Toki Pona Jan

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.
pisku
Posts: 18
Joined: Thu Oct 29, 2009 9:26 pm
Location: Mexico City

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by pisku »

I will start with something I think we all will agree.

Pronouns

mi - I
sina - you
ona - he, she, it

I think mi is something universal acepted, it should stay and sina and ona too

What you think?
janSilipu
Posts: 288
Joined: Tue Aug 09, 2011 9:21 am

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by janSilipu »

There is probably a point where discussions of changes to tp slide over to discussions of new languages based on tp, Anne, later, when those discussions seem no longer appropriate for a tp forum, but call for a site of their own. I don't know where those points are, but I feel this discussion is around at least one of them now. (An really, using Lojban as a model?)
jan-ante
Posts: 541
Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2009 4:05 pm

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by jan-ante »

pisku wrote: mi - I
sina - you
ona - he, she, it

I think mi is something universal acepted, it should stay and sina and ona too

What you think?
i agree with mi only, everything else should be monosyllabic too:
you - ki or ti or vi
he, she - ci
but pronouns are far not the most important words of tp; those are separators. perhaps we should decide on them, other words could be generated randomly
jan-ante
Posts: 541
Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2009 4:05 pm

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by jan-ante »

janSilipu wrote: There is probably a point where discussions of changes to tp slide over to discussions of new languages based on tp, Anne, later, when those discussions seem no longer appropriate for a tp forum, but call for a site of their own. I don't know where those points are, but I feel this discussion is around at least one of them now. (An really, using Lojban as a model?)
i dont think so. some dialects of chinese have totally different words (monosyllabic!), but they are just dialects, not different languages, becuse everything else is the same. if you write them with logographics, they look identically
janSilipu
Posts: 288
Joined: Tue Aug 09, 2011 9:21 am

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by janSilipu »

Of course, in the Chinese case, there is also the historical development and the political unitynto justify the the dialect claim, even though the differences are greater than that between many separate languages ( French and Italian, certainly). Dialects may well develop in tp, if it is ever spoken, but I don't see a reason for deliberately creating them or otherwise dicking around with the language other than creative exuberance. And that can be done on your own dime, not tp's. Nothing in this thread so far seems to address actual problems with tp.
jan Misite
Posts: 42
Joined: Tue Dec 28, 2010 6:42 pm

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by jan Misite »

I like jan Mato's idea. Are there any best practices that make spontaneous TP more readable or speakable?

I wonder how the semicolon clause thing works in real life?

Jan silipu: TP has problems? Like what?
jan-ante
Posts: 541
Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2009 4:05 pm

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by jan-ante »

janSilipu wrote:Of course, in the Chinese case, there is also the historical development and the political unitynto justify the the dialect claim, even though the differences are greater than that between many separate languages ( French and Italian, certainly).
i disagree. the grammatis and sintacsis of french and italian are differnt, although the words are similar. if you read french and italiat texts in logographic, they will look differently
Dialects may well develop in tp, if it is ever spoken, but I don't see a reason for deliberately creating them or otherwise dicking around with the language other than creative exuberance.
if you don not see the reason, just do not participate.
And that can be done on your own dime, not tp's. Nothing in this thread so far seems to address actual problems with tp.
what is dime? sorry, i am too lazy to day to look at the dictionary
jan-ante
Posts: 541
Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2009 4:05 pm

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by jan-ante »

jan Misite wrote: I wonder how the semicolon clause thing works in real life?
good point. should we pick a word for it?
other points:
numbers
multiple la
(quasi)prepositions - this could be solved in monosyllabic dialect by mere introducing of pause/space. e.g. if tomo->fo, tawa->va, then fovami - my car, fo vami - house for me. so, vote for monosyllabic :)
janSilipu
Posts: 288
Joined: Tue Aug 09, 2011 9:21 am

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by janSilipu »

"on tp's dime" ancient telephone reference from when calls were paid for with current cash: tp's resources being used for someone else's advantage.
Semicolon suspect Mato has his eye on 'pu' again.
Pauses are notoriously hard features to legislate, stress patterns work better but are also unreliable (most people mispronounce at least some tp words by putting the emPHAsis on the wrong SylLABle)
French and Italian: I haven't tried the logographic test, but I suspect the differences are not all that great -- not so much as Chinese and Japanese, say, and probably not much more than Mandarin and Hakka, although, again, political forces may impose a certain uniformity.
The question is less whether to participate or not than of whether to use a tp forum for an inherently nontp enterprise.
Tp problems: numbers, relative clauses (restrictive), ambiguity of extended 'pi' structures, etc.
jan Misite
Posts: 42
Joined: Tue Dec 28, 2010 6:42 pm

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by jan Misite »

jan-ante wrote:
jan Misite wrote: I wonder how the semicolon clause thing works in real life?
good point. should we pick a word for it? :)
It's always felt like a band-aid. Why don't we dosomething idiomatic like 'ona ni'? I like it because I don't think I would ever use it except for disambiguating purposes in an utterance.Imight also use it for general endophora rather than just cataphora or periphrasis or embedding...Whatever it is that the semicolon does. Anyways, when I say it with an English pronunciation the problem kind of goes away. :/ kind of why I suggested that. Not enough languages bother with how they're supposed to be spoken, TP being kind of an exception with its attention to pragmatics. And /real/ problems. Though if I could syntacticize English's system, that would be pretty sweet...If only I could figure it out.

@ jan Silipa: Don't knock lojban! At least not too much. It has it's good points, they just take it too far by being too precise about everything all the time. A very lojban-y way to solve what I am talking about would be to create a new class of words for demonstratives based on 'ni' with a definite form factor, like 'nV' and then to systematize it so that a user could make his own determination about word he wanted. That's not a bad way to go about making a dictionary and a grammar for people who want to use a language. It's just that the demands lojban makes on its speakers are too high. I mean, using my example, there are some words I would probably use all the time, depending on how I structured my utterances, for rhetorical sake, and for ease of comprehension and production. It's just that lojban doesn't do ambiguity, which it really should. It's often too fine-grained or you're describing stuff you don't really care about. Grice would have a fit.

Going back to my example, to show how it could work:
Ni - agnostic as to endo- or exophoric.
Ne - exophoric
Na - endophoric, agnostic as to whether anaphora or cataphora.
No- endophoric, strictly anaphoric.
Nu - endophoric, strictly cataphoric.
You can put them together to create words that are basically hedges. In other words, sticking together ne + nu you get a word that is more flexible than wither by itself. There is perhaps too much redundancy, for instance, ni and na can both be recreated with the combination trick above, but they do shorten things a bit, that's all.

If you want to know where I got the idea, I think it was mostly inspired by Bislama's pronoun system. I'm still not sure ona and ni aren't basically interchangeable in toki Pona. Ijo is probably way underrepresented. Mi Jo e sona ijo. Sina toki E nasin toki ni! Or maybe even, O mi sona seme? Mi ken toki Sama ni. Or, O mi wile e [ijo] seme? Sina toki Sama ni. I kind of like 'sona ijo ni' for 'this idea' or maybe ona toki or sona toki ni. How does ijo as a modifier work again?

Can we translate 'something like this/that'? Mi wile e ijo Sama ni. Sina toki Sama mi Lon ni.
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