things that have surprised me when learning TP

[leoboiko]

... My remark about Piriha~ is generalizable across the whole of Latin America and parts of Indo-China, especially if the report comes from SIL folk (personal prejudice).

Who or what is SIL? The people who publish the Ethnologue book? http://www.sil.org/

Yup, missionary group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIL_International

They undoubtedly do some important linguistic work (and some great free fonts to boot!), but I share janKipo’s grain of salt.

(that was an awkward metaphor. you got the idea.)

[janKipo]

Summer Institute of Linguistics, at least formerly a branch of Wycliff Bible Translators, a major plague on indigenous cultures -- also given to showboating more than a bit for donations. I don't know Ethnologue, which sounds legit. (To be fair, the WBT often wrote rather good grammars of the tribes as they disappeared. Of course, it was often hard to check.).

[janMato]

They undoubtedly do some important linguistic work (and some great free fonts to boot!), but I share janKipo’s grain of salt.

ha! let´s not be splitting grains of salt.

o tu ala e linja lawa.

o kipisi tu ala e kiwen lili pi kiwen namako walo.

[leoboiko]

For those of you who are also nonreligious and bothered by the idea missionary work in general, here’s Geoffrey Pullum on SIL and the Pirahã guy:

And so we come to anti-Christian prejudice. Earlier in his life, Everett was a missionary linguist working with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the organization of fundamentalist Protestants founded by Kenneth Pike for the purpose of analyzing the remaining undescribed indigenous languages of the world and translating the Bible into each of them. Not everyone knows that Everett left SIL many years ago, and now does not believe Christian doctrines or practice a religious faith. Still, the SIL's work goes on, and it did provide Everett's original motivation to go to Brazil, back in the 1970s, and commence working on the Pirahã language.

In that context, consider these three propositions, which I think are true. (a) There is a tendency for more people to be atheists in academia than in the rest of the population (it doesn't matter why). (b) There is a tendency for social scientists to believe (with some justification, of course) that missionaries over the centuries have done great harm to indigenous people around the world, particularly in earlier centuries. (c) Christian fundamentalists have been doing their own cause great harm among intellectuals by repeatedly attempting crazy things like taking over school boards and pushing creationist or cryptocreationist ideas illicitly into science classes. If you put (a), (b), and (c) together, you have some basis for a certain amount of suspicion toward anyone who is thought to be an active, practising, Protestant-fundamentalist missionary operating or appearing within the academic sphere.

I say you have a basis for some suspicion; I don't say you have an excuse for being prejudiced. I personally think prejudice against Christians is as unedifying and immoral as prejudice against Jews. Suppose (contrary to fact) that Everett were still a missionary: suppose he really did still think that God had instructed him to ensure that the Pirahã can read the Gospel according to St Mark in their native tongue. Would this be grounds for a prejudice so deep that it would insist that everything he did was evil and twisted, and everything he said about the language was some devious lie? I've worked with linguists who are practising Christians. I don't share their religious beliefs, but they seem to be perfectly honest. I don't know why they would lie about something as banal as subordinate clauses (as opposed to the origin of the universe or the issue of whether we have immortal souls). Where's the gain for God in telling lies about tensed complements?

(Full text)

While I agree with the main thrust of the argument, prof. Pullum doesn’t deal with the ethical issues of, you know, telling native peoples around the world that their religions are all wrong, not to mention the alleged ties to CIA and transnational corporations &c. I too don’t support SIL’s goals and some of their activities, but speaking strictly linguistically, IMHO it would be premature to simply dismiss outright all the results of their research. Healthy skepticism works best.

a, mi mute li kama toki pi ijo ante! :)

[janMato]

I don't know why they would lie about something as banal as subordinate clauses (as opposed to the origin of the universe or the issue of whether we have immortal souls). Where's the gain for God in telling lies about tensed complements?[/url]

Because the subtext to "no numbers, no subordinate clauses, etc" is that they're stupid, either congenitally or their language made 'em so. If they're congenitally stupid as demonstrated by their language, the next step is to imagine that it's only the natural order than the Portuguese get to take over. If they're language made them stupid, then it's only natural that we should pack off their kids to boarding schools and put soap in their mouths every time they speak with their mother tongue, after all, letting them use their mother tongue would be tantamount to letting them damage their brains to the point that they can't function in a modern society. It's crypo-racism. While I don't know if he wanted that story to be the story that made it to the popular press, there it is.

