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

Post by janMato »

This is a new thread that jan Ante suggested. Lemme see if I can remember most of the main sorts of innovations:

1) Innovations of topic-- writing about right wing politics, modern society with complexities and nuance, complex thoughts in general, something non-daoist (although I'm not sure what that would be)

2) Grammar innovations -- E.g. using pi or pu as a clause marker, using la fragments for adverbs or as syntactic tense markers, using post verb pi-phrases as direct object incorporation, using nouns in the verb slot as transformation, e.g. mi mute li jan ilo e kiwen suno = We turned the metal into a robot. mi mute li soweli tomo e soweli wawa. We tamed the wild animal (turned the powerful animal into a house animal/house pet).

3) Semantic innovations -- Polysemy -- Expanding the meaning of words to concepts further and further from the canonical English and Esperanto definitions (canon being jan Sonja classic, jan Pije's wordlist, or the new jan Sonja wiki, take your pick).

3a) Semantic innovations involving homonymy -- Expanding the meaning of words to cover entirely new concepts, e.g. using pan to mean life

4) Proper modifier vocabulary growth for things that aren't really unique people, places, things or companies -- kasi Soja is a good example from the community corpus. ilo Konputa would be another, or maybe ilo Nakutosi (Macintosh brand device), to do a loan word that uses a company name.

5) Non-latin writing systems

6a) Counting systems
6b) Color naming systems
6c) Other systems necessary for modern life, such as spelling conventions, names of days of week, month names, years, rock hardness, biological taxonomy systems, astronomy jargon systems, etc.

8) Opaque lexical phrases. nena kama for "logon button" Opacity is relative, but I think we've all seen a phrase that left us wondering what it meant, or that we felt we had to memorize to understand it next time we saw it. jan Sonja's "unofficial phrases" fall in this category. jan Wiko argued passionately about this issue a long while ago.

9) toki pona derived language proposals, such as toki-pinglish, any of jan Arpe's 20 word languages

10) jan Sonja's own innovations. Because there isn't a very well defined governance process, words like noka, monsuta, pan, apeja and a dozen more all have different clouds and the community has varied in their willingness to use the new words, stop using old words, etc.

11) Punctuation conventions, such as wrapping untranslated text in double quotes, using : to indicate that the anaphora is refering to something in an upcoming sentence, etc.

12) Proposals to drop a word that has a near synonym in the lexicon

13) Innovations in (con)culture. Interestingly, I hardly ever see anyone in toki pona innovate much with the conculture in the sense of a completely made up history and set of customs of an imaginary people. This seems to be an issue more for Na'vi, Klingon, and the like.

14) Innovations in logic. toki pona, because it's grammar can be formalized so nicely, can be subject to modern logical analysis to find interesting solutions to "I have to work" mi wile ala pali. taso mi ken ala pali ala. (I'm sure there are better solutions using clever arrangements of la, ken, ala, en, anu

15) [edit] Part of speech innovations. From time to time there have been arguments over when a word can be moved from one part of speech to another and how the word might change. Also, last time I dinked around with machine parsing toki pona, it was just so much easier to treat most nouns, verbs, adjectives as being capable of playing all parts of speech, while most function words, li, pi, ni, kepeken, lon, sama, kama, tawa etc resist changing part of speech.

16) .... am I missing any?


My personal stand:
I think everyone has the freedom to fork the project (i.e. go create a brand new language inspired by toki pona)

I think innovation and language drift like that we see in natural languages is inevitable, but it is difficult to tell when someone is subconsciously changing the language the way we change our natural languages and when they are engaging in conscious re-engineering.

I think changing the basic sentence template is wrong, but giving meaning to legal but unexplored areas is fair game, such as post verb pi phrases and la fragments. So using pi to make what is a type of relative clause is okay, e.g. running bird = waso tawa, but using pu as a clause marker really changes the basic template. Pu-as a clause marker is a small change with a really big impact on how everything would be written.

