things that have surprised me when learning TP

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jan Misite
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Re: things that have surprised me when learning TP

Post by jan Misite »

janMato wrote:Exactly! Just for me, on an aesthetic level, leaf color is more concrete and sounds prettier than the abstract "green".
Yeah, I think it's pretty too; and if laso is grue then we can also say 'laso pi lipu kasi' or 'laso pi akesi Ikuwana' or 'laso pi kiwen Jade' and so on.
janKipo wrote:I note in passing that the green example is very like the "definitions" in NSM and so may be a step toward another kind of idiom structure.
I am not sure what NSM stands for. Pray tell?
janMato wrote:But because I lack subordinate clauses, I can't easily introduce my discussion of evergreen trees without it seeming like I've gone off on a tangent.
Speaking for myself, when I say these sentences in English they aren't unusual individually, but I would rearrange them so that the sentence about trees growing somewhere comes first and change it to use 'its color'. You're right about the 'kasi' being unnecessary here ('kule pi ona kasi' versus 'kule one').That is the order I think I am most used to in English writing. I think a lot of people are pretty tolerant of people being indirect and starting with a peripheral subject and taking their sweet time to get to a point, so long as they do in fact finish their thought eventually.

kasi suli li suli lon ma lete. mi pana e kule tawa lipu pi tomo mi kepeken kule ona.
There is a tree that grows in the north lands. I'm painting my house using its color.
I was thinking that maybe '...kepeken kule pi (or sama?) kule ona' might work too.

Using similar sentences in the order you provided but with a cataphoric 'ni', the corresponding English translation has a cataphoric "this" which I pronounce with a marked intonation on each word in the phrase, like so:
I am painting my house using the color of this tree. It is a tree in the north lands.
mi pana e kule tawa lipu pi tomo mi kepeken kule pi kasi suli ni. ona kasi li suli lon ma lete.

Note: I am guessing I could say 'kule kule pi kasi suli ni' but I think the paint is pretty much implied. I am not sure I couldn't just say 'mi pana e kule pi kasi suli ni tawa lipu pi tomo mi' either. I guess I would agree with you though, the order typical of tp makes it read pretty much like a tangent. I might finish it off with something like, "I like its color." kule ona li pona tawa mi. Though, if I said that, I might still come off as sort of ditzy. 'kule pi ona kasi' is not something I would really expect to see ever, I guess.

Which brings me to another thing: 'ni' being used deictically and cataphorically. This is a lot like the English usage, but I see no reason that it has to be the only way we can do it in toki pona. For instance:
jan Bobo li unpa e meli mi. ona li ike tawa mi tan ni.
Bob did my girl. I hate him because of that.
I am not really a fan of the use of a colon after 'tan ni' because I don't see it as necessary. There is also another possibility: jan Mato's modifying of 'ona' makes 'ona' much more useful overall in my opinion, and I suppose it's even more useful for writing tp because this use of 'ona' to refer to a clausal antecedent is transparent so long as you're careful (replace 'ni' in the last example with 'ona' or 'ona toki'; the corresponding English translation would probably be 'it' and it works!)
jan Bobo li unpa e meli mi. ona li ike tawa mi tan ona.
Bob did my girl. I hate him because of it.
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Re: things that have surprised me when learning TP

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janMato
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Re: things that have surprised me when learning TP

Post by janMato »

jan Misite wrote:Yeah, I think it's pretty too; and if laso is grue then we can also say 'laso pi lipu kasi' or 'laso pi akesi Ikuwana' or 'laso pi kiwen Jade' and so on.
Maybe. If you're referring to the species (Iguana iguana), then proper modifiers are probably okay. There is a thread somewhere on the forum on the various options for naming rocks, and some of them aren't too bad and didn't resort to proper modifiers. It comes down to how you feel about the effect of proper modifiers on toki pona's total word count, and maybe how you feel about how recognizable something like "kiwen Ja" is. (would you recognize that "Mele Kalikimaka" means Merry Christmas in Hawaiian? I mean, it is so far off they might as well have invented a new word.)
jan Misite wrote:I am not sure what NSM stands for. Pray tell?
Natural semantic metalanguage. A reasonable rigorous attempt to find the "atoms" of language. Not a conlang per se, but it generates a list of words that in theory can be combined to describe a lot of things.

