Controversial Phrases

[janKipo]

tenpo PI sike suno

[jan Ote]

I you are a heliocentric believer and I am a geocentric believer then when we agree to meet in tempo sike wan, we will show up after a year and a day respectively.
[...]
tempo suno pi sike sike = season, time of an epicycle of the sun.

Also in Ptolemy'sc model a year is "time of [one] round" = "tenpo sike". There is no epicycle for the Sun.
(By the way it doesn't matter if we are using epicycles, one round is one round, on elipse, deferent or epicycle).

[janMato]

Oh! I'm dense, lemme try to reason this out. If we discard this complex Copernican model, and maybe that Ptolymean stuff too, which also has a whiff of science to it, it should be obvious that the earth doesn't move--I can't feel it moving under my feet--and the sun makes one circle around the sun every *day*, not year, again obvious by personal observation.

As for why there are seasons that repeat every 365 days, I have no idea, but if the sun has epicycles, then it must get cooler when the sun in further away on it's epicycle. But I don't see the sun wobbling around in epicycles or doing loop-de-loops, so the most economical explanation is that the goddess of spring and fertility is on vacation in the underworld, which not by experience, but by necessary logic is on the flip side of the land we are standing on right now. And while I'm on the topic, "ma" would make a good word for discus, because obviously the land we stand on is a flat round discus, which would be handy because it would free up "sike" to mean only hoops, donuts, toruses and abstract circles.

So sun-circle meaning day is geocentric, but year in heliocentric. That said, I will concede that with any pair of words related by a universal relationship (which is pretty much what is indicated between head nouns and their modifiers), then all sorts of things can be implied-- round suns, spherical suns, the circles that a sun moves across, the time it takes to move around the sun, the circles left by the solar disk as it rolls through the black mud of the sky, the time it takes for the sun to spin on it's own axis, etc.

Finally found one ref that discusses seasons from the geocentric perspective-- the sun was attached to two rotating spheres...I can't even visualize what they had in mind.
http://www.bookrags.com/research/geocentric-theory-wop/

[jan Ote]

the sun makes one circle around the sun every *day*, not year, again obvious by personal observation.

Yes, you don't observe, even don't notice a year circle, just like the most of modern Western general public (including me). We live with rhythm of clocks, and when we need to know, for example, when the time sun will rise on certain day -- we use calendars made by astronomers. We do not watch sky above us.

Not only the sun makes a daily round up and down, from sunrise to sunset. Also during all night all stars move on a circle around Polaris, they make the same round at night that the sun makes during the day. It's diural rotation on/of the sky.

As you said, you don't feel earth moving under your feet - so the simpliest explanation of this movement on the sky is geocentric: stars are fixed to some celestial sphere surrounding the earth. The sphere rotates, making a full round around the Polaris in one day plus one night (twenty-four hours, nychthemeron). The sun is also fixed on this sphere. It explains everything when we fix our attention only on movements of the sun and stars during any particular one day and night.

All you need to notice this movement is to look at the sky occasionally, like we do now, in modern times. But hundreds years ago people used to look at the skies more often. They watched the skies and noticed that year has 365 days:

As for why there are seasons that repeat every 365 days, I have no idea, [...] so the most economical explanation is that the goddess of spring and fertility

It's quite easy to notice that seasons repeat, that there is a cycle. But how do you know seasons repeat 365 days?

When the sun rises, we can see certain star at certain position. But few days later - there is some other star in this place during sunrise. The sun has moved against stars. So, in day and night the sun makes one round and stars make the same round, but additionally sun slowly moves. Moreover, it makes this great round not on the plane of daily circle, but on an inclined plane (about 23 deg). So we have two circles, two rotations. The sun is not fixed to the sphere as we could think watching only its daily movement. We can watch the sun and stars day by day and notice that we need to wait a 365 days for the same position of the sun against a background of stars. Now we can say: the sun appears to slowly move eastwards on the celestial sphere of fixed stars. It moves on the fixed path we call the ecliptic and makes full round in this movement in 365 days. And what a nice surprise! After the same period sun makes its round, all seasonal on-ground phenomena repeat (plants start to grow, Nile floods), seasons repeat in the same cycle. The seasons of year are on the earth, but you can see them and predict them on the sky!

found one ref that discusses seasons from the geocentric perspective-- the sun was attached to two rotating spheres...I can't even visualize what they had in mind.