I think word growth is bad-- it defeats the raison d'etre of toki pona to continually expand the vocabulary, either officially or via the back door of proper modifiers, but it creates a genie out of the bottle situation. I can't unlearn apeja and someone reading toki pona who just wants to understand the text (and might not be interested in purity issues at that time) will also need to know what apeja means. And opaque phrases are lexical items requiring memory and behaving a lot like words, so this toki pona project may have only shown that you can have a language with a small number of unbound morphemes, but the lexical items required for ordinary speech will still be in the thousands.

I think all the number, calendar, color systems are harmless because they are all so cumbersome that no one is using them and certainly not for real life goals. Toki pona isn't Esperanto where you might really need to ask how to get to the train station and when the train leaves.

Finally, I know it's one of my hobby horses, but a conlang designer that intends to have fans should establish a governance process, not as fancy as L'Academie Francais, but maybe more like the rules of a board game or chess, that helps people known when they are playing by tournament rules and when they are playing by casual game-in-the-pub rules.
Jan KoAla
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by Jan KoAla »

I've thought about this myself and am glad jan Mato did all the heavy work!

Personally, one thing that has bothered me is the "simple ideas" aren't really basic as much as they are just whims from the mind of its creator. Things like alcohol being "telo nasa" is pretty lolzy, but after the immature laugh it becomes kind of ridiculous and to me, it's easy to see that it was just a random whim.

I think that from this seed of random whims, the community has seemingly pushed for more logical phrases that are easy to parse.

Which leads me to another issue I've come across with toki pona. The illusion of feeling proficient from a lack of completeness. It's fairly easy to put together a dice's throw of toki pona words and come out with something that feels right at the time, but is impossible for anyone else to understand. The fact that this isn't an uncommon problem makes me feel there ought to be a clearer way asto "how to build a sentence".

I'll have to look a little harder at this list to comment directly on it, but these are my general thoughts on the subject.
Kuti
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by Kuti »

I disagree on :
1)
3a)
4)
6a)
12)
13)

Making things more complex is the opposite of toki pona. Things have to be kept simple.
If you do this, it would be a new derivative. If you change the aim, it is not toki pona anymore.
janSilipu
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by janSilipu »

Well, as where I placed my separate thread shows, I don't think so much of innovating in tp as of exploiting its potentials. Some of the suggested areas here are clearly not of that sort, others cleary are, and a few are iffy. Of the clearly not, I would consider only the number problem, I think. Otherwise, I go with the clearly or not and remain unsure about the iffy cases.
Btw in my stuff somewhere is an (English) story about the origins of tp, which I should translate, and a lesson 'esun' which is set in a Daoish/tpish setting.
The tp solution to the unintelligibity problem is to deconstruct, using lots of short sentences, rather than the complex noun phrase (usually) to express yur idea. You can the bring the NP in gradually and in sn explanatory context.
Jan KoAla
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by Jan KoAla »

janSilipu wrote:Well, as where I placed my separate thread shows, I don't think so much of innovating in tp as of exploiting its potentials. Some of the suggested areas here are clearly not of that sort, others cleary are, and a few are iffy. Of the clearly not, I would consider only the number problem, I think. Otherwise, I go with the clearly or not and remain unsure about the iffy cases.
I think it's a blurry line for most people. What are the limits of "exploiting its potentials" to you?

janSilipu wrote:The tp solution to the unintelligibity problem is to deconstruct, using lots of short sentences, rather than the complex noun phrase (usually) to express yur idea. You can the bring the NP in gradually and in sn explanatory context.
I agree with you on that being a kind of work around, but I question the actual merits of it. Even in the simplist of toki pona that has no complex NP structure, it's often still too opaque or too abstract. In principle I agree, but in practice I don't know.


For actually seeing what happens, rather than just talking about it, we should have a tp only section on the forum. I would guess we'd see some form of "inovation" from trying to be understood. I should say, for me personally, I care much less about the theory than I do the actual use.
Jan KoAla
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by Jan KoAla »

janMato wrote:12) Proposals to drop a word that has a near synonym in the lexicon
Kuti wrote:I disagree on :

12)

Making things more complex is the opposite of toki pona. Things have to be kept simple.
If you do this, it would be a new derivative. If you change the aim, it is not toki pona anymore.

