"raising a kid is what makes you a parent, not conceiving the kid.", jan Sonja
Foster parents are "mama" but biological parents are not. So what are they? I'm constantly being told that flowers aren't kasi unpa, but kasi kule, so if I do some gagavai reasoning, then jan kule must be reproductive humans.
I suppose jan sama would be the same for both siblings by adoption, half siblings that you grew up with, but if you met for the first time as an adult someone who is a long lost brother, what would one say? "tenpo ni la mi lukin e .... mi" jan sama, jan lili ante pi mama mi?
Also, if we don't have a conculture, should I be able to invoke that fact to say, well, in my house, in person relationships count most, but outside of those, blood relations count more than complete strangers, even if that blood relation hasn't been visiting for tea and cookies frequently?
Last edited by janMato on Sun Sep 05, 2010 3:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"Lo, rabbithood!" indeed.
Essentialism again and not tp. Biological parents are 'mama' if they raise the kids. maybe not if they don't. What is the situation, context, where we need the words? Where you have some perhaps negative or at least indifferent feelings toward your long absent biological mother (say), you might call her something like 'meli ni li pana e mi;' if she was always there for you but could not (for whatever reason) actually raise you. maybe 'mama pana' (vs what I am not sure). Or something else that works in situ. Outta situ, the question doesn't make a lot of sense except to look at what others have used --or you, for that matter -- in various actual cases.
"kasi unpa" I love this one Since there are afterall meat eating plants, then why not f***ing plants as well. On a more serious note, I don't think "unpa" is meant to signify reproduction, but simply the act of having sex. Gays and lesbians can "unpa" too, but they can't reproduce, at least for the time being.
A typical fluent natural language speaker knows 50,000 + words. 2 words in tp can at most cover 15625 narrowly defined concepts. 3 words phrases cover 1 million narrowly defined concepts, but the 3 and 4 word phrases start to get cumbersome and hard to remeber, eg. spam = poki suno pi moku jaki =9 syllables, which is as phonetically complex as uniformitariansim (although the English example has 8 morphemes vs toki pona with 5 lexemes)
The way out of this is to not be too picky about the semantic ground covered by individual words.
And besides, even the biologist is going to need some phrase to talk about pistils and stamens, pollen and seed and how the process works and if unpa is carefully avoided, then what words would work to describe the propagation of plants?
Reiterating, I have nothing against 'kasi unpa' for flowers (etc.) in the context of sexual reproduction of plants, but it doesn't usually work in nontechnical contexts (and is misleading even). The rule is not for making expressions to match every English word but to find expressions that work for the concept in a given context. The dictionary gives suggestions that have worked in some contexts -- maybe even fairly broad ones -- but not ever absolute. 'jan pona' just means a good person in ethical discussions, for example.
There is a good discussion about if tenpo sike suno implies a heliocentric or geocentric view of the world. One of the better ideas out of that was that tenpo sike, which avoids implications about what is circling what, is a preferable.
I'm still working out the implications of what a conlanguage without a conculture means. It could mean compounding words are necessarily re-made up on the spot (I think this is what jan Kipo was alluding to) to fit the situation, or it means that words are made up to match your own culture (white middle class east coast american vs technocrat from Moscow vs left leaning Canadian linguist), or you follow the convention and don't think much about what the conventions mean (e.g. jan lawa ~ king, but in a modern context, I'd all a parliamentary government a jan lawa anyhow), or maybe it means one should take every opportunity to think up some editorializing compound phrases, like "nasin pi mani jaki" or coffin nails.
If there is a conculture to toki pona, then we infer what a primitive society might think and create phrases that way.
meli en mije li pali e toki wile ni lon sewi tomo mi: toki li tawa ni: waso pi noka palisa li kama poka jan lili. The couple upstairs were summoning the stork.
Last edited by janMato on Sun Sep 05, 2010 3:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Well, the natural reading of 'sike suno' is "going around the sun", which is heliocentric. But it could mean "the sun going around" which would be geocentric (presumably).
As I am working on the dictionary, I keep coming up with places where I have to say "Warning: this may be culturally determined", usually for extended meanings (the first is for 'akesi' as a modifier meaning "ugly" rather than "lucky", say). I don't know a good solution for this, short of a tp conculture (on Second Life or whatever it is called?) and then we have the same problem in building that culture. For now, we just have to go along taking other people's views as well as our own into account (when we know them -- and misunderstanding is a good way [barring war] to learn them).
You just know that earth goes around the sun and a complete turn last a year: sike suno.
where's the problem? it doesn't imply the center of the universe is the sun, it just means a year has past turning around the sun, which is the only thing we can do inside of this rock called earth.
janKilu wrote:You just know that earth goes around the sun and a complete turn last a year: sike suno.
O RLY?
Methinks 'sike suno' is just 'solar cycle', a full circle sun makes around the earth...
By the way, a 'year' oficially is tenpo sike, not sike suno.
See a discussion about "tenpo sike", mentioned by jan Mato and started here: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1387&start=10#p7311
Since there are afterall meat eating plants, then why not f***ing plants as well. On a more serious note, I don't think "unpa" is meant to signify reproduction, but simply the act of having sex. Gays and lesbians can "unpa" too, but they can't reproduce, at least for the time being.