Word counting and a word for life

Tinkerers Anonymous: Some people can't help making changes to "fix" Toki Pona. This is a playground for their ideas.
Tokiponidistoj: Iuj homoj nepre volas fari ŝanĝojn por "ripari" Tokiponon. Jen ludejo por iliaj ideoj.
janPasi
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janPasi »

Yes, that does sound better, but it sounds better because it avoids expressing alive. The new guy could be dead.
That could indeed be the case. Some babies are stillborn, unfortunately. Could one perhaps think that "jan" is by default a living person, unless explicitly said to be dead?
kin la mije en meli taso en jan ilo ala li ken lon e jan sin pi lape weka.
Whoa! You make long sentences, they're a bit difficult for me to understand as I've just started with toki pona. lape weka - sleepless, seems (at least to me) to be a bit different thing from being aware, i.e. "lon".

"Only woman and man, not robots, can create sleepless babies."

Well, in my experience a great number of babies seem to be more or less sleepless, but it's not really the same thing, is it? :D

What is the function of "kin la" in your sentence? Could one maybe say:

mije en meli taso li ken lon e jan sin li lon. jan ilo li ken ala. - Only man and woman can create new, aware people. Not robots.

Yeah, I know that "lon" is there again, but that really is the word that says aware or alive in tp... Sorry if there are errors in that sentence, like I said, I'm still learning.
Last edited by janPasi on Thu Jul 22, 2010 12:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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jan Josan
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by jan Josan »

janPasi wrote: mije en meli taso li ken lon e jan sin li lon. jan ilo li ken ala. - Only man and woman can create new, aware people. Not robots.
You're instinct to split the people and the robots into two sentences is good. But the first sentence would have to end with 'jan sin' or it is an (illegal) compound:
mije en meli taso li ken lon e jan sin. jan ilo li ken ala.
janPasi
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janPasi »

jan Josan wrote: You're instinct to split the people and the robots into two sentences is good. But the first sentence would have to end with 'jan sin' or it is an (illegal) compound:
mije en meli taso li ken lon e jan sin. jan ilo li ken ala.
Oh yeah, I read about that a while ago. Thanks for the correction! :) We did lose the reference to being aware/alive again, though :D
janKipo
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janKipo »

The sentence is licit; it just says something else, namely "Only males and females can create new people and exist." that is, the 'li lon' attaches as verb back to the original subjent, not the DO here.
I am not sure that 'lon' should mean "conscious, aware" and the like, since amoebae are lon but not conscious (as far as we know, anyhow). "Conscious" seems more like 'pilin' or 'lukin' or some such. But I haven't looked at the draft notes nor actual entries on the list for a while.
janPasi
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janPasi »

janKipo wrote:I am not sure that 'lon' should mean "conscious, aware" and the like, since amoebae are lon but not conscious (as far as we know, anyhow). "Conscious" seems more like 'pilin' or 'lukin' or some such. But I haven't looked at the draft notes nor actual entries on the list for a while.
lon is actually said to mean (among other things) "to be awake" or "to be present", but I though awareness is sort of implied in that.

http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona ... i-pona.xml

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Toki_Pona/WordTpEn

Your point about amoebae is a valid one, though. After reading some more postings on the forums, it seems to me that most everything (including inanimate objects) can "lon".
janMato
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janMato »

Conlang designers are not (usually) professional linguists. Both conlang hobbyists and probably linguists fall into the trap of thinking they know what a word means, but in fact their definition doesn't reflect usage.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
—Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride, after one "Inconceivable!" too many from Vizzini.
janKipo
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janKipo »

But for conlangers, H. Dumpty is the true authority -- at least until the epigones cock things up. Are we now to the point where we can cock things up or are things still so amorphous that all we can do is impose some form here and there?
janMato
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janMato »

janKipo wrote:But for conlangers, H. Dumpty is the true authority -- at least until the epigones cock things up. Are we now to the point where we can cock things up or are things still so amorphous that all we can do is impose some form here and there?
Imho, toki pona solidified about 2 years after inception. It's main developers were jan Pije, jan Sonja her roommate, and jan Lament (Nikita Ayzikovsky)-- the last I suspect was the active Russian poster on livejournal (but I haven't checked my names to know for sure). Thanks to the neglect (and I mean that in a nice way) and general lack of governance, the language, imho, is very much a living language now and evolving much like any creole would. jan Sonja, more so recently and somewhat half a year ago began withdrawing her presence from the internet, doesn't answer fan mail (from me) and generally isn't publishing much. Let me hasten to add, that is fine by me, conlang designers are only responsible to work on it to the extend that they enjoy it and feel like doing so. jan Pije, similarly appears to be suffering from a high rate of employment.

Individually, all we can do is suggest style guidelines, some of them will catch on, but this herd of cats will decide which way to go. Anyhow, I've been pondering personal languages thinking these questions are easier to answer if a) tp is a natural language and preponderance of usage in the corpus is all that counts or b) it's a personal language that happens to be used by several people, so each person is 100% correct in their own idiolect.

As for us pundits of tp (and even jan Pije and jan Sonja would just be pundits if they resumed writing), correctness is by ear. It means what it sounds like it means.
janKipo
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janKipo »

All too true, I fear. But I wish the fundamentals had been finished (of course, I know from other langs that that may take years -- going on 25 for Lojban and no end in sight. So, let's us divvy up the needful: deciding the hard cases, filling out the vocab, codifying agreed upon usage and the like. And hope Sonja either gets involved or out of the way and that we can come to some serious agreements pretty rapidly. Esperanto worked well because it got all its kinks (that we going to be ironed out) ironed out at the start. A goal to shoot for. Then the language can go on from there.
janMato
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Re: Word counting and a word for life

Post by janMato »

I think the design goals of Esperanto helped -- it was okay to borrow words and the grammar had a clear model of IE languages.

The design goals of lojban, imho, isn't helping. To grind out all the ambiguity in a phrase is a difficult task, and every time one discovers an ambiguity left by the current grammar, one would have to tinker with the grammar. But I'm speculating there, I dimly understand lojban.

As for what we can do today regarding the abstruse questions of grammar, semantic gaps, community innovations:

1- write style guides (Strunk and White aren't the law and many English style guides went as far as to promote grammatical rules that never existed before)
2- create ideolect, a personal conlang-- who's to stop me from telling my cat, "*soweli mi o mi wile ala e ni: sina moku e soweli Monkowi pu pan lon poki" if I do it in the privacy of my own apartment?
3- quietly make mistakes over an over (natural languages aren't nearly so neurotic about evolution, we hardly notice the changes going on under our nose)
4- wait. Well, it's been 7 years or so since the last canonical publication from jan Sonja and something less than that from the last jan Pije publication.
5- research and advocacy of positions, and participation in the language governance process. This path suffers delusions about the resources most people have for managing the language in this fashion.
6- treat the whole thing as an exercise in field linguistics. Look strictly at the corpus of utterance and writings of everyone *except* the conlang designers. Infer the grammar from that the same way that a linguistic analyzes a newly discovered language in the Amazon.

Personally, I like options 1,2,3 and 6, they're not all mutually exclusive.

* "my cat, I don't want this: you are eating the Mongolian animal (gerbil) living in the box."
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