Word counting and a word for life

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janMato
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Word counting and a word for life

Post by janMato »

Fairly consistently in what reviews of toki pona exist on the web, people note that toki pona has a word for death but not life. So far, li moli ala/e moli ala and li lon/e lon are the most common work-arounds.

me: "jan lawa mi o moli ala e mi! mi wile lon!" Master don't kill me! I want to exist!
jan lawa: "tempo kama la sina li lon... li lon ma anpa!" You will exist, you will exist in the underworld!

mi pana e pona tawa lon tan ni. mi moli ala. I give thanks to the world that I am not dead.
mi pana e pona tawa lon tan ni. mi lon. I give thanks to the world that I exist (or I'm real, not imaginary).

jan meli taso li ken kama lon e moli ala sin. Only woman can bring into existence new un-dead (life). <--If you can translate this without it sounding awful, then maybe we don't need a word for life.
? jan meli taso li ken kama lon e lon sin. Only woman can bring into existence a new existence. <-- whuh?

On the other hand, I like a language with 100 or so words and keeping it close to that takes some discipline ...or better accounting.

Not really words
a, a a a, mu -- Oddly we are counting 'a' as one word when 'a' and 'a a a' mean different things.
If a toki pona made a farting noise, he wouldn't say 'a' or 'mu', he'd say Bubububu, but that isn't a word so it would have to be a proper modifier.

jan musi li pana e kon monsi kepeken kalama Bupupupu.

jan li kama li toki e "a!" ni e "a a a!" ni!
jan li kama li kalama monsi e ni: "bubububu!"
jan li mole e jan ante ni: jan li pana e (kalama) i!

So sigh, laugh and animal noise are words have the peculiar privilege of being words and not proper modifiers, but generally aren't being used as verbs or nouns except for (li mu sometimes, li a once). The vast majority of uses are stand alone exclamations. In my humble opinion, they have no superior standing to kalama Bupupupu (farting), or kalama Bilu Bilu Bilu (police siren)

Imho, the best way to fix this is to allow kalama to be dropped in colloquial speech from all kalama + onomatopoeia and not consider a, a a a, or mu as words and require they be capitalized as proper modifiers when they modify something and lowercase when they are just onomatopoeia, or the extremely rare cases where they're being used as verbs.

But li mu does seem to be a full blown verb and as a noun it generalizes to quack, grrr, meow, etc, so I suppose it must remain a word and not just an imitation of a noise.

Clitics or words, with plenty of room for arguing.
li, pi, e, sometimes la (maybe pu if we ever get a ruling on if it is a grammatical clitic or some new word)
These words don't fit the Zipf curve, there is something different about them. I think it is that they're not really words.
la following a noun phrase is more of a clitic, when it follows a whole sentence, in my opinion it is more like a word.

So if we stop counting 'a', 'li', 'pi', 'e' as words (yet continue to call mu and la words) then we have freed up four words and can get a new word for life.
janKipo
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janKipo »

Of course, I think all the words are words and most are open to any number of uses. So, 'a' works fine as noun, verb (t and i), modifier and so on. Only the markers (your clitics) are of fixed type. As for 'a a a' having a separate meaning, this is only a side effect of the repetition: the triplet may as well be a warning or a pain shout and so on.
Yes, it would be nice to have a word for "life/alive/living" but that is only on of the asymmetries in tp and probably not the worst. However, it is useful to recall that what tp is meant for is practical communication in a situation, not defining concepts or making general claims in the abstract. In a real situation, the 'moli ala' report may well be the crucial one, given the very real possibility that the body is moli.
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janMato »

So what is the worst asymmetry?

The word for "life" right now holds the same position with vampires and zombies (un-dead). If the conculture (what small one is recorded) is based on philosophies that answer questions about life, why were here, who we really are, we should have a short word for it, this feels very unsatisfying.

Another compromise would be to tack the meaning "life/to live" onto a pre-existing word, preferably one that doesn't have any meanings that could easily be confused with "to live", such as "pan", staff of life, something farmers can't live without. This feature has a jan Sonja feel to it since it works like her other language Ooa.

taso jan meli li ken lon e pan sin. Only woman can create new life/Only woman can make fresh bread.
o moli ale e mi! mi wile pan. Don't kill me, I want to live!/Don't kill me, I'd like a muffin please.
mi o moli anu pan? ni li kulupu pi wile sona suli. To die or to live? (To die or knead the dough?) That is the question.
janKipo
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janKipo »

Well, my favorite this week is the fact that 'lili' contrasts with both 'suli' and 'mute'. But I also like the contrast of 'pona' with (at least) 'ike' and 'jaki', the lack of an antonym for 'pakala' and I could go on a while. As for philosophies, I think the "meaning of life" is out as a role, though "how to live well" is in and as much a problem. Notice that "life" is already attached to an unrelated word (in our way of thinking), "at," 'lon.'
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janMato »

Overloading preps creates nasty garden-pathing.

tempo LW la mi lon tawa pali. I wake at 6 for work. At six, I'm in some sort of work-vehicle, maybe construction equipment, maybe a tractor.

lon isn't on the classic word list as a noun or transitive verb--(pros and cons as to if this matters has been hashed out elsewhere.)

jan meli taso li ken kama e lon sin. Only woman can create a new location/presence/truth/existence/awakening.
jan sona nasa li lon e jan ilo. The mad scientist brought the robot to life.