How is dropping a word not keeping it simple? Or rather, how is it not making things even simpler? I'm curious as to what your reasoning is.
jan-ante
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by jan-ante »

whenever someone looks at innovation, his reaction depends on what is toki pona for him. to me it is a game "express the world with hundreed something words". so, if an innovation requires an additional convention(s), then it looks like an unfair play. e.g. using of ken ala X ala as "must X" does not require any new convention, while kin la and tenpo la do. one can notice that i myself suggested some conventoinal innovation(s), like use of colours to express taste, smell, etc.but i only suggested without any attempts of advertising it like using in my tokiponic texts.

some people say that tp is not a game but the mean of communication for them. to me it is a bit strange, as they can communicate in english. so, choosing this way of communication could be also a sort of game

in fact jan Mato might be right saying that users' influence is inevitable as it happens in natural languages. but this will break tp into a set of dialects. i do not object this if one change his dialect phonetically from original tp. just do in and introduce the words for monsters, glue and whatever you like. but this gonna be a new game different from toki pona, like pool differs from snooker. i might even play ths new game iff it is clearly separated from tp.

in fact one could try to follow Linux path: specify a kernel, i.e. a segment of languages where no one (except Linus Torvalds or jan Sonja) may make innovations. but everyone could innovate elsewhere, making new distributive. then people could choose what they like, Red Hat or Ubuntu.
Jan KoAla
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by Jan KoAla »

jan-ante wrote:whenever someone looks at innovation, his reaction depends on what is toki pona for him.
I've had this exact thought too. In my ideal make everyone happy world, all toki pona poetry and high culture/art would be in the form that is as limited as possible. At the same time, there would be an expanded form that could be used in everday situations.

I doubt that would ever happen, but I think the real root is that toki pona is something different to a lot of different people.
Kuti
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by Kuti »

You answered right. toki pona is not only a game for me but a real language. toki pona is for me present coming from out of nowhere.
I think a lot, i think all the time, but the languages i knew were not good to suit my way of thinking.
One day i was looking for something else on internet, but did bad reseach and found toki pona instead, and… the solution was here !

Before breaking the language into different free forms, we have to agree on what to keep. What is the base.
We need our unua libro with the basic rules trusted by everyone and kept unchanged, and everything else could be innovations.

If toki pona reaches a larger audience and is used not a game but as a language, it will evolves like natural languages. There is nothing to do to this.
If you want the toki pona to stay like it is, continue to use it like a game ;)
janSilipu
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Re: What kind of innovation(s) are permissible in tp?

Post by janSilipu »

janMato wrote:
1) Innovations of topic-- writing about right wing politics, modern society with complexities and nuance, complex thoughts in general, something non-daoist (although I'm not sure what that would be
Nothing we can do about this;people will do what they will do. So long as it doesn't involve other changes -- aside from complicated modifier strings -- it continues the issue of what can be said with 120 words.

2) Grammar innovations -- E.g. using pi or pu as a clause marker, using la fragments for adverbs or as syntactic tense markers, using post verb pi-phrases as direct object incorporation, using nouns in the verb slot as transformation, e.g. mi mute li jan ilo e kiwen suno = We turned the metal into a robot. mi mute li soweli tomo e soweli wawa. We tamed the wild animal (turned the powerful animal into a house animal/house pet).
The new uses of pi and pu (which I take as early gropings toward pu as colon) won't fly. La fragments in these uses are already in Pije. DO incorporation is already used with pilin and maybe a few others (I don't like it, but I suspect we can't go back). The use NPs in verb position with a causative sense is standard already in Pije (also, though less explicitly, the application 'mi telo e tomo taw a' "I wash the car". That is none of these is an innovation except the one that won't fly. The la phrases need some organizing and the NP as VP will continue to expand, as planned.