After this long description above, we can look at the image from my previous letter. In geocentric model this "second sphere for sun" is in fact the outermost one - the stellar sphere carrying stars. This sphere rotates around Polaris in 24 hours, with all spheres of other celestial bodies inside. All this image makes 24-h round around the earth in the middle. The sphere with yellow circle, between stars and earth in the middle, is the one for the sun, making a separate full round in one year.

[jan Ote]

Back to 'tenpo sike':
While cultures of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and so on knew 365-day cycle of the sky, used a solar calendar, used ecliptic and Zodiac etc., could be toki pona is a culture of hunter-gatherers not recognizing this movement on the sky? But even then:

sike
  n circle, wheel, sphere, ball, cycle
  mod round, cyclical

so 'tenpo sike' can be understood as 'time of cycle', period of full cycle of seasons. Then this expression doesn't need to be related to modern heliocentric or even a geocentric astronomy.

[janMato]

If anything, I think I'm gaining some additional respect for Ptolomy as he had a much harder problem to solve than Copernicus, Aristotle only had to dream up a crack-pot idea that only superficially fit the data-- like any primative person would do, Ptolomy had to explain retrograde motion. So the Ptolomaic geocentric model is not only wrong, but remarkably complex. Toki ponas would have stopped reading their astronomy text books around about Aristotle.

A naive geocentric model not only does a poor job of describing retrograde motion of planets, it does a poor job of describing the year.

It's quite easy to notice that seasons repeat, that there is a cycle. But how do you know seasons repeat 365 days?

Everyone counted from an arbitrarily selected similar time, so estimates of the length of a year varied wildly from place to place and in fact, now that I think about it using my new and improved simplistic mind devoid of science. This is why the earliest astronomers were values for figuring out equinoxes, precisely because any naive model had a hard time explaining the length of a year, and worse, having to explain why it kept getting out of synch at the rate of 1/4 a day every year.

http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/ca ... cient.html <-- Somewhere here they mention a tribal society that counts years by waiting for the first rain and they used the same word for year as they use for rain. So in that society the length of a year varies as to the number of days.

mi moli ala tawa tenpo telo anpa MLLW.

re: 2nd Sphere.
I tried looking for 3D models with the 2nd sphere and couldn't find one, all though I found textual representations of it. I'd call the 2nd sphere a remarkably complicated expansion of the geocentric model, on the scale of Kepler's shift to elipsis and so on.

I guess it is ironic that using the simplest, most naive model for astronomy introduces so many complexities compared to the more complex, but real model.

[janMato]

jan Sonja posted a few words that have some implications for the word for abortion:

http://en.tokipona.org/wiki/insa

jo e jan lili lon insa to have a small person in one's organ; be pregnant
weka e insa to remove the internal organs; to gut

ona li pini jo e jan lili lon insa. To abort? To come to the end of a pregnancy, (without indicating exactly how)?
ona li pana e jan lili tan insa sama. To give birth?
jan pi sijelo pona li weka e jan lili tan insa ona meli. To delivery by C section?

[janKipo]

pona sijelo
The last could be abortion too.
Why 'ona'?

[janMato]

Why 'ona'?

I had in mind "he removed the small person from her inside", but ona/ona wasn't clear enough, so I changed it to doctor & "ona meli' In retrospect I was probably try to signal I didn't have any particular person in mind by using "ona"

[janKipo]

Not what 'ona' is supposed to do (sorta opposite, in fact); just 'meli' works best.