It's like want to/need to. You can't distinguish them in toki pona briefly. If lon means life/to live, then you can't distinguish "to exist" and "to live" briefly. Everything that is dead still exists. lon would have to be qualified with something, like

o moli ala e mi! mi wile lon lon ma sewi! I don't kill me! I want to exist above ground (also, in heaven)!

I've been thinking about a way to calque "The quick and the dead", but toki pona doesn't have a good short phrase for "quick" either.
janKipo
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janKipo »

Well, "quick" in that case just means "alive" but tp doesn't have a good way to say the more common one either. In the abstract. I still would hold that in most real situations tp will do fine, It doesn't work well in philosophy and science, but those are not real situations.
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janMato »

janKipo wrote:Well, "quick" in that case just means "alive" but tp doesn't have a good way to say the more common one either.
Quick is a relevant feature of being alive. The dead are motionless sluggards.
In the abstract. I still would hold that in most real situations tp will do fine, It doesn't work well in philosophy and science, but those are not real situations.
That smacks of the idea that there are some things that can't be said in toki pona-- very 1984-ish. I don't buy it.

Now as for philosophy, toki pona should be able to express proverbs that express it's underlying philosophy and goals.

Today is a good day to live. (Suitable response to Klingon)

Variations on lon
tempo ni la mi lon ni. ni li pona. Meh...
tempo ni la mi lon li tawa lon ma. ni li pona. Wordy.
suno li kama. ni li tempo pona tawa lon mi. Wordy.
tempo suno ni la jan li lon. lon li pona. Still plausibly reads as exist/existence.
tempo suno pona ni la jan lon. This good day people are here. Maybe in a mass grave. Not specific enough to conjure thoughts of vibrant life.

Variations on pan
tempo suno ni li pona tawa pan.
pona li ni. mi pan lon suno.
tempo suno ni la mi pan pona.
janKipo
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janKipo »

That too, but "quick" really just means "alive" in this case (IE root I forget exactly, but something like GVK -> vivus, biFos, zhiv, etc.)
Sorry, I meant real philosophy (possibly a contradiction) not gnomic utterances, We can, of course, do it, but at the cost of prolixity probably beyond even philosophers' endurance.
tenpo suno ni li tenpo pona tawa lon.
janPasi
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janPasi »

jan meli taso li ken kama lon e moli ala sin. Only woman can bring into existence new un-dead (life). <--If you can translate this without it sounding awful, then maybe we don't need a word for life.
? jan meli taso li ken kama lon e lon sin. Only woman can bring into existence a new existence. <-- whuh?
Maybe: jan meli taso li ken kama lon e jan sin. ?

But the whole sentence is actually wrong to begin with. In reality a man would be required too, it cannot be done by only (a) woman ;D

Ps. If someone is dead, can you say that that person still exists? This kind of reminds me of toki pona lessons:

"mi lon e sina. -- I made you aware of reality. I forced you to be to present and alert. [...] works because, to the waker, it seems as if the sleeper is not present in the waker's reality; the sleeper seems absent, and so waking him up brings him back to reality." (from: http://bknight0.myweb.uga.edu/toki/lesson/lesson6.html)

The body does exist for sure, but the person standing next to the corpse would most certainly not preceive his or her dead friend to be "present" as described in the text above. Maybe the word "moli" could be dropped too and we could just call it "lape awen". Like in finnish: ikiuni = perpetual sleep, death
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janMato »

janPasi wrote:Maybe: jan meli taso li ken kama lon e jan sin. ?
Yes, that does sound better, but it sounds better because it avoids expressing alive. The new guy could be dead.
janPasi wrote:But the whole sentence is actually wrong to begin with. In reality a man would be required too, it cannot be done by only (a) woman ;D
I had in mind a feminist tract, but in an anti-robot tract, then one would want to remind people that only men and women can create life, unlike those lousy androids.
janPasi wrote:Ps. If someone is dead, can you say that that person still exists? This kind of reminds me of toki pona lessons:

"mi lon e sina. -- I made you aware of reality. I forced you to be to present and alert. [...] works because, to the waker, it seems as if the sleeper is not present in the waker's reality; the sleeper seems absent, and so waking him up brings him back to reality." (from: http://bknight0.myweb.uga.edu/toki/lesson/lesson6.html)
lon e sounds discordant to my ears, so I checked to see how often it gets used, more often to mean "to create, to establish, to be at" I think I only saw one non Pije reference that seemed to use the meaning of "wake". I would have said:

mi li (kama) pini e lape sina.
jan Puta li pini e lape sina.

jan Pije asks if the distinction between why "mi lon e sina" is legit but 'sina lon e mi" isn't, makes sense, and I answer "ala". Either they both can be a peculiar way to express wake, or neither is. I would be interesting if there exist a language with verbs that required a lexically different verb for such a role reversal.
janPasi wrote:The body does exist for sure, but the person standing next to the corpse would most certainly not preceive his or her dead friend to be "present" as described in the text above. Maybe the word "moli" could be dropped too and we could just call it "lape awen". Like in finnish: ikiuni = perpetual sleep, death
toki pona words definitely are not atomic, this has been noted many times before. Unlike a philosophical language, I don't think toki ponans have made any claims that the words consititute indivisible atoms. Somewhere out there is a toki pona thesaurus with two word alternatives for most words, some words have 1 word alternatives, but sometimes in only one sense of the word.

If one could come up with a suitable antonym for "lape awen" then we'd have a word for alive.

lape weka?
kin la mije en meli taso en jan ilo ala li ken lon e jan sin pi lape weka. Only woman and man, not robots, can create life (new sleepless people)
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