lon lawa insa mi la mi sona e ijo sona kepeken ala nimi.
I'm a mentalist. I think all thought is done in a mentalese that gets turned into language, sometimes so we can hear it in our head and decide if it makes sense, sometimes so we can convey our thoughts to others and they can convert language back into their own mentalese.
It fits with my experience, since most of the day I write computer code, which is difficult to to express in English. It's like a sculptor. They carve up marble without coming up with tidy phrases for each act they take. They must be using "mentalese" to think.
sina wile pali e ni kepeken nasin seme ?
toki sin la toki li toki pona ala la mi kepeken e nasi ni:
I'd establish a real cultural context. I'm not a big fan of languages that want me to be a spectator or participant of a made up society of alien, spaceship flying, insectoid, violent, warlike, blue skinned, forest dwelling, magic wielding, radical feminist pedophiles. I'm just here for an interesting communication system.
But being able so say, "here are the reference stories, you are allowed to make reference to them"-- that allows being able to say "The stork came" (waso li kama kepeken jan lili sin) instead of "A baby popped out her twat" And that provides context that these small-vocab languages really seem to *need*.
I'd have some way of telling apart a new phrase and a compound word/word phrase, e.g.
I'm watching birds. (There is a bird right there!)
I bird watch. (It's my hobby, I'm not actually looking at a bird now)
I see a black bird. (It is a raven)
I see a blackbird. (It is the sort of bird called a black bird)
mi lukin e waso. (I'd read this as there is a bird right there! I'd need a paragraph for the hobby.)
mi lukin e waso pimeja. (I'd read this as a bird that happens to be black, maybe a oil dipped seagull)
A tp extension might be:
mi lukin e janlili- (no spaces) I see a child (not just any person, but a person between ages 0 and 18 and they are not necessarily small or large).
mi lukin e jan lili. (a space) I see some sort of person, they happen to be small.
I'd have something like pi that could be overlaid with a something specific.
ilo pi ma uta. It's a device and is somehow related to holes in the ground.
* ilo *zi* ma ute. It is a device that causes holes in the ground.
* ilo *bo* ma ute. It is a device that is typically located in a hole in the ground.
An augmented pi system could still be easy for beginners if the the nonspecific version was a legal alternative to a specific relation. So a beginner would see
ilo bo ma ute and think "I don't know 'bo' so I'll read it as pi." And expert would be able to say, "Ah, this is a shovel, while this is a septic tank or a bomb shelter or a coffin or some other underground device."