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Re: You can't simply....

Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2013 10:25 am
by janSilipu
'taso' first, I think.
Last bit not perfectly clear: you have the woman standing in the station tossing the baby in the air. Possible, but unlikely. Do you mean she sent the baby into the station? Use 'tawa' rather than'lon'. Do you mean she is inside the station carrying the baby? Use 'jo' rather than 'pana'. Don't need 'pi' and 'jan', probably. 'sijelo pona'?

Re: You can't simply....

Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2013 5:03 pm
by janMato
janSilipu wrote:'taso' first, I think.
Last bit not perfectly clear: you have the woman standing in the station tossing the baby in the air. Possible, but unlikely. Do you mean she sent the baby into the station? Use 'tawa' rather than'lon'. Do you mean she is inside the station carrying the baby? Use 'jo' rather than 'pana'. Don't need 'pi' and 'jan', probably. 'sijelo pona'?
taso ni li lon: meli li pana e jan lili sin lon insa tomo L'Enfant Station pi tomo tawa pi linja tu.
But this is true: a woman gave (forth) a baby inside the building L'Enfant Station of the moving room of 2 lines (metro station).
To have a baby sounds very Englishy and doesn't rule out the static possibility that she was just standing there next to the baby. Euphemism I guess isn't a virtue in toki pona, maybe we ought to say, li moli ala li pana tan lupa meli li sin li pini pali e jan lili sin or something along that line.

ni li nasa tan ni: nimi L'Enfant Station li toki Kanse tawa tomo pi jan lili sin! jan lili sin en mama pi ona jan li sijelo pona.
This is crazy because: The name L'Enfant Station in French means station of the baby. The baby and the it's mother are good in the manner of their health.

Re: You can't simply....

Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2013 8:14 am
by Kuti
What are you even talking about? this is not lojbanistan :twisted: :mrgreen:

Re: You can't simply....

Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2013 9:19 am
by janSilipu
nasa la mi plin ala e ni: jan lili li kama lon lon tomo awen Lanpan. taso mi pilin e ni: meli li poka taso jan lili lon ona
Pona sijelo "healthy, doing well"
seme ni li sama ma pi toki Losupan?

Re: You can't simply....

Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2013 11:14 am
by Kuti
ijo ike ( complex )
jan pi toki Losupan li pona, taso tenpo ale la ona li toki tan ijo toki ike.
ni li pakala e lawa mi :cry:

tenpo ni la jan Mato li pali e sama, taso ona li jan pi nasin toki ( grammar ) pi toki pona :ugeek:

Re: You can't simply....

Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2013 1:07 pm
by janSilipu
Not sure Lojbanists talk because of bad bits of language ( I expect they would talk even if everything were going well) but the do talk mainly about what is or might be wrong with bits and how to do it right. Toki e ijo toki, in short. But the so do jan pi toki pona; it is the conlang curse.

Re: You can't simply....

Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2013 2:04 pm
by Kuti
This is always long débates about grammar or translations, like here, complex things, bringing an artificial situation.
I just use the concept of lojban as an exemple as someting i percieve as complex.
ni li nasa tan ni: nimi L'Enfant Station li toki Kanse tawa tomo pi jan lili sin! jan lili sin en mama pi ona jan li sijelo pona.
This is crazy because: The name L'Enfant Station in French means station of the baby. The baby and the it's mother are good in the manner of their health.
the point here is to make tokipona fails while translatin l'enfant station into tomo pi jan lili.
But it is proper name, so this can be avoided.

and don't make me use English :o :arrow:

Re: You can't simply....

Posted: Sun Aug 04, 2013 9:19 am
by janMato
What did I do wrong? I think it was because I changed topics.

Someone said, toki pona is easier than Esperanto. and I said, "But I wouldn't want to have to ask someone how to find the train station in Esperanto" and then I told a story about a lady who gave birth at L'Enfant Station in DC. It was the first time anything had ever arrived early there. [Sorry, toki pona works best when the is little or no context or topic switching]

Grammatically speaking, the only tricky part I saw was the sijelo pona vs pona sijelo. From an English speaking background, pona sijelo is the more difficult construction because it is further from the deep tracks etched into my brain by my mother tongue-- I have to stop and think to use a modifier-noun construction.

And we don't have good conventions for the birth-- is it a verb, is it an euphemism (waso li kama tawa tomo mi kepeken jan lili sin)

And toki pona relies on "scales" of diminutives which are hard to guess what they mean in advance. It is like Russian "Chasha = challice, a frickin big cup" "Chaska = a regular size cup or mug for coffee" "Baikal == a big tea mug, but not as big as a Chasha" In advance, if all you knew was how to form diminutives in russian, one couldn't not be expected to guess what to call a huge cup, a big cup, a regular sized cup, nor a small cup.

If I were to create a language from scratch, I would *not* allow dimunitives (or augmentives) as derivational morphology strategy.

Re: You can't simply....

Posted: Sun Aug 04, 2013 11:19 am
by Kuti
ah! pona
janMato wrote:toki pona works best when the is little or no context or topic switching
ni li lon mute ;)
janMato wrote:it is further from the deep tracks etched into my brain by my mother tongue-- I have to stop and think to use a modifier-noun construction..
Do you have to thing in English and translate to toki pona, or do think in toki pona?
janMato wrote: (waso li kama tawa tomo mi kepeken jan lili sin)
meli li pana e jan lili sin tan lupa ona.
waso li waso taso :lol:
janMato wrote:If I were to create a language from scratch, I would *not* allow dimunitives (or augmentives) as derivational morphology strategy.
sina wile pali e ni kepeken nasin seme ?

Re: You can't simply....

Posted: Sun Aug 04, 2013 12:17 pm
by janMato
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."