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.
Kuti
Posts: 358
Joined: Sun Feb 28, 2010 3:48 pm

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by Kuti »

janSilipu wrote:.
Tp problems: numbers, relative clauses (restrictive), ambiguity of extended 'pi' structures, etc.
The problems comes not from toki pona. It comes from people who don't want to use toki pona the right way : very simple.
janSilipu
Posts: 288
Joined: Tue Aug 09, 2011 9:21 am

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by janSilipu »

A fair point for restrictive relative clauses, but less so for numbers if we are to use it at all in the world. We can live in Laoziville for a while, but eventually we have to deal with addresses and phone numbers and PINs and so on, not to mention money.
jan Misite
Posts: 42
Joined: Tue Dec 28, 2010 6:42 pm

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by jan Misite »

I wish we wouldn't use relative clauses. :( I wish we could get workable periphrasis in the language. If people did choose to habpve some kind of embedding, it would be nice if it were very limited like what's in Mura-Piraha.

I'm not entirely sure I believe in TP with advanced numbers. The examples you gave, silipu, aren't really compelling examples of stuff I think the language needs. An address is an address no matter what language. Money is money. I'm not sure TP as it is has enough power to conduct a verbal business transaction, let alone give you a way to name prices lol. I'm not entirely convinced it has enough power for much spontaneous discourse and that's where I think the language could really shine, if more work were done. Stories are reaally hard to read IMO.

It would be neat if it would have a grammatically rating system like Kalusa where y could vote on what sentences were grammatical in the language. This would be a way to crowd source best practices.

What do you guys think of this sentence?
Mi wile e ni: jan Sutepani li Kama Lon mi. Which becomes,
jan Sutepani li Kama Lon mi la ni li Pona tawa mi.
jan-ante
Posts: 541
Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2009 4:05 pm

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by jan-ante »

janSilipu wrote:
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)
you do not want o participate, but you do participate
The question is less whether to participate or not than of whether to use a tp forum for an inherently nontp enterprise.
why not? what is wrong with it? we have forums of "jan nasa" and "ijo ante" specially for the stuff like this
janSilipu
Posts: 288
Joined: Tue Aug 09, 2011 9:21 am

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by janSilipu »

@ ante: As have said, the line between suggesting changes to a language and constructing a new language is hard to draw. I guess my problem is that I have lost track of the connection between some of the suggestions and tp as it currently is.
@misite: The grammar of tp is relatively unproblematic; style, however, is up for grabs. The tension between simplicity, which leads to many short clear sentences, and conciseness, which leads to fewer sentences but much more complex ones, is hard to keep in proper balance for each of the various types text.
Both of thes texts look fine, although the "becomes" is open to question.
janKipo
Posts: 3064
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by janKipo »

@misite a few items back.
'ni' is deictic and, as you say, available for both exophora and endophora. Endophorically, it can be either anaphoric or cataphoric ('tan ni la' "therefore", 'tan ni:' "because"). Exophorically, it can be either proximal or distal, but endophorically it is always proximal (I think). 'ona' is strictly anaphoric (so endophoric). The exophoric use, while justified by its etymology, is not usually taken as proper in tp ('jan' or 'ijo' or some such being dictated).

I would hardly knock Lojban, having been involved with it since a decade before its inception and still at it today. But it is a lousy source for anything having to do with tp, which is built on a totally different foundation, even phonetically. It is always useful to remember that Lojban is unambiguous in only the sense that every grammatical sentence has only one parse on the official parser (even this not quite true in practice). In particular, for all the various systems it has for endophoric pronouns, in spontaneous (as opposed to carefully plotted out using all the books, etc.) speech, one often gets either the wrong thing or an ambiguous reference. The rules for the the very precise pronouns are almost too complex to do on the fly, without the text in front of you, and the handy easy ones just aren't unique in many contexts.

'ijo' as a modifier seems to mean (often) "about something". This seems to be related to its use as the object of propositional attitude verbs (pilin. sitelen, sona, toki, kute, probably some I've forgotten) to mean "about X", where X is identified in the modifier on 'ijo'.

mi sona E seme
sina toki e ijo ni sama mi
jan Misite
Posts: 42
Joined: Tue Dec 28, 2010 6:42 pm

Re: Toki Pona Jan

Post by jan Misite »

Okay, I made a new thread so people can hammer out the details of the TP offshoot if they like. I am more concerned with pushing TP's limits so I made a new thread here. viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2100

Thanks, kipo, that clears up a lot.

