modifier word order/PoS of colors

Tinkerers Anonymous: Some people can't help making changes to "fix" Toki Pona. This is a playground for their ideas.
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janMato
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modifier word order/PoS of colors

Post by janMato »

http://en.tokipona.org/wiki/Colour_words

According to the page above loje jelo and jelo loje are different shades of orange. What is remarkable about this is

a) loje and jelo are officially nouns now.
OR
b) kule is being left off and modifier order is significant

a) is easier to cope with. Despite some bickering, people tend to move words from one PoS to another and somewhere jan Sonja said the PoS indicators were guidelines, not really strict lexical categories like they might be in other, usually inflecting languages.

b) has more complicated implications. I've speculated elsewhere that there is a seemingly natural or necessary ordering of categories of modifiers.

mi lukin e kala suli laso mute mi. I saw my blue whales. noun + derivational modifier + descriptive modifier + plural + possessive
mi lukin e kala suli mute laso mi. I saw my blue whales. noun + derivational modifier + plural + descriptive modifier + possessive
? mi lukin e kala mute laso mi suli. I saw my blue whales.

But within a category, the modifiers seems to float freely.

mi jo e soweli lili kalama. I have a noisy cat.
mi jo e soweli kalama lili. I have a noisy cat.

If colors don't float freely, then there would be 2 varieties of modifiers, one whose orders change freely and one whose meaning changes based on if it is in 2nd or 3rd place.

So the simpler explanation is that colors are now officially legal noun phrase heads.
janKipo
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Re: modifier word order/PoS of colors

Post by janKipo »

Not sure I follow. I do think there is an order to modifiers, though I am not so sure what it is and how variations affect meaning (moving possessives and plurals forward over long descriptives makes for clarity, for example). But I don't see any reason why, within that order, there cannot be several items (probably regrouped) occuring, so that 'ijo [pi] loje losa' and 'ijo[pi] losa loje' refer to different colored things, without making either of them nouns (in this case or as a base category).
Another factor to be taken into account is quasi idioms, of which tp is full. Thus, 'soweli lili kalama' is clearly (in context, of course) a noisy cat (or, in slightly varied context, dog, budgie, ...) where as 'soweli kalama lili' sends us looking for a loud animal in a small form (I suspect that interchanging size modifiers and nominal modifiers will usually affect meaning, but that is a very vague hunch -- and may be just English talking).
Why. by the way, is 'suli' called a derivational modifier and 'laso' a descriptive one -- they both look descriptive to me (but see above)?
janMato
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Re: modifier word order/PoS of colors

Post by janMato »

I would guess that possessives need to go very last, because they sometimes take modifiers themselves.

mi lukin e tomo mi mute. I think at one point it was said juxtaposition alone was okay for possessives, even if the possessor was 2 words
mi lukin e tomo suli mi mute.
* mi lukin e tomo mi mute suli. If this is "pi"-less juxtaposition, then suli should be modifying mi.
mi lukin e tomo pi mi mute. No matter how I parse it, this looks okay to me.
mi lukin e tomo suli pi mi mute
* mi lukin e tomo pi mi mute suli. Once there is a pi in the way this is just wrong.

Imho, the difference between derivational modifiers and descriptive modifiers is how often they get used in "quasi-idioms"/"compound phrase". The more often they appear in these fixed phrases, the more productive they are, the more they behave like derivational modifiers and would/could/should resist having other modifiers infixed between them and their head noun.

jan pona
jan ike
kasi suli
jan lili

whereas jan laso, kasi laso, etc aren't used so much used like idioms/fixed phrases
janKipo
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Re: modifier word order/PoS of colors

Post by janKipo »

I don't remember that about not needing 'pi', but it makes some sense (cf. numbers). On the other hand it would require strict order, putting possessives always last (which I think is a bad idea).
In any case in your first *d sentence 'suli' would be modifying 'tomo' again unless there were a 'pi': even if two word possessives are OK without 'pi', three-word ones aren't (unlike numbers) .
second *d is OK but (on your reading) force the possessor to be the big us or (on mine) is ambiguous.
I wouldn't want to put too much on the frequency in idioms, since that is like to change over time and perhaps radically. Of course, I also wouldn't call that derivation, since they are always free and the more productive they are, the more they are free.
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