What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

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.
jan-ante
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by jan-ante »

janMato wrote:Re: toki pona only
It's on my wish list to create a little website that allows anyone to post anything, as long as the text conforms to the toki pona's lexicon, i.e. the 120+ words, Capitalized words using only the toki pona alphabet and any punctuation, whitespace etc. Everywhere else the urge to cheat overwhelms my resolve to use toki pona.

tenpo kama la mi wile sitelen e sitelen pi ilo nanpa ni: jan li ken sitelen e nimi. taso nimi ni li nimi pi toki pona taso.
yes, and ban digits!
jan-ante
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by jan-ante »

Kuti wrote: full tp talks happens with people who don't have others languages in common,
did you meet them? was Palaman like this? i thought he knows english
For the english speakers, and even the others, it could be for fun, or for learning the language, and as time pass it becomes friendship and we keep talking about different things in different languages.
altogether, it looks like it confirms that toki pona is a toy constructed pidgin, isnt it?
Do you only come on this forum or try the others tp places ?
i started at livejournal. http://jan-ante.livejournal.com/
there were not so many active members of tp community over there: jan Kipo, jan Pusa, and one more russian guy from Tolyatti, i dont remember his name. but after this forum started i stopped using my LJ
I think that if we takes the risk to let tp evolves, it could be a chance to make this language being talked by more people.
this is not evident. sometimes the evolution leads to species elimination.
but it seems we try to discover a bicycle. i think the solution is here viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2093
just start your new version
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janTali
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To summarize...

Post by janTali »

I haven't posted any contribution to this discussion yet, because I feel that I am still “new” and that I have to listen more than talk. I am reading a lot of past discussions in these forums and I see a pattern of the same people differing all the time on the same things. This is perhaps the best place to summarize their positions. I hope I am not misrepresenting anybody. The people I don’t mention lie all in the triangle defined by these three typical representatives:
  1. Kuti doesn’t perceive any problem. For him, Toki Pona is as good as it should be and he is happy with it. When he wants to communicate something beyond its present expressive power, he switches languages.
  2. jan-ante thinks that Toki Pona is hopelessly limited but no changes are allowed at all. According to him, if you want more expressive power you have to fork and create another language altogether.
  3. Finally, jan Kipo thinks that it is legitimate to develop Toki Pona “gradually and from the inside” to get as much expressive power as backward compatibility allows.
If this thread aimed to find a definition of “backward compatibility” acceptable to all parties, it failed. This is a typical governance problem, as pointed out by jan Mato. mama pi toki pona is presently a deus otiosus who lets her creation drift away in the “natural flow of the universe”, or maybe she’s just too busy with real life. In any case the solution won’t come from her.

Sometimes, in similar situations, a critical mass emerges around a compromise position, but I’m afraid the people involved are too few for such a development to occur, and new people are unlikely to flock in.
Kuti
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Re: To summarize...

Post by Kuti »

jan-ante wrote:did you meet them?
Only by internet. text and voice.
jan-ante wrote: was Palaman like this? i thought he knows english
Yes but at first he said that he didn't knew english and didn't used it. So we only had toki pona in common, and still use toki pona most of the time.
jan-ante wrote:altogether, it looks like it confirms that toki pona is a toy constructed pidgin, isnt it?
It is a contructed pidgin used as a toy
( do the use of something changes the nature of this thing ? )
jan-ante wrote: there were not so many active members of tp community over there: jan Kipo, jan Pusa, and one more russian guy from Tolyatti, i dont remember his name. but after this forum started i stopped using my LJ
ah. We still have the old IRC chat, and have groups in Skype, and there is the tokilili site. We also try on Second Life too. That is what i know.
There are also groups on Facbook and Twitter but i've never checked them.
http://tokilili.shoutem.com/

jan-ante wrote: but it seems we try to discover a bicycle. i think the solution is here viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2093
just start your new version
If you bring toki pona to more people, the new version could start on itself, no need to contruct a fork of a conpidgin used as a toy.
janTali wrote:
  1. Kuti doesn’t perceive any problem. For him, Toki Pona is as good as it should be and he is happy with it. When he wants to communicate something beyond its present expressive power, he switches languages.
Yes, we can say more or less this. I try to use the language as it was intended.
janTali wrote: mama pi toki pona is presently a deus otiosus who lets her creation drift away in the “natural flow of the universe”, or maybe she’s just too busy with real life. In any case the solution won’t come from her.
Do someone already contacts her about it ?
jan-ante
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Re: To summarize...

Post by jan-ante »

Kuti wrote: It is a contructed pidgin used as a toy
yes. and moreover it was intended as a toy
If you bring toki pona to more people, the new version could start on itself, no need to contruct a fork of a conpidgin used as a toy.
it will not and it is good it will not. i want to preserve a classical version of tp
i registred but it seems it require an approval from jan Mato.
but what is this? is it like a forum but without any subdivisions into topics?
janKipo
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by janKipo »

No attempts to contact jan Sonja have been successful in the sense of getting a reply or acknowledgment.
toki lili is more like Twitter (140 characters, etc.) Mostly in tp.
jan-ante
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by jan-ante »

http://tokilili.shoutem.com/ seems to be a stupid forum. it still urges me to wait for some "approval" although i registred long ago.
jan Misite
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by jan Misite »

I think a great way to manage innovation and rhetoric in TP would be to use the Kalusa engine.
http://jimhenry.conlang.org/conlang/kalusa/index.html

I think we would have to add additional parameters, such as an ambiguity acting and maybe an interest rating for each sentence, so that if any got below a threshold the sentence would be flagged and hidden, if not deleted (it's kind of good to know what sentences aren't good usage, or arent allowed, after all.)
jan Misite
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by jan Misite »

I also wanted to say, if people find toki pona too limited, they may just enjoy learning Bislama, which was a major inspiration for TP and is a living lingua franca with an active base of ~250,000 speakers. The only thing is it needs a bigger online base, but to its advantage I think many English speakers would find it appealing. Certainly TP users would probably like it.
janMato
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by janMato »

The thing about creoles though, is while from time to time you will see someone say that creole X has only Y words (Y being some small 3 digit number), when you go look for an online dictionary, they are already up to several thousand words.

In the case of Bislama, they can continually borrow words from English. Chamurro is in a similar situation-- the speakers can use as many Spanish loans as they like, and now adays English loans, too. So by shear vocabulary, they aren't toki pona like.

By grammar, creoles are simpler in some areas and more complicated in other than toki pona, e.g. serial verbs are common in creoles, but isn't quite the same thing in toki pona (ref. http://www.ericschiller.com/ling/papers/why_svc.htm )
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