Toki Pona Forums

Here is a draft Swadesh list. I was surprised how much gutter talk there was on the Swadesh list. Some words are rated R. Many words take a phrase or entire sentence to build up and after you built it, you won't find a place to plug it on account of not having subordinate clauses. Generating multi-...

wan li lukin ala e jan sewi. wan li pilin ala e jan sewi. wan li pilin kon ala e jan sewi kepeken nena sinpin sama. (I'm looking for indefinite subject, "one never see's god.") ona li lukin ala e jan sewi. ona li pilin ala e jan sewi. ona li pilin kon ala e jan sewi kepeken nena sinpin sa...

precisement. But any native speaker of any language who knows nothing of grammars and phonologies, etc. can do as well.

Glad to hear there are still Red Caps. I didn't realize it had been that long since I was in a train station. Glad to hear that the pool has expanded a bit, too. Yes, ya gotta has a verb in there. 'nasa li ni:' is possible or 'ni li nasa' with the understanding that this does not go back to the prev...

I had in mind a double headed noun phrase, the opposite headless noun phrase where both words in the noun phrase are modifiers. "low life", "oil mice" (examples from Pinker) A low life is not a "low" or a "life". Ardepithicus is a human and an animal at the s...

So... a la b tan a means a <=> b, i.e. equivalence. No such thing!! Read it again. It says that b happens not merely on the occasion of a but also because a happens. Nothing like equivalence (wherein a would also happen on the occasion of b, which is no where suggested here). I'm confused by the ol...

Competence is not focused but general, so someone can be quite competent even if he makes occasional mistakes. But, more importantly, he can be thoroughly competent even if he cannot explain why he does some of the things he does competently. So, the fact that he does not know a good noun meaning fo...

Well, as a professional logician (retired) and mainly as a persistent buttinsky, I have to say a few things about all of this. First, thanks for the citation; I hadn't heard that one for a while and it is nice to see it coming round again. I am curious about why 'mije soweli' rather than 'soweli mij...

jan li nasin mute tan telo suli. A man isn't a path or many paths; I suppose 'jan li lon nasin mute' but 'nasin mute' doesn't amount to "many miles." Maybe, 'weka mute'. mi awen sinpin wan lon ma supa. Not sure what 'sinpin' does here -- not even "stand" in the original. mama mi...

Let's try more exactly parallel cases after the accident, I say 'mi pona ala. kin la meli mi li pakala.' Exactly parallel, except that for historical reasons 'taso' doesn't need 'la.' The other usages would be 'mi pona ala. meli mi li pakala kin' " I am not well. My wife is injured also." ...