Case

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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Evertype
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Case

Post by Evertype »

Evidently there is a specification
Upper case letters are only used at the beginning of proper names.
This rule seems to me to be very silly. What is the advantage to Toki Pona for it to disregard the simple typographic rules of the Latin script?

Written case is decorative. In the spoken language there is no "marker" for the beginning of sentences of or proper names. (Except of course in Lojban.) So in the written language, if one is going to use case for proper names in Toki Pona, why wouldn't one also do it at the beginning of sentences?
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Re: Case

Post by janMato »

This is actually a good point. Part of the toki pona way of doing things is to split phrases with particles. And this is important because words don't have a strict part of speech, like Icelandic, instead it's closer to English were we can verb any noun we feel like. So in spoken toki pona you can have sentence split ambiguity:

ilo jan li tawa wawa ma tawa li ike tawa ilo jan.

vs

ilo jan li tawa wawa. ma tawa li ike tawa ilo jan.

The robot moves fast. The robot doesn't like earthquakes.

vs

ilo jan li tawa wawa ma. tawa li ike tawa ilo jan.
The robot is an earth shaker. The robot doesn't like movement.

I think a native would speaker would invent end of sentence particles, similar to Singapore English's "la". (And a particle to indicate the split between a verb and its modifiers but that is another story)

In written toki pona, we have to rely on periods to indicate the sentence split.

The spec officially says any intonation is okay, including I suppose fire truck intonation ILO jan LI tawa WAWA. ma TAWA li IKE... etc. So I'm reluctant to say that sentence break questions can be resolved by appealing to intonation. And besides, tp except at a conference or two is a written internet language, not an in person language, at the moment.
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Re: Case

Post by Evertype »

janMato wrote:In written toki pona, we have to rely on periods to indicate the sentence split.
Here you didn't address my actual concern. Because in written Toki Pona, there's nothing to prevent a reliance on both full stops and sentence capitalization to indicate the sentence split.

The rule I cited,
Upper case letters are only used at the beginning of proper names.
is arbitrary, and I question its utility. Toki Pona can also be written in Devanagari, or in Tengwar, or in Greek. Just as any language can be written in any script. Again: What is the advantage to Toki Pona for it to disregard the simple typographic rules of the Latin script, namely the use of sentence-initial capitalization?

All it does is make sentence navigation more difficult, and since most Toki Pona words are very short and similar-looking, that's no advantage at all.
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Re: Case

Post by janMato »

Yup, sorry, I sometimes do that (write, then carefully read the original post).

If we step away from toki pona, [which is a system with a largely absent inventor and a bunch of transient, disorganized fans], and talk about conlang creation in general, I agree with you on capitalization and using the general patterns for using the latin alphabet, punctuation etc. If I were to write my own conlang, my audience would be other people in Arlington, Virginia and I would make sure it was writable with ordinary a to z (no diacritics) and used punctuation more or less like English unless there was something seriously compelling about inventing a new punctuation system, a letter with a diacritic, or some unexpected convention for capitalization. Prestige scripts are a different story-- those are for making stuff that looks nice on the wall, not as a communication system that people will actually use, on forums or in real life.

Since the inventor is largely absent and the fans are transient and disorganized, ideas to change existing conventions don't catch on, or do so slowly. We are in the same state that Japanese is with their god awful complex writing system. People are sticking with the writing system because it's an established convention. I think to change the language now, someone would have to use toki pona & contribute enough to the corpus that people start to imitate you. For example I, on this forum, for a while so consistently misspelled tenpo as tempo that some people began copying me. I didn't do that on purpose. I try to spell the word correctly now.

If tp lacked a period, then we'd have no written sentence dividers. The capital is redundant for starting a sentence. In the spirit of doing with less, it makes sense to give up the initial capital. We could maybe give up the capital for proper modifiers because they are recognizable from not being on the list of 125 or so words. ma mewika is just as clear. But the edge case would be names like Mary : jan meli vs jan Meli. Verbally, you'd get no hints that the 2nd was a name and the former meant "woman" or "the woman's person."

For spoken toki pona, we don't have any good guidance yet. The fans of toki pona are from all over the place-- Finland, Russia, Spain, Brazil, Japan, and those languages don't have the same conventions for intonation, stress or volume (or pauses between words) to indicate end of sentence end, or questions. So we really don't know what's going to happen in spoken toki pona-- it's attractive to think that rising tone at the end will mean question and falling means end of sentence, but in Finnish (according to someone in my book club) rising tone means you're angry and I don't know what falling tone means in Finnish.

At the moment in written tp, questions aren't a problem because we got the question mark, sentences aren't a problem because we have the period.
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Re: Case

Post by Kuti »

janMato wrote:For example I, on this forum, for a while so consistently misspelled tenpo as tempo that some people began copying me. I didn't do that on purpose. I try to spell the word correctly now.
Maybe it could be useful to add to the forum a tool to correct spelling

Evertype wrote: What is the advantage to Toki Pona for it to disregard the simple typographic rules of the Latin script, namely the use of sentence-initial capitalization?
I don't know there are rules for latin script.
What is the advantage to German to capitalise each name ?
Viweil Uhr ist es? :arrow:

long sentence foun in Wikipedia wrote:Er kam am Freitagabend nach einem harten Arbeitstag und dem üblichen Ärger, der ihn schon seit Jahren immer wieder an seinem Arbeitsplatz plagt, mit fraglicher Freude auf ein Mahl, das seine Frau ihm, wie er hoffte, bereits aufgetischt hatte, endlich zu Hause an .
I didn't understand why :?