I was thinking that ona could be used exophoric ally for some reason. I guess then, that in some sense ni is like english it/this/that, but only 'it' in a restricted sense...Using ona for cataphora, or late introcpductions of something you want to give a statement on, or just cannot identify right away...Actually I have some interesting ideas for writing things down. I would like to try them out this weekend and see how you folks like them. In a way, TP nouns like meli work have similar capacities to English pronouns...then actually, it's hard to say 'ona' means it because it could cataphoric ally refer to almost any thing or person anywhere!

I think the thing I admire about lojban is the idea of the grammar more than anything. I admire it. I gave up learning the language a while ago when I couldn't understand the use of articles.

I don't mind that lojban has unambiguous parsings, it's just not what I am really interested in. I wouldn't want to get rid of donkey sentences for instance, because a lot of interesting natural language phenomenon deserve to be understood rather than treated as inappropriate. That's kind of what I would like a conlang to do, really. Stuff like singular they in English fascinate me, and I think I kind of understand them but not well enough. A lot of intonation I think is related and it is undeservedly cast aside, probably 'cause it's really hard to analyze.

Could you please show me an example of 'X ijo'?

I gave the example a few pages back of a cognitive science approach to copulas a few pages back because I think all of these phenomena are related.

What do you think of the other ways I suggested on the other page? I will rewrite them in a few. Jan Kipo, at the end of your post is one of the unusual constructions I was thinking of. What do you think of it? Is this an endorsement of rhetorical questions? ;) I like it because these things are things only you can know, so my raising the question of what I think about something is unanswerable by the listener, so of course they're going to wait for me to answer my own question. I would like to think that's legal, although people might have other feelings about how fair it is as a conversational strategy...

@silipu: thanks, I wondered about that. I much prefer that phrasing to the 'wile e ni:...' trick. Instead of saying, "I would like Stephanie to come over" (which used the semicolon) I said "If Stephanie were to come I would like it" which used a 'la phrase'. 'It' in this case refers to a 'ni'. ( It feels kind of weird for 'ni' to be referring to inside a sentence actually, doesn't it?)

I will explain what I mean in regards to Kalusa. Kalusa was a collaborative conlang that used a submission system with voting to grow the language. At the same time that people proposed grammatical principles (which were never explicit...the sentences were provided without explanation) they would propose the words which would be parsed by the reader...I think it was a problem, that the issue of semantics versus readability was never cleared up. In the end, people cheated the vote system and gamed the submission process so that the sound of the language got more and more ridiculous, or so I heard. I think the same set-up could work well for any developing conlang that needed to develop rhetorically. TP could gain from it. As it is we use the corpus for attested forms, right? Well, why not see what everyone thinks of the readability of those forms? The difference is kind of that, unlike a natural language just because someone says something doesn't mean it has ever been used to solve a discourse problem in a real language environment. This would provide some kind of feedback for speakers at least right? and I think it could encourage innovation where people saw problems in being understood by other people. The only problem I see is if un dedicated people came by or were insincere about stuff, but that's not very likely is it?

Of course this might be overkill. This happens in a different way on this very board all the time. :P. I think if another language were to begin like Kalusa you would need two buttons to give a rating for both well-formedness and one for understandability. It is possible that you could see people who are more conservative about the grammar of the language actually rejecting new words over time and sticking to a few while others would be more willing to incorporate vocabulary and extrapolate new sentences and new uses. These things go hand in hand but they are again, not the same thing. There might be problems with people being able to distinguish these two things but it could still be worthwhile. (to go further on this tangent, I might do a voting system with abstaining, not yet decided, yes, no and a preferred option, which is like yes with a star next to it as a kind of best practices thing that pushes it to the top amongst closely weighted scores...I guess the Margin would have to be determined as a percentage of votes based on the community and on those voting on individual items.)

I think another limitation might be context. When people recognize part of what you're talking about they go the extra mile to understand difficult sentences. Writers would probably have to find clever ways of talking about things people had seen or know about, ie news, movies, or Internet phenomena. But the thing is, people will already do this if theyre attracted to your language and TP's community does this very well. Some things are already almost as succinct as headlines and they read just fine ie fish kills Irwin (jan pije).
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