Minimalist tp...

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.
mije Wi
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Minimalist tp...

Post by mije Wi »

So i've read that someone would reduce the language to about 20 words.
Vowels can be reduced to 3 (a, e/i, o/u) and ken changed to kan.
Prepositions could be used as nouns and vice-versa.
Maybe even li, la, e, mi, sina, ona can be used as verbs, nouns etc. (mi mi = I incorporate? mi sina = mi pana? mi ona = mi ante?)

So which could be these 20 words?
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janMato
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Re: Minimalist tp...

Post by janMato »

mije Wi wrote:So i've read that someone would reduce the language to about 20 words.
Yes, jan Ape has the starts of an agglutinating, 20 root language and the semantic primes.
mije Wi wrote:Prepositions could be used as nouns and vice-versa.
Re-using function words in content slots is already underway, but it makes the language harder to read. I tried entering all the rules for TP into a machine grammar parser and when a function word can mean content or function, the number of possible parse trees grows really fast.
mije Wi wrote:Maybe even li, la, e, mi, sina, ona can be used as verbs, nouns etc. (mi mi = I incorporate? mi sina = mi pana? mi ona = mi ante?)
Well, "there's no if's about it", and Icelandic "eflaus adj. doubtless"

la ala la toki pi nimi 20 li lili kin. <-- This just looks odd.
mije Wi wrote:So which could be these 20 words?
Good question, I've been planning to write a blog post on the same idea. One could look at the most common words in natural languages, the NSM primes list, some subset of a pre-existing conlang, words similar to the Type I list in Newspeak (i.e. words excluding scientific jargon and areas of obsession, in the case of Newspeak, it was totalitarian jargon)
Last edited by janMato on Fri Oct 01, 2010 5:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
mije Wi
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Re: Minimalist tp...

Post by mije Wi »

Thank you! o pana e sona pi sin pi lipu sina tawa mi.
la ala la toki pi nimi 20 li lili kin. <-- This just looks odd.
I find it very nice kin.
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janMato
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Re: Minimalist tp...

Post by janMato »

This is my list of small languages, toki pona derivatives:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1391&p=7326

ROILA isn't on the list, but ROILA is just toki pona with the words swapped out with something that speech recognition software can understand.
mije Wi
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Re: Minimalist tp...

Post by mije Wi »

The link for puna works no more.
I found a forum post of the author, bit it seems really tough to communicate with.
I find the meanings too vague...
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janKipo
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Re: Minimalist tp...

Post by janKipo »

As always, being a self-promoter (no one else will), I recommend looking at my paper at the first LCC, which is available at the conlangs.org website, I think. Twenty seems extremely small (even 36 didn't look very promising). It depends, of course, on what you want to do with it. If, like NSM, you want to "define" everything in some loose way, you may need more than just what is needed for "everyday life" -- but less than what is needed to strictly define everything. tp's content words seem a pretty good middle of the road project for a general language: not so short as to make ordinary things have hopelessly long words for them, not so long as to be hard to learn (at least the basics). With twenty words, the Zipf wall crashes in pretty quickly, even in very ordinary situations where you can point.
mije Wi
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Re: Minimalist tp...

Post by mije Wi »

The search feature is disabled at conlangs.org. Would you give me the link please?
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janKipo
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Re: Minimalist tp...

Post by janKipo »

Sorry, no. I probably have it here somewhere but it is in deep pile. I've given the gist, I think, but the details are fun, too.
[Later] Oops! it is conlang.org (no s) and, in fact, http://conference.conlang.org/lcc1/talks2.php
mije Wi
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Re: Minimalist tp...

Post by mije Wi »

Thank you. aUI is interensting indeed. I enjoyed your article.
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janKipo
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Re: Minimalist tp...

Post by janKipo »

pona. mi kama sona e toki pona tan ni: mi sitelen e toki ni. toki ajuwi li nasa taso musi.
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