While I agree with the main thrust of the argument, prof. Pullum doesn’t deal with the ethical issues of, you know, telling native peoples around the world that their religions are all wrong, not to mention the alleged ties to CIA and transnational corporations &c. I too don’t support SIL’s goals and some of their activities, but speaking strictly linguistically, IMHO it would be premature to simply dismiss outright all the results of their research. Healthy skepticism works best.

We gotta trust people to pick their own religion, even if it is being sold door to door by an aggressive salesman. The best we can do is to keep an eye open for attempts to create institutional barriers to choice, institutionalize policies aimed at eliminating cultural diversity. If the only people going door to door are aggressive missionaries, who will spread the voice of reason? (Not that I support rabid skeptics and rabid atheists, they're no fun either).

Anyhow, forums have never been a good place to discuss this sort of thing. Either one ends up in an echo chamber because everyone intensely agrees with each other and the other side has left the building or it's a flame war because everyone intensely disagrees with each other and the moderates leaves the building because they don't feel about the issue strongly enough to wage the war.

There is an idea, what would debate in toki pona look like? Would it make each camps ideas appear to be more simplistic and childish than maybe they really are?

[janKipo]

open la mi toki ala e ni: jan pi kulupu SIL li toki pi lon ala. mi toki e ni taso: [Oh, Hell;. this is going to take too long -- a good argument for carrying on all or debates in tp.] I just said, don't take any field linguists word about a new language as Gospel; the history of linguistics (and anthropology generally) is replete with astounding facts that turned out not to be either. Claims of non-existence are particularly hard to maintain, since, along with "it doesn't exist", go "I missed it in my notes" and "I lost it in analysis", both of which have better track records over all. I know that the discoverer of Piriha~ has not been with SIL for some time, which, I confess, makes me more cautious, since it may mean he no longer has regular funding and so need to find a case for another grant or whatever. Not that SIL is immune to that problem; money for missions abroad and especially those with little potential return has dropped off sharply since the rise of culture wars and the need to evangelize one's neighbors: some televangelists take in a month more than the annual budget of SIL, and they don't have to take cholera shots.
Nor do I have anything against Christians, being one myself, nor against evangelicals (except for the group sopping up rich men's money to screw with my church) and, indeed, I usta was one (though my group would have though most modern specimens hopelessly liberal and damned) and even an ardent supporter of SIL, with whose graduates I have worked happily in several situations.
So, my point was just the general one: just because an expert says it and gets it published in a reputable journal is not yet a reason to think the unlikely thing he claims is likely true. When it is confirmed by a couple, three, other experts whose hate his and one another's guts, then maybe a sense of confidence can creep in. This applies, of course, foremostly in the social sciences and diminishes somewhat as you move into the hard sciences (but remember cold fusion) and almost completely disappears in mathematics (labeled conjectures and questions aside).

[jan Misite]

Thanks for the tips. I will think more about this when reading and writing TP. I was probably using ona when I should have been using ni to talk about something next to me.

Lojban doesn't have an animacy hierarchy but it does a word order that is mostly independent of a particular verb's semantics insofar as you can remember what schema to use with the verb ie what is experienced, etc. No it's not really like it, but it is just as difficult for me ; when it comes to Lojban you need to remember how to shift an argument with a particle, and in Japanese you modify the verb to show the behavior of the arguments.

I have nothing to say about the Christians.

[leoboiko]

Btw, I don’t want to give the impression that I think toki pona is at a fault for being too English-like. I could write a longer (but probably more boring) post on things that didn’t surprise me when learning TP even though English speakers (e.g. jan Pije) thought they would, like the syntax for questions, the order of modifiers, or “ken la”.