Of the two suggestions, the "ni" suggestion that moves the discussion of evergreens to the end does the best of keeping artic trees on the periphery of the message.
I am not sure I couldn't just say 'mi pana e kule pi kasi suli ni tawa lipu pi tomo mi' either.
Depending on the surrounding sentences, this middle-of-the-sentence-ni could risk being unclear if the ni refers to something that was just said or something that will be said.

At one time it seemed that it would be handy to have switch-reference particles to help resolve what ni and ona refer to and to keep clear what is the current topic and what is comment, (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch-reference) but switch-references are considered a pretty exotic feature of super complicated languages.
Which brings me to another thing: 'ni' being used deictically and cataphorically.
I'm not smart enough to understand how dietic words can be deitic in an environment where you can't point at anything. And often people online use the anaphora ona when they haven't said anything before and aren't saying anything after.
jan Bobo li unpa e meli mi. ona li ike tawa mi tan ni.
Bob did my girl. I hate him because of that.
I am not really a fan of the use of a colon after 'tan ni' because I don't see it as necessary.
jan Kipo (I'm sure I remember this) said ":" means the same thing as ".", i.e. end of sentence. I tend to use
: to mean, "...ni:" refers to what I am about to say. "...ni." refers to something I said earlier. Since the rules on toki pona punctuation are somewhat vague, I figure I can get away with it.
(replace 'ni' in the last example with 'ona' or 'ona toki'; the corresponding English translation would probably be 'it' and it works!)
Hmm, I would have guessed, jan Bobo li unpa e meli mi. ona toke li ike tawa mi tan ni means "I don't like it (things someone said) because of this". And I would have guessed "things someone said" was in the environment and not a reference to something said elsewhere, or something one one planning to say.

I think somewhere on the board it's been said that "ni" can coordinate with a whole sentence (or what ever you are point at with your finger), but "ona" has to co-ordinate to one noun phrase (or some suitable thing in the environment).
jan Bobo li unpa e meli mi. ona li ike tawa mi tan ona.
Bob did my girl. I hate him because of it.
But also:
I hate her because of him.
I hate him because of her.

I suppose "I hate him because of it" could refer to "the activity of screwing", but it would be safer to use ni, because ni can safely refer to the whole sentence.

Or, if gender feels salient:
ona mije li ike tawa mi tan ni. I don't like him because of (all) this.

Or if size is more salient
ona suli li ike tawa mi tan ni. I don't like that big guy/fat bastard because of all this.

I guess it's peculiar how most human languages seem to thing it's mostly gender, number and animacy that are salient for pronouns.
janKipo
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Re: things that have surprised me when learning TP

Post by janKipo »

In the Bobo case, I would say 'tan ni la ona li Ike tawa mi'. As Mato says, 'ni' is used for sentences and it is nice to get as close as possible. 'ona' is ambiguous here, of course, between Bobo and my gal, and can be disambiguated either by tendering the 'ona' or just using the tendering word, with or without 'ni'.
'laso' doesn't literally mean "grue", which is for things green before a certain time and blue thereafter (the time varies with the discussion), but can be used loosely as here (or we could use Russian or Navajo etc.words).
NSM can, in theory, be used to describe everything. But the techniques are not normal definitions, but rather little stories in which the new concept is introduced contextually. The story for "green" involves getting one to visualize fresh grass growing and gradually focusing down on the color -- about as you suggested.
for the subordinate relative clause situation, the seemingly awkward move is pretty much required by the grammar: the clause goes as first sentence and the main sentence comes after, linked by either repetition or 'ona'. This seems to give the subordinate part extra prominence, but, since this is a restrictive relative clause, its information has to be available when the main clause comes along in order to pick out the right referent. Non-restrictive relative clauses are just separate sentences anyhow, so nothing special happens here -- except i would always put them after the main sentence,
jan Misite
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Re: things that have surprised me when learning TP

