corrections, suggestions or encouragement appreciated and seriously needed.

Oh, I see, sorry. I had to re-read your post jan kipo. Yes, absolutely does not address the problem you mention, not intended to. I did mention that quoting arabic numbers is the real-life solution that most languages use, in my experience. Japanese and Chinese notably simply use our numbers. They h...

I agree that nonstandard notation as well as an unusual base are almost overwhelming obstacles. Well... Except that toki pona folks already signed on for something unusual and nonstandard. Personally, I like the finger numbering too much to abandon the system without further effort to advocate for i...

Well, "ternary" does mean base three, and base three is often used with a positional notation, but I don't know that it's required. Perhaps that's why jan kipo uses the term "triseimal", which, by context, I believe he means three digits (0,1,2) rather than base three. And yes, a...

I would not place myself in the "say everything efficiently" group, speedtalk has it's place but that's not what I came here for. I did, however, hope that with careful thought and patience, I would be able to say important things with some clarity. If I have to formulate seriously long se...

Reply to Baerdric: That's 211 fish, nanpa mute wan wan tu wan tu kala. 211 fish -- "kala pi nanpa tu nanpa wan nanpa wan" That requires converting to base 10. Which brings in the missing 7 numeral names and several missing place column names. toki pona actually already has a ternary count...

I like that, in fact I thought that's what would happen when I first heard about toki pona's 120 word limit (how twitterish). But I doubt that a formalized system will win many adherents right away. Although a little of what you outline has already happened, it happened organically and using obvious...

nimi li nanpa mute. I thought about several alternative names and all of them make it longer and harder to say. The name "nanpa mute" (numbers multiplied) seems most useable in speech and I don't think it might commonly be used otherwise when followed by number words. So, for the system as...

Well, for the sake of conversation, I'm willing to hold that he was fluent but with a small vocabulary. I think, like a lot of things, we try to overload one term with meanings that are best described with other terms. We say fluent when we mean fluent and large vocabulary and good grammar and perha...

As another example of something, I have an ex-father-in-law who considers himself fluent in Japanese. I checked him on this and he basically knows the first chapter of my Japanese book. But where I was unable to speak a single sentence to a Japanese person we ran into, he could happily converse with...