kulupu nimi tu pi nasin pona

[loteni]

You said ;

"[Still later: I think part of your problem (and mine) is from the threefold nature of parts of speech in tp. Every word has a home type" 'moku' is a transitive verb. 'loje' is an adjective, 'telo' is a noun. But then any of them can be used ins slots typical of any one of them: 'moku' as head of the subject or a DO or a prepositional object, so like a noun, or as a modifier in 'soweli moku'. And similarly for the others. But, even in those slots, all the possibilities are still present: 'moku' in a noun slot can still be verbal "eating" (the activity) or nominal "food" or adjectival "edible thing/edibility" and so on through all the permutations.[..]"

This is exactly the issue im struggling with. I love your suggestion that you described after that also.

I think either, I will just accept tp officially is hard to read quickly, adopt something like what you suggest, maybe as a derivative of the language or try to find clues as to how to make the impact of that problem less so for more situations. Whilst the book offers some implications about this, I have yet to really work through what it all means or may intend to mean, and how or if it effects that much.

[janKipo]

Well, as a practical problem, the biggest difficulty with "context will decide" is actually laying out all the possibilities and seeing which ones makes sense. We tend (as I did in my back-trat on multiverses) to go for the easy, obvious, standard readings and goin to the next most obvious only if the obvious is too awful. With the p-t-k approach, the run-through of possibilities could be systematized and made sure not to miss anything. Of course, it would also involve looking at a lot of blindingly wrong-headed options, but that is just the breaks of the disambiguization game. Of course, generally, context does decide or at least limit the range a lot. That is often hard to see in these discussions since they are often about things totally out of context. But even in context (I have been through most of the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone), the way that other people's minds work is often unfathomable, even if they are people more or less of your own culture (admittedly the HP case is an Englishman fifty years and some my junior, but still). All you can do is engage in dialog. Or, usually, shift over to English and hash it out quickly (working on the toki pona taso thread on Facebook is driving me nuts, since I don't understand their points and they don't understand mine, even after going back to basic sentences).

[loteni]

Yeah I am finding this to be a big problem as well. To me, the kind of talk that is prevalent in toki pona only type settings is the exact kind of talk I have no interest whatsoever in. I really don't care if someone is eating, unless of course it is implicating their afk status, I am not interested in where people are from, unless it pertains to some topic where that is important.. etc... small talk, I don't like to engage in it..

However in Toki Pona it seems it is hard to convey anything with much content, so people reduce themselves to more often than not focusing of things of no interest.

Even in english, I often have to stop and think, the subject changes or something is brought up that is different, my mind can take a little bit of time to tune into what is being said. Young people with different cultural norms speak so differently sometimes I can barely understand them. These things of ambiguity are bad enough in a language such as english with all its specific word mapped concepts.

So I suppose the question at least for me is this: Is it possible to talk about the kind of things I am interested in, using toki pona, in a way that is easy enough for others to understand.

Sonja posted a IRC log in these forums, which hinted at these things. She entered an channel on freenode about languages, and enquired about toki pona, as if she knew little about it. Two aspects of this struck me ;

1. At one point, someone mentions that toki pona is quite simple and only able to express rudimentary ideas.
Sonja replied with something like; Oh its a failed project then ?
This seems to imply, that either; if you can only easily express rudimentary ideas the project fails. Or being limited to rudimentary ideas/communication is not important to the projects aims; ie it matters not if it is the case or not the case.

They continued to explain to her the nature of these rudimentary ideas or types of thought or communication. Describing it more like a game or meditation, a way of being more than just a language maybe.

And then this happened :

2. Someone used the term "mandala" referring to the language.
At this point, Sonja revealed she was the creator of the language, and thought that was a beautiful way to picture her language. Specifically drawing attention to microcosm / macrocosm reflective nature of mandalas.

This whole interaction seemed very intriguing to me. Mandalas are not rudimentary forms, they are very interesting to me atleast. Whilst one person might merely see a kind of pretty circle, with a few patterned dots, another might come to understand the deep mysteries of the universe, both looking at the same picture!

To me this implies being able to talk about very interesting things (albeit slightly differently to how I am used to talking about them)! People who are interested in those things will see those things that I communicate. People interested in other things might see what I communicate as other things, more in tune with their own interests. A poetic notion about synchronicity or a physical theory about quantum mechanics. A colourful way to explain how you see things, or a modern scientific theory of mind. A metaphor to describe your city of roads maybe, or a description of the latest discoveries in neurobiology.

I see this process could work the other way as well. You swat up on some current interesting science thing, and come across a toki pona poetic metaphor of someone describing their city; boom! Your mind is seeing a very interesting model of said science thing.

Does it matter if one person sees a poem about roads, where you mean to be scientific about the brain;
I don't really think so, people will interpret things in a way they find most interesting, so everyone is happy anyway.

I suppose the language might embrace this old notion, about no one really ever understanding each other anyway. So why bother trying; lets just make best use of that fact.

[janKipo]

I like polysemia in poetry and in belles lettres generally it seems OK. But I don't think it belongs in what is intended as factual or scientific writing. (Of course, there is always the note in Foucault's Pendulum, but that just points up the problem). I will be content if tp can express my prosaic idea in a way that anyone reading them will understand them. Then maybe we can shoot for more artsy-fartsy stuff.

[loteni]

But, the official dialect allows us to be more precise given the context of precision. Sonja was very clever in writing the dictionary

I suppose laying out that you want precision quickly might be tricky, but your discovery of ni as verb would probably come in handy there

sitelen ni li ni e ijo wan --- a quick intro maybe...

[janKipo]

Your adulation does you credit, but it doesn't appear to be supported by boring facts.

[loteni]

Well "more precise" not completely so... I think Sonja wrote the meanings of words in a specific order, ie that which comes first is most likely, or if you have required precision communicated, then you should go through the order in the order they are presented and take the first one that makes sense. If you intend to write something else, you would need to make earlier entries not be a sensible interpretation or write something out in a longer way or something.

This could be not possible for many instances, but it is possible for some atleast. If it is possible for all, it would allow fairly arbitrary precision.

[janKipo]

I think you are attributing more attention to detail than the evidence of pu generally suggests. So far as I can see, the order of definition in the dictionary is pretty random or, at best, statistical. But in any case, it has nothing to do with precision or general utility.

[loteni]

Oh that is strange, I had pretty well convinced myself it was to do with precision and or general utility.

Can you tell me how you know it is not ?

[janKipo]

Well, just from experience that the meaning I want is often not at a handy place on the list (and often not on the list at all) and that using the words on the list in order often lead way off the trail in figuring out what someone else is saying (see the cases where I have back-translated to show where problems lie).