A Few Observations on Minimalist Languages

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.
janMato
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Re: A Few Observations on Minimalist Languages

Post by janMato »

oligo wrote:What is the purpose of Toki Pona?

I used to believe that its purpose is to express emotions. I searched in the dictionary (http://tokipona.net/tp/ClassicWordList.aspx) for words describing emotions: mourning, painful, passive, patient, nausea, discomfort, unconvenient, trust, immoral, noble, pleasure. I have found none, but all of them were in the Ygyde dictionary.
A hammer is for what ever you are currently using it for, even if it wasn´t designed for that. My hammer is keeping my papers firmly on my desk so they won´t blow away in the wind.

Toki pona, by how it is used, is a recreational language learned and used by language hobbyists for entertainment, which puts it in the same category of human activity as crossword puzzles.

All those words (an piano) require sentences to describe, maybe many sentences, not unlike the way English speakers have to deal with "the feeling of pleasure one gets when you know when someone else is suffering", which the German's have a nice tidy single word for, yet in either language it can be discussed, it is just a question of how concise the discussion will be. I'll add it to my todo list to attempt to translate the various words you mentioned.
janKipo
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Re: A Few Observations on Minimalist Languages

Post by janKipo »

I don't remember tp ever be put forward for expressing emotions or the like, but I missed some of the early fun. But throughout it has had only one official cry to cover all emotional outbursts, so the best you could hope for is to describe emotions -- and, as you note, the vocab isn't there for that either. As I've said before (I think). the purpose, as near as I can work it out, is to be able to get a message across in a real situation, using a minimum of vocabulary and structure (the related conworld of minimal material and social constraints is another issue). Since the message is rarely to describe the details of one's emotional state, there is little for that -- but enough to get the message across to someone who knows the situation and so the relevant bad or good feelings. Again, the size or content of the vocab is relatively uninteresting, provided there is enough.
janMato
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Re: A Few Observations on Minimalist Languages

Post by janMato »

grieving

mi pilin e pilin ike tan moli pi jan mama.

The community is a bit split on if things like above are either a) just sentences that have been and always will be created on the spot (just like the one I'm writing now, which I have never heard before and have never memorized) or b) these are more like phrases you'll need to memorize, not unlike "to kick the bucket", and "pilin ike tan moli pi jan (X)" is more like a lexeme, a compound "word", a paraphrasis (depending on what taxonomy you like).

jan pona meaning friend certainly behaves more like a lexeme, but since there isn't any easy to see structural difference between the two sorts of phrases, I'm sure there won't be any universal agreement on the matter.

The last possibility is kind of a strong-Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, i.e. your language doesn't have a basic tidy word for "grieving" so you can't express it... you just stand there with your mouth gapping like a fish out of water, or maybe you can't even think it, you see your father dead on the couch, but lacking a word for grieving, you don't really feel anything one way or the other. I think the strong Sapir–Whorf hypothesisis poppycock, I'm just listing it for completeness.
janKipo
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Re: A Few Observations on Minimalist Languages

Post by janKipo »

Maybe not, if someone could formulate it in a testable way (not likely apparently, after 70-odd years). Of course, I don't think your description is much like SW, but then, ... .
The answer to the first part is sorta "both" -- use them as fixed until that doesn't work and then remember that they are just strings and recombine. Or do it the other way 'round. The point here is that, given the context (here the reason), we get the idea of what feeling you are communicating. That is always the point in tp; in Ygyde, apparently, you could send the message without giving the reason for the feeling or any indication of the situation ("extreme unhappiness because of loss" or some such thing could be built into a single word).
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