Post by jan Misite »

janKipo wrote:In the Bobo case, I would say 'tan ni la ona li Ike tawa mi'. As Mato says, 'ni' is used for sentences and it is nice to get as close as possible. 'ona' is ambiguous here, of course, between Bobo and my gal, and can be disambiguated either by tendering the 'ona' or just using the tendering word, with or without 'ni'.
I agree, with the caveat that bare nouns should be watched for being generic. For instance:
meli mi li unpa e jan Bobo. meli li ike tawa mi tan ni.
My girl did Bob. That's why women are bad.
I think I might use 'meli ali'='all women'.
janKipo wrote:for the subordinate relative clause situation, the seemingly awkward move is pretty much required by the grammar: the clause goes as first sentence and the main sentence comes after, linked by either repetition or 'ona'. This seems to give the subordinate part extra prominence, but, since this is a restrictive relative clause, its information has to be available when the main clause comes along in order to pick out the right referent. Non-restrictive relative clauses are just separate sentences anyhow, so nothing special happens here -- except i would always put them after the main sentence,
So you agree with being able to use 'ona' for clauses? As in, the evergreen clause is subordinate & comes first, and painting comes second in the main clause?
janMato wrote:Maybe. If you're referring to the species (Iguana iguana), then proper modifiers are probably okay. There is a thread somewhere on the forum on the various options for naming rocks, and some of them aren't too bad and didn't resort to proper modifiers. It comes down to how you feel about the effect of proper modifiers on toki pona's total word count, and maybe how you feel about how recognizable something like "kiwen Ja" is. (would you recognize that "Mele Kalikimaka" means Merry Christmas in Hawaiian? I mean, it is so far off they might as well have invented a new word.)
I don't mind borrowing nonce words.
janMato wrote:Of the two suggestions, the "ni" suggestion that moves the discussion of evergreens to the end does the best of keeping artic trees on the periphery of the message.
I am not sure what you mean. Do you mean bringing it to the front end?
janMato wrote:
I am not sure I couldn't just say 'mi pana e kule pi kasi suli ni tawa lipu pi tomo mi' either.
Depending on the surrounding sentences, this middle-of-the-sentence-ni could risk being unclear if the ni refers to something that was just said or something that will be said.
Exactly, which is why I am suggesting 'ona' for anaphora and not 'ni' for anaphora, just deixis and maybe cataphora. I suppose I would also use it when I want to talk about someone who has already been mentioned in a conversation too.
janMato wrote:At one time it seemed that it would be handy to have switch-reference particles to help resolve what ni and ona refer to and to keep clear what is the current topic and what is comment, (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch-reference) but switch-references are considered a pretty exotic feature of super complicated languages.
That book on ellipsis in Japanese described it as a switch-reference language; it seemed really elegant until I read about needing to inflect the verbs to reorder the arguments so that they didn't violate the animacy hierarchy -- which is a lot like Lojban except maybe worse because it's required!
janMato wrote:
Which brings me to another thing: 'ni' being used deictically and cataphorically.
I'm not smart enough to understand how dietic words can be deitic in an environment where you can't point at anything. And often people online use the anaphora ona when they haven't said anything before and aren't saying anything after.
Fair enough. Do people use 'ona' when they mean 'it/thing'? That's not something I would do; I'd probably use 'ijo' or some animal noun. I would use 'jan' to talk about a person/somebody, and 'jan ni' if they were a stranger in the immediate vicinity.
janMato wrote:
jan Bobo li unpa e meli mi. ona li ike tawa mi tan ni.
Bob did my girl. I hate him because of that.
I am not really a fan of the use of a colon after 'tan ni' because I don't see it as necessary.
jan Kipo (I'm sure I remember this) said ":" means the same thing as ".", i.e. end of sentence. I tend to use
: to mean, "...ni:" refers to what I am about to say. "...ni." refers to something I said earlier. Since the rules on toki pona punctuation are somewhat vague, I figure I can get away with it.
Sure that's fine, it might be pronounceable, and then the written colon would just help out with the lack of intonation. I pointed in my example that cataphoric 'this' happens in English. I guess I'm being a little contradictory.
janMato wrote:
(replace 'ni' in the last example with 'ona' or 'ona toki'; the corresponding English translation would probably be 'it' and it works!)
Hmm, I would have guessed, jan Bobo li unpa e meli mi. ona toke li ike tawa mi tan ni means "I don't like it (things someone said) because of this". And I would have guessed "things someone said" was in the environment and not a reference to something said elsewhere, or something one one planning to say.
Sorry about this, I had in mind something more like "jan Bobo li unpa e meli mi. ona [mije/Bobo] li ike tawa mi tan ona toki [mi]." 'ona toki mi' is pretty clear, although it could refer to anything you said.
janMato wrote:I think somewhere on the board it's been said that "ni" can coordinate with a whole sentence (or what ever you are point at with your finger), but "ona" has to co-ordinate to one noun phrase (or some suitable thing in the environment).
Well that's too bad. I guess I could use 'toki mi' or 'toki mi ni' to refer to a phrase/clause/sentence then.I don't really see why 'ona' can't. As I noted, English uses 'it' to refer to another sentence pretty frequently.
janMato wrote:
jan Bobo li unpa e meli mi. ona li ike tawa mi tan ona.
Bob did my girl. I hate him because of it.
But also:
I hate her because of him.
I hate him because of her.