I don't know why toki pona has this rule, but in written form I found it more cute than other languages, and in keyboard-writting it makes typing a bit faster :lol:
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Re: Case

Post by Evertype »

janMato wrote:If I were to write my own conlang, my audience would be other people in Arlington, Virginia and I would make sure it was writable with ordinary a to z (no diacritics) and used punctuation more or less like English unless there was something seriously compelling about inventing a new punctuation system, a letter with a diacritic, or some unexpected convention for capitalization.
Surely you would not shun the noble þorn…
If tp lacked a period, then we'd have no written sentence dividers. The capital is redundant for starting a sentence. In the spirit of doing with less, it makes sense to give up the initial capital.
Erm, no, it doesn't. Why not? Well, none of the world's languages, great or small, gives up the initial capital. It's part of the writing system. It's useful. it helps paragraphs to become less of a wall of words. We use initial capitals to navigate when we read.
We could maybe give up the capital for proper modifiers because they are recognizable from not being on the list of 125 or so words.
That would be silly, What's the orthography based on? "Doing with less"? To me it makes no sense to make that the cornerstone of orthographic principles.
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Re: Case

Post by Evertype »

Evertype wrote: What is the advantage to Toki Pona for it to disregard the simple typographic rules of the Latin script, namely the use of sentence-initial capitalization?
I don't know there are rules for latin script.[/quote]There are centuries of orthographic practice for hundreds of languages.
What is the advantage to German to capitalise each name ?
Each noun, you mean. That particular practice was once also used in English and Dutch and Nordic languages. They've all given it up but German, and in the twentieth century at least in East Germany but also elsewhere German was sometimes printed without capitalization of nouns.
I don't know why toki pona has this rule, but in written form I found it more cute than other languages, and in keyboard-writting it makes typing a bit faster :lol:
OK, well if you think it is "cute" then I guess we differ in matters of taste. I think it's dysfunctional, and I think it looks bad, and I think it makes it harder to navigate prose. :cry:

And I simply don't believe you about the typing speed. You've said it, but I don't bet you've tested it rigorously. :o
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Re: Case

Post by janMato »

I said " In the spirit of doing with less, it makes sense to give up the initial capital."
You said "Erm, no, it doesn't. Why not? Well, none of the world's languages, great or small, gives up the initial capital. It's part of the writing system. It's useful."

Toki pona has a streak of primitivism in it, too, so by that measure the existence of any capitals is the odd ball, not the refined usage of capitals. Before the Romans, no one used a system of upper case/lower case. And it was hundreds of years that people got along with just upper case.

Toki pona has give up a ton of stuff that is useful.

- subordinate clauses. This is a royal pain in a language with so few words.
- open lexical categories (except 1). This is another royal pain. In all real languages the argument "Eskimo has no word for "lamb"" is nonsense, because they can make on up, borrow one, etc. In toki pona, we really don't have a lexical strategy for "lamb"
- a rich syntactic or morphological system. TP has like zero morphology (at best some clitic action going on, but it's hair splitting arguing to get people to agree what is a clitic and what is an independent word) Most languages have nothing against adding more and more rules, so that oddities like "Beer me!" (Bartender, give me a beer!) can enter the language and require yet another rule to be added to the formal grammar. But in toki pona, the list of syntactic rules is closed.
- Morphology at all. Toki pona has to be one of the most analytic languages I've worked with.
- a large dictionary. No human language gets by with so few words. This is pidgin sized lexicons, but we are trying to do creole sized work. That we succeed at all is kind of amazing.

toki pona as the game that it is, is indeed about doing without. It may evolve into a real language, but that could take a long time (probably longer than societies interest in this game). If someone hurries up the process, they will create a toki pona derivative. Which is fine-- but getting fans for a derivative is a risky project-- we got tons to tp derivatives that try to do the same with less or try to do more with more and so far they aren't picking up any fans (at least not in the sense of people trying to use these new toki pona- look-alikes.)
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Re: Case

Post by Evertype »

janMato wrote:Toki pona has a streak of primitivism in it, too, so by that measure the existence of any capitals is the odd ball, not the refined usage of capitals. Before the Romans, no one used a system of upper case/lower case. And it was hundreds of years that people got along with just upper case.
Why doesn't Toki Pona use all caps, then? Before there was case, there were only capitals. Primitivism is as primitivism does.
Toki pona has give up a ton of stuff that is useful.
Sure, and that makes Toki Pona quite interesting. But giving up this particular thing doesn't make it more interesting, or easier to parse. It's oddball for oddball's sake.

Plus, Toki Pona does use capital letters for "proper modifiers" as you called them. So much for primitivism there.

All of the other restrictions Toki Pona has are quite interesting. But not the one that avoids the use of capital letters at the beginnings of sentences. There's no actual value there: it's a needless restriction.
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Re: Case

Post by szilard »

Evertype wrote:OK, well if you think it is "cute" then I guess we differ in matters of taste. I think it's dysfunctional, and I think it looks bad, and I think it makes it harder to navigate prose. :cry:

And I simply don't believe you about the typing speed. You've said it, but I don't bet you've tested it rigorously. :o
what is the last time you had to navigate prose in toki pona?
as far as i can tell the longest genre that makes sense in tp is haiku and epigram; anything longer than that is out of the scope; i just can't see Don Quixote or the Yukara in tp.
actually the Yukara would be a good idea; i just might try to hit it.
now we have a paragraph with tp rules; lets see; does it look bad?
nah, it is ok.

if you want to learn about typing speed look at teen chatrooms. they are all about typing speed. no caps, or all caps, no punctuation except for !!!!!!!.
tp does not go that far, but it could.
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