Toki Pona Jan

[jan Kapiwe]

The forum section "jan nasa li wile ante e toki pona" is really useless. Why? There are many of ideas. And none of them are actually used by anyone, because they are not official. Unless Sonja says it is a good idea, no one uses it. And Sonja doesn't seem to participate the forum, actually she is pretty busy, and we don't even know what "pu" is yet. We depend on our leader, who is inactive for a looong time.

So, what do I want? I want to propose something that many of you will disagree. I suggest we create a Toki Pona dialect called Toki Pona Jan. What is TPJ? Toki Pona Jan is a dialect of Toki Pona where fans ideas are welcome. actually, the good additions are democratically chosen to be added to the dialect. So, let's say, people want more numbers. Someone gives an idea, a poll is made to decide wether it is good or not, and all the TPJ community chooses whether or not it will be implemented in the dialect.

Toki Pona Jan will be (if it succeeds) the People's Toki Pona, and can also be an experiment to see how a language naturally evolves.
Note that it is only a dialect and it can't and won't modify Toki Pona in anyway. The #tokipona IRC will remain the same, we don't have the authority to change it. If the dialect succeeds, the discussions will not occur on this forum and the chat will be in another chatroom. To speak Toki Pona Jan you must be in a place that everybody agrees to speak the dialect.

I know many of you will not like the idea, because we are not language experts like Sonja, and it will be unofficial. But why can't we give it a try?

[jan-ante]

in order to minimise tensions with Sonja and other supporters of classical tokipona, i suggest to change all the words and probably even a phonetical system. e.g, it could be a monosyllabic dialect of toki pona as i suggested something like 2 yaers ago. but we should move away so that the new dialect will not influence the classical one

[jan Kapiwe]

It will be difficult for people to learn completely new words, I suggest that three-syllabe words become two-syllabe, like:

pakala - paka
soweli - sowe
sijelo - sije
kipisi - kipi

etc...

[janKipo]

Well, while there changes I would like to make in tp (numbers, e.g.), I don't think a new "dialect" is the right route. tp has changed quite a bit in its decade or so and mainly by internal causes. Sonja has entered occasionally to restrains some changes (not always successfully) and to add new words (also not always successfully). This seems to me to be the best way to proceed (I have suggested several times the way to introduce large numbers and to effect some other changes from within and continue to move things to my liking (not always successfully).

[janMato]

I like the toki pona jan phrase, it's a good phrase to describe colloquial toki pona, in the sense of a .

The subforum exists to recognize that a large percent of toki pona fans are conlang creators and can't resist suggesting things.

Where a subforum like this is most useful is as a source of ideas for conlangers who would like to create their own small language, especially if it has a sufficiently different purpose. For example, eo has a clear purpose of allowing people at Esperanto conferences to speak to each other despite coming from different countries. tp has a several purposes, among them being small and expressing some sort of idea about simplicity.

I've lost count how many toki pona reforms and toki pona derivatives have been put forth on the web-- they weren't successful because it's really hard to launch a new language and a new language should be too close to an existing (relatively speaking) successful language.

If I ever get the urge to finish writing a conlang, it will be like toki pona in that it will be small, mostly fixed lexicon/closed word classes, have small list of grammar rules. But it would have the phonotactics of some pre-existing natural language (other than English) and would fall as far from the indoeuropean tree as possible with respect to parameters like branching direction, etc. And it would have a very specific goal of being a family language with potential applications as an anti-depression, anti-alzheimer's language.

The sort-of-fluent toki pona community is about 50 (maybe more now?) people and that is not such a large group that a conlang creator would gain a lot by implementing a reformed toki pona instead of a brand new language.

And my last point-- the one reform I'd like to see in toki pona (clauses of some sort, that work like "that/what/who/when" or "sem" in Scandinavian languages), I've since decided there is enough room within the current constraints to do with out it.

Another alternative to language governance in absence of either a benign dictator or a crowd that naturally turns into a governing body would be to have people just publish style guides. With things like Strunk and White and the Chicago Book of Style, that more or less is how English is governed.

[Kuti]

[janMato]

[pisku]

I think is a good idea is natural that other dialects or languages should born from tokipona I mean, is such a great idea but needs to be refined like a saphire from a stone.

I would like to call this new dialect "toki" (language) to keep the simpleness feeling, then I think some words could be refined, maybe the consonants selection. We could work with ideas from romance languages like spanish and portugese and from other languagues keeping what is best from these languages:

Spanish, portugues -> simple pronunciation, Internationalism: lot of words have same meaning in other languages
English -> Internationalism too, simple phrase structure

Vocals and Consonants I would choose:
a e i o u
C J L M N P S T U V (to replace w and be used as B ex: walo (white) walo(gualo) valo (balo) like german V in volk (vfolk)

I will give more ideas soon

[jan Misite]

I think what really hurts toki piña most right now is that no one speaks it. People have brought this up before but I am not afraid to beat a dead horse now. The small vocabulary is what keeps it from becoming a literary language and I think that is good because what you want to deal with is a listener's attention and understanding.

Also the forums lack all of the secondary things that would help a speaker get their message across another way I.e. gesture or intonation. Most speakers of toki pona probably are familiar with enough English intonation patterns that some pretty advanced problems could be resolved that way if it were to come to that. For instance, certain copular phrases in English that are ambiguous in writing probably have the same problem in Toki Pona, but if people spoke them they would go away.

I am thinking in particular of Sakahara's rather obscure but fun example of predication versus identification in the sentence 'Clinton is the President of the United States.' It pops up in one of Gilles Fauconnier's cognitive linguistics books and it rang very true with me, because it's something that I remember actually stopping me in my tracks while reading it to myself. It actually felt like a big deal, and it still does.

It continues onto 263 and 264.


One other thing I have considered is making a separate language, but I don't ever do it. One thing I like about TP is how little grammar there is, and then it's all explained so thoroughly and in such a straightforward manner. It's a very good model to emulate. It kind of reminds me of the FrameNet project for English, another exhaustive and very useful online resource which makes you appreciate just how much you know as a native speaker, with what you can do with a verb and its arguments. Word net is very useful too. I think both are very useful for a prospective conlanger to look to and emulate.

[jan-ante]