I suppose "I hate him because of it" could refer to "the activity of screwing", but it would be safer to use ni, because ni can safely refer to the whole sentence.
In my opinion, when 'ni' does refer back it needs to be more specific than it usually is, i.e. 'toki mi'. I really like 'ona toki mi'.
janMato wrote:I guess it's peculiar how most human languages seem to thing it's mostly gender, number and animacy that are salient for pronouns.
[/quote]
Several South American languages mark every noun with a noun classifier, i.e. leaf, wood, insect, &c. Some(?) mark nouns with a 3rd-person marker as well, so nouns and pronouns are essentially along the same continuum.
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janMato
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Re: things that have surprised me when learning TP

Post by janMato »

re: repeating head nouns as anaphora & the confusion that causes
Yes, repeating head nouns makes it possible to think a new actor has been introduced to the stage.
Piraha, is reputed to do anaphora by repeating nouns, which then is followed up by a sentence like this:

I saw man. Man is carrying wood. These men were the same man.

So far I haven't seen much of the above pattern in tp, probably because it is so alien to anyone that speaks a langauge with subordination.

re: ona toki / toki mi / ona toki mi.
Ok, this one is taking a while to sink in. I have to think about it some more to see if it is a game changer or if it is a natural extension of what is already canonical or in the corpus. (And there isn't much to go on, just "mi mute", "ona mije" and the like, and those always refer to some noun phrase, and not the slightly different concept of "the sentence, paragraph or other ideas I've mentioned",and ni pretty safely has support for referring to situations and entire sentences)

Two days ago, I would have only expected to see:

jan sona li pana e toki. ona li wawa. (was it the teacher or the lecture that was powerful/moving?)
jan sona li pana e toki. ona toki li wawa. (It was a fast/powerful/moving lecture. The professor may have been slow, weak and sesile)

vs

? mi pali e tomo sin e moku sin e ilo sin. ona li nasa. I built a house, a sandwich and some new tools at work today. It was crazy.

Almost makes me think this is an impersonal construction. My memory isn't good enough to remember how tp is dealing with common impersonal situations, like "It's raining".

Personally, I prefer:

jan sewi li weka e telo. It's raining. (The gods are sweating, or pissing)

(actually, its fairly common to see "telo li anpa" or "walo lete li anpa tan laso suli" or the like.)

re: ni vs ona
Neither ona nor ni let you know if you are talking about something said earlier, something you plan to say, or something that happens to be in the environment. (Although : vs . can be a clue) And online, I can't see people pointing their fingers either, so the deixis is lost on me. Since english doesn't make a sharp distinction between it and that,* I wonder if the deixis/anaphora distinction was one that was important to Greek and not necessarily a universal. I think in tp, the main difference between ni and ona is that the former can refer to more things.

*If it does, I'm not smart enough to see the distinction.

Anyhow, I'm certainly no expert on the matter and I'm still learning as I go along.
jan Misite
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Re: things that have surprised me when learning TP

Post by jan Misite »

janMato wrote:I saw man. Man is carrying wood. These men were the same man.
That's pretty awesome. I will have to try that some time.
janMato wrote:jan sona li pana e toki. ona li wawa. (was it the teacher or the lecture that was powerful/moving?)
jan sona li pana e toki. ona toki li wawa. (It was a fast/powerful/moving lecture. The professor may have been slow, weak and sesile).
The second example is exactly what I am talking about.
janMato wrote:? mi pali e tomo sin e moku sin e ilo sin. ona li nasa. I built a house, a sandwich and some new tools at work today. It was crazy.
Probably OK because it refers to the whole thing happening. What happened is considered crazy. Although I am not sure a thing could be crazy except a person. I might say 'ona li nasa e mi' or maybe 'ali li nasa e mi'.
janMato wrote:re: ni vs ona...*If it does, I'm not smart enough to see the distinction [between it and that].
I don't think 'it' can refer forward really. It can talk about what's old or what's in the environment or is considered obvious but I have never seen it used in a way that doesn't make me uncomfortable to refer to something about to be mentioned. 'This' and 'that' are more flexible.

