Thread worth reading- who can add words to a language?

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.
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janMato
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Thread worth reading- who can add words to a language?

Post by janMato »

The child posts of this thread are fascinating and mention toki pona several times.

Who can add a word? I think only jan Sonja has the clout to add word. I don't think jan Sonja could retire any word except for "pu" since it's the only undefined word. I'll be shocked if noka is successfully retired.

Adding a word to toki pona is like adding a new letter to the English alphabet. The idea is absurd enough The Onion had a article about it. http://www.theonion.com/articles/alphab ... ment,2869/

On the otherhand, proper modifiers are a huge loophole, as they can lead to eponyms and kasi pi ma Italija (for oregano). I haven't counted but the proper modifiers that have been used at least once must be in the 1000s and I'm sure it would be an interesting argument if they're lexemes or not and if they should be counted as words.

Anyone tempted to use ekato as a word for ten? It was proposed seemingly in jest or to make a rhetorical point. I would guess a native speaker of tp would start using the word immediately--native speakers don't care much about conlang design and asthetics, but only as a modifier since only modifiers are an open lexical category in TP.
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jan Josan
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Re: Thread worth reading- who can add words to a language?

Post by jan Josan »

That was an excellent read, thanks! It was interesting to see this 'jan nasa li wile..." discussion board mentioned in the arguments. Even with this in forum, I can't imagine anyone coming in here and proposing a new word. "disrespectful" was the term that came up several times in the discussion and I think that it is apt.

Just as a refresher, I went back through all the posts here to see what people have been proposing. There were three posts requesting new words: one for medicine, one for life, and one for shape names. In no case did anyone suggest what the word should be, only that they wanted one. In all cases the community seemed to favor using past solutions or living with the restriction (or general silence in the case of shapes).
Arguments here and in the past that I can remember often go along these lines: 1. the solution depends on context, and the right solution change along with either the physical qualities (pill, liquid) or conceptual understanding of the word (mothers create life, being not dead, awareness of existence) 2. Simplify the concept, don't get bogged down in describing every detail.

There were (and always will be) the proposals for numerical systems. Most of these solutions have been elaborate ways to use existing words to represent numerical markers. I imagine this might be more common than I realize in general: proposing an existing word can also cover other meanings.

I'm glad to see that proper noun innovations are mentioned in the above discussion, because they are so common I haven't seen a thread dedicated to one. When I had to come up with toki Pasi for Persian/Farsi, it was handled as a mini discussion within another thread. These do get bantered about and there are better and worse solutions, but Sonja has given full license to the community to take care of this when it is needed, and so far I haven't seen it abused. Someone will always be there to help with the rules, or show how a better solution within toki pona. Watching how these inventions occur and when they stick, when they are reinvented, different variations etc. would be fascinating to watch.

Curiously, there were a couple things in here that may be more unique to toki pona:

Several suggestions to remove established words, or letters! Does this happen in other conlangs? I would imagine useful words would continue to be used, and others would drop into obscurity. But without the proposal and desire for a certain amount of minimalism, would anyone care about a redundant word or two?

Grammatical proposals are abundant. I'm not sure other languages rely so heavily on creating new grammatical structures for new meaning. But most new innovations in toki pona seem to come from adding new function to the established words, and trying to fit new modifiers and clauses into the sentence structure. For example can 'kin' come at the beginning using 'kin la', or should it come after the verb, to act as a modifier on the whole sentence? And where would new ambiguities emerge?
janMato
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Re: Thread worth reading- who can add words to a language?

Post by janMato »

For the record, somewhere around here I proposed that "pan" also mean "a life"/"to live". This is a more aggressive overload than say, using "wile" to mean "expect" or somesuch similar but different word.

The new grammar rules are so subtle. For example, I've been wanting a way to communicate a "verby" sense of a phrase instead of the "nouny" sense. The innovation that would be hard to hide is X pu Y. But if I used X pi tawa Y, and was consistent enough about it, some people would internalize it as a grammatical rule for creating noun phrases based on the verbal sense of a word.

jan moli - dead man, murdering man, murdered man, etc.
jan pu moli. Dying man/Murdering man.
jan pi tawa moli. Dying man. (Man of the dying action)
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Re: Thread worth reading- who can add words to a language?

Post by jan_Pusa »

I'm not sure about suggestions for word removal, but I do notice that namako and kipisi don't seem to pop up anywhere in the forums. It could be that
1) People found their meanings redundant and stuck to "kepeken ala" and "tu", respectively
2) I haven't looked everywhere in the forums
olin jan li ike la ni li pakala mute.
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Re: Thread worth reading- who can add words to a language?

Post by janMato »

I used kipisi and namako. Mostly as "division/part/section/to cut" and spice
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jan Josan
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Re: Thread worth reading- who can add words to a language?

Post by jan Josan »

jan Pusa o, use the search field in the top and enter namako or kipisi. You will find many discussion threads, and examples of trying them out. This goes for monsuto as well.
mije Wi
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Re: Thread worth reading- who can add words to a language?

Post by mije Wi »

janMato wrote:Anyone tempted to use ekato as a word for ten?
Why "ekato"?
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janMato
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Re: Thread worth reading- who can add words to a language?

Post by janMato »

mije Wi wrote:
janMato wrote:Anyone tempted to use ekato as a word for ten?
Why "ekato"?
Philip Newton on the conlang mailing list suggested this, seemingly at random, to make a point about how it certainly isn't hard to coin a word.

Actually, ma Ekato is already semi official tp meaning the country Ecuador, maybe that is where he pulled the word from his subconscious.
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Re: Thread worth reading- who can add words to a language?

Post by janKipo »

I suspect it is from the Greek "ekaton", "100", misapplied. It is used for hundreds in the scientific nomenclature for left of point values, before the familiar "kilo, mega, giga, tera,...." and after "deka" "10". So he might better have suggested 'teka' (as I did long ago).
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Re: Thread worth reading- who can add words to a language?

Post by mije Wi »

Or ekaton. I'll add this word to my secret word list :)
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