kama sona lukin pi esun pi toki pona
Posted: Sun Jan 10, 2010 12:02 pm
My opinions on the great toki pona sales contract experiment
Suitablity of toki pona for legal contracts. Worked just fine. Just as difficult to understand as any credit card privacy policy. Buying and selling, online included, is already so common that the majority of the details of the contract are already embedded in our culture. toki pona might be unsuitable for never seen before derivatives contracts like interest rate swaps, mortgage swaps or wife swapping.
When reading the contract, I got the vague idea about contracts being sent back and forth. I didn't understand this until the package arrived with two poster-quality toki pona sales contracts in hieroglyphics, then it was obvious that the artists was planning on retaining a copy of the art piece for himself. As I've said elsewhere, context and paralinguistic evidence needs more formal treatment and study.
Suitablity of toki pona for business. Half way through the experiment jan Josan switched to English to say he wasn't in this for the money, it was just a friendly experiment.
I tried to respond in tp, that fair is fair and if someone does some work, they should get paid. I wanted to also convey that I'd be happy with what ever quantity of art he felt was fair, because I know that professional artists in New York normally charge four to five digit dollar amounts for a custom single piece of art-- I was psychologically prepared to receive a postcard for my $100. I wasn't clever enough to write that. I'm optimistic about Sonja's inclusion of more abstractions in the definition list for base root words to help convey words like "fair" without resorting to "pona"
I read this as meaning toki pona really needs more conventions of politeness. If a language lacks effective tense markers (grammatical or otherwise), the worst that can happen is the listener misinterprets a sentence as being in the past or future instead of the present. If a language lacks established politiness markers, the worst that can happen is people will fight un-necessarily, and after all, isn't that was real world legal contracts are trying to prevent? The politeness markers don't necessarily have to be the sort regarding establishing pecking orders that people seem to *want* to remove from languages. Politeness markers that signal that I consider them as trust-worthy, honest, well-intended, an equal, etc are very handy. Right now, conveying that sense is just as hard as saying "It is two days walk from my fathers village to my sister's village." Please feel free to take this as a challenge to use toki pona examples to prove me wrong in both cases. We don't need a "royal we" or a "you, my lord" in toki pona to convey politeness. We do need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that "o pana e moku tawa mi" will necessarily be interpreted as a polite request.
Japanese has a reputation of being highly indirect language, relying heavily on context. I think it is no accident that it is the language most famous for extensive use of non-optional grammaticalized politeness markers and probably has quite a few optional constructs for marking politeness. The risk of being misunderstood and thought rude are high in vague speech.
Suitablity of toki pona for legal contracts. Worked just fine. Just as difficult to understand as any credit card privacy policy. Buying and selling, online included, is already so common that the majority of the details of the contract are already embedded in our culture. toki pona might be unsuitable for never seen before derivatives contracts like interest rate swaps, mortgage swaps or wife swapping.
When reading the contract, I got the vague idea about contracts being sent back and forth. I didn't understand this until the package arrived with two poster-quality toki pona sales contracts in hieroglyphics, then it was obvious that the artists was planning on retaining a copy of the art piece for himself. As I've said elsewhere, context and paralinguistic evidence needs more formal treatment and study.
Suitablity of toki pona for business. Half way through the experiment jan Josan switched to English to say he wasn't in this for the money, it was just a friendly experiment.
I tried to respond in tp, that fair is fair and if someone does some work, they should get paid. I wanted to also convey that I'd be happy with what ever quantity of art he felt was fair, because I know that professional artists in New York normally charge four to five digit dollar amounts for a custom single piece of art-- I was psychologically prepared to receive a postcard for my $100. I wasn't clever enough to write that. I'm optimistic about Sonja's inclusion of more abstractions in the definition list for base root words to help convey words like "fair" without resorting to "pona"
I read this as meaning toki pona really needs more conventions of politeness. If a language lacks effective tense markers (grammatical or otherwise), the worst that can happen is the listener misinterprets a sentence as being in the past or future instead of the present. If a language lacks established politiness markers, the worst that can happen is people will fight un-necessarily, and after all, isn't that was real world legal contracts are trying to prevent? The politeness markers don't necessarily have to be the sort regarding establishing pecking orders that people seem to *want* to remove from languages. Politeness markers that signal that I consider them as trust-worthy, honest, well-intended, an equal, etc are very handy. Right now, conveying that sense is just as hard as saying "It is two days walk from my fathers village to my sister's village." Please feel free to take this as a challenge to use toki pona examples to prove me wrong in both cases. We don't need a "royal we" or a "you, my lord" in toki pona to convey politeness. We do need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that "o pana e moku tawa mi" will necessarily be interpreted as a polite request.
Japanese has a reputation of being highly indirect language, relying heavily on context. I think it is no accident that it is the language most famous for extensive use of non-optional grammaticalized politeness markers and probably has quite a few optional constructs for marking politeness. The risk of being misunderstood and thought rude are high in vague speech.