You can never stop learning.
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Re: things that have surprised me when learning TP

Post by janMato »

jan Misite wrote:
janMato wrote:re: ni vs ona...*If it does, I'm not smart enough to see the distinction [between it and that].
I don't think 'it' can refer forward really. It can talk about what's old or what's in the environment or is considered obvious but I have never seen it used in a way that doesn't make me uncomfortable to refer to something about to be mentioned. 'This' and 'that' are more flexible.
It can't be done. Faster than light travel violates the laws of physics.

Dunno. I guess regarding how it, this, that work in English, the next step would be to start tracking down examples in corpora, but I'm too lazy.
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Re: things that have surprised me when learning TP

Post by janKipo »

Busy, busy, busy!
@Misite All claims about what Piraha~ does are suspect. But this makes some sense (I've got a guy who is working on ways of folding one sentence into another;I wonder if he knows this one).
I think the speech case and other like it have to be 'ona'. disambiguated at your pleasure.
With the strung out sentence, I would probably use 'ni ali' if I meant making all the things together, 'ona ali' if I meant just the things, and repetition if I meant just some of them ("Repetition is also anaphora", old saying (mine)).
One immediate difference between "it" and "that" in English is that "it" doesn't introduce a relative clause and so functions as a relative adjective or some such thing. Also indirect quotations. These are three separate functions that collapsed PIE days (like the relative and the interrogative prns). I can't think of a case where "that" is more likely to have future reference than "it". The future reference of 'ni' in tp is strictly deictic, so far as I can see -- one reason for trying to put the sentence as close to the 'ni' as possible (cf. 'tan ni la' for preceding explanations).
@Mato
Yeah, repeating head nouns can cause confusion in the abstract though maybe not in context; 'ona' flagged is safer, if there is real danger of confusion (or head noun + 'ni')
Really thorough folk say 'telo anpa li lon' since '... li lon' is a general weather pattern,
So far as I can tell, 'ona' is never used cataphorically and is explicitly rejected for impersonal use (despite coming from Eo on and Fr. too).
We should note one minor (yeah, sure) problem with 'ni' pointing to the previous sentence, namely that it also (and more often, I suspect) points to the event the prior sentence describes, which strictly isn't there to point to. But I think replacing those 'ni's with 'kama pi toki ni' would not fly, aside from being stupid (or because). But there are regular cases 'mi kepeken ilo' 'ni li ike/lon ala. sina kepeken e kin ilo.' The sentence about Bobo and Bebi is not the cause of your dislike of one or the otehrh or both of them (or of women or men in general), but it is the fact behind the sentence that smarts. Myabe here we ought to say 'nimi ni' instead of just 'ni', which makes economic sense.
@Misite again (I'm running backwards because of the way this program is set up).
I don't think we can use 'ona' to refer to sentences (there are no other clauses in tp). The 'ona' mentioned is just the one that picks up the linking item, the noun to be modified by the first sentence. I would not use 'ni' alone for that, as it sends the wrong signal. Otherwise, I agree with your point 'kasi suli li lon ma pi lete mute.mi kule e tomo mi kepeken kule pi lipu ona (kasi)/kasi ni.' All the possibilities seem to be adequate -- for this short conversation.
At a bet, Mato meant the back end. But then he is running against the restrictive sense of the expression, which is needed to identify the right thing, the color of the leaves of those particular trees. Non-restrictive relative clauses come after the main sentence and refer back to something in that sentence.
The 'ni' in the center (with the accompanying head noun) looks fine to me; 'ona' might work in this case, too, 'kule pi lipu ona (kasi)'. In general, I would use 'ona' as a modifier only in a genitive sense, as hear, while 'ni' is more flexible.
Since when does Lojban have an animacy hierarchy? Even a stylistic one?
Following up on (or anticipating) what I said above, 'ona toki' obviously refers to the linguistic item, not the non-linguistic reality behind it, which is what causes your anger.
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).
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Re: things that have surprised me when learning TP

Post by janMato »

janKipo wrote:... 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/
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