Pronouns in lexically small 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.
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janMato
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Pronouns in lexically small languages

Post by janMato »

I've already griped plenty about ona & ni elsewhere. But like the weather that everyone keep complaining about, it's time to do something about it. So I'm working on a draft of a small language of my own.

In a small language, one constantly comes across things that one doesn't have a tidy phrase for and the lexicon might not lend itself to building an elegant, transparent one on the fly. If a pronoun included the first three answers to a 20-questions game, then the listener might be able to guess what your talking about. English's pronouns answer "How many?", "Was it a boy, a girl or neither?", "Are we talking about me or you or someone else?" Answering all three of those still leaves a lot of possibilities.

Animal, vegetable or mineral?
Abstract or concrete?
Visible right now or out of sight?

So a tp version of the idea might have this:

mi monsuta e ona. (I fear it-- but I'm not sure what "it" is, so I use "ona")
vs.
* mi monsuta e [soweli]-[kiwen]-[ken-lukin] (I fear it, and it is some sort of concrete-currently-visible-animal)

So it could be a lion, but not Predator (from the sci-fi) movie who is often invisible, and not a discussion of phobias.

So for the cost of maybe 10-20 free or bound morphemes, a small language could have a useful pronoun system and an additional strategy for avoiding word building altogether.

Here is a another way to simulate the idea without invalid toki pona:

mi monsuta e ona. ona li soweli. ona li sama kiwen li sama ala ijo kon. sina ken lukin e ona.

But that is 17 words to answer 3 questions that could have been answered in 3 morphemes.

What would be a better set of questions to use in a system like this?
janKipo
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Re: Pronouns in lexically small languages

Post by janKipo »

A nice, though limited, selection of things that pronouns more or less point to. It is hard to imagine a complete set and, given that the role of such pronouns syntactically is to match up with other concord systems in the language, hard to think of a reason for trying at all in a totally isolating language. English has a few pronouns left over from the bad old days of inflections, but, being freed from the requirements of concord, they are used in all sorts of "unnatural" ways (ships are "she", God is "he", infants are "it" -- except to parents). What is a new set of pronouns intended to accomplish? We have an anaphoric pronoun to pick up earlier names and a deictic adjective which functions as a pronoun both anaphoric and cataphoric for events and sentences. There may be occasional confusions or uncertainties about what is mean, but, when these arise, they can be eliminated by a variety of devices. And the cases that arise are far fewer than one might expect (in a recent passage with quite a few 'ona's and two participants, there is only one real possible goof and that is easily resolved by context).
So, I don't see the point of more pronouns (letting all pronouns drop 'li', now that has something going for it).
janMato
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Re: Pronouns in lexically small languages

Post by janMato »

re: Why pronouns exist- syntactic agreement...
Pronouns exist for lots of reasons. They're shorter. They refer to something said (and presumably one actually said something and you know the right phrase). And they can refer to something you don't know the name of, so you simply can't have said it earlier. And you might not have in in the environment.

Re: agreement with noun classes
English pronouns answer some interesting questions without resorting to arbitrary noun classes. I think it's non-controversial that noun classes both make a language larger (in terms of # of things to memorize) and more difficult.

Re: the internal consistency of mi tawa, sina tawa, but ona li tawa.
I agree, but I think the fix would be to always use "li", since it there would be one fewer rule. If ona could dispense with li, then presumably ona mute still wouldn't? Even if the rule was "dispense with li if the subject head is a pronoun", that is still one more rule than if li was always required.
janKipo wrote:There may be occasional confusions or uncertainties about what is mean, but, when these arise, they can be eliminated by a variety of devices. And the cases that arise are far fewer than one might expect (in a recent passage with quite a few 'ona's and two participants, there is only one real possible goof and that is easily resolved by context).
Umm, which one? The song about jan Jesu? I just re-read it and nitpicked the effectiveness of ona.
janKipo
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Re: Pronouns in lexically small languages

Post by janKipo »

Well, you had more trouble with the passage than I did, so my assessment may be overly optimistic. But how would you correct it? Have a pronoun for body parts? Surely simple repetition does as well, if not better (usually not even longer). pronouns are shorter, usually, than what they replace, and can, in Enlish, refer to unknown things. But English pronouns force us to answer question we usually do not care about(someone else's baby's sex, say, or that of an unknown) or to repeat perfectly obvious facts: that Mary is female, say. On the other hand, they often let uas down at the crucial point "Flash walked up to Ming. He struck him.". Pronouns, in short, violate several of the basic rules of coversation. Lojban goes overboard in resonse to this: it has at least three different anaphoric pronoun systems (I think that is the offal number but does not count the one most people use most of the time) plus a couple of deictic ones and at least one cataphoric. The result is unusable, of course, since the calculations involved in getting the right form are often too hard to make in real time.
The ideal pronoun would be shorter than what it replaces and yet always tell us which expression it replaced or object it referred to. 'ijo' is pretty good on the first part, no too bad on the second. With careful use simple repetition, it is adequate for most cases (not so good with Flash and Ming, to be sure). We could introduce some conventions to improve the situation a bit, but the best is surely just to ask if you get lost.
Ok, dropping the drop li rule would shorten the grammar by a couple of lines, which is a lot in such a short grammar. But I am so habituated to the rule that the resulting sentences just feel wrong. I am going back to the John text to rethink the pronouns there.
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