3) Semantic innovations -- Polysemy -- Expanding the meaning of words to concepts further and further from the canonical English and Esperanto definitions (canon being jan Sonja classic, jan Pije's wordlist, or the new jan Sonja wiki, take your pick).
Absolutely necessary, given the limited resources. And underway since the get go. The base definitions keep getting more general (toki: communication) and will continue to do so as long as the need arises (see 1).

3a) Semantic innovations involving homonymy -- Expanding the meaning of words to cover entirely new concepts, e.g. using pan to mean life
Not sure how this different except in terms of degree of remoteness or obscurity -- to someone -- of the chain of connections. So, when doing this the connection must be walked through at least once.

4) Proper modifier vocabulary growth for things that aren't really unique people, places, things or companies -- kasi Soja is a good example from the community corpus. ilo Konputa would be another, or maybe ilo Nakutosi (Macintosh brand device), to do a loan word that uses a company name.
To be stopped where possible, or at least, regulated. Ilo Makintosi doesn't seem too bad, kasi Soja is worse, ilo Papi (for smoking) is beyond the pale. And keep them adjectives!

5) Non-latin writing systems
Harmless fun, won't be adopted for regular use and does nothing to the language.

6a) Counting systems
We need a way of speaking numerical strings (and alphabetic, too). If some uses that to solve the nanpa suli problem, good luck to them. It will not make a change that affects things elsewhere (I hope).

6b) Color naming systems
This just a matter of standardization, since we have enough color terms to work with.

6c) Other systems necessary for modern life, such as spelling conventions, names of days of week, month names, years, rock hardness, biological taxonomy systems, astronomy jargon systems, etc.
Have number strings would solve a lot of these, but basically, I don't see tp at it's most expansive as being a language for technical discussions (except to show we could do it).

8) Opaque lexical phrases. nena kama for "logon button" Opacity is relative, but I think we've all seen a phrase that left us wondering what it meant, or that we felt we had to memorize to understand it next time we saw it. jan Sonja's "unofficial phrases" fall in this category. jan Wiko argued passionately about this issue a long while ago.
These are endemic in a language of this size. Every phrase is ambiguous in some ways and picking out the right one on the fly may be difficult, even with context. Ones that get used a lot are not a problem, but new ones are. I recommend creeping up on them with short sentences, which you then combine into one phrase. In any case, these will continue to occur.

9) toki pona derived language proposals, such as toki-pinglish, any of jan Arpe's 20 word languages
Nothing to do with tp. Wish 'em well and move on.

10) jan Sonja's own innovations. Because there isn't a very well defined governance process, words like noka, monsuta, pan, apeja and a dozen more all have different clouds and the community has varied in their willingness to use the new words, stop using old words, etc.
Harder to deal with, since she hold the title. So far the changes have been, as someone noted, by whimsy, without explanation or discussion, and perverse at first glance (generally second glance hasn't improved things). New words we can simply chose to ignore, as some puritans have, dropped words we can simply keep using, like noka (if that drop is not simply a typo). I think we can pretty much go on ignoring her, though I do think only she has the right to introduce new words (save 6a above).

11) Punctuation conventions, such as wrapping untranslated text in double quotes, using : to indicate that the anaphora is refering to something in an upcoming sentence, etc.
The colon convention is already in place and may have a word equivalent. The quotes, which come in under the proper adjective rule for tp expressions and out of desperation for other expressions are harder to justify.

12) Proposals to drop a word that has a near synonym in the lexicon
Maybe Sonja's prerogative again, though some drops, which don't require replacing with longer phrases are tempting. Sonja's drops don't seem to have been of the kepeken-ilo sort.

13) Innovations in (con)culture. Interestingly, I hardly ever see anyone in toki pona innovate much with the conculture in the sense of a completely made up history and set of customs of an imaginary people. This seems to be an issue more for Na'vi, Klingon, and the like.
Well, tp seems to have started as an engelang, not an artlang, so this is no surprise, despite the Daoist references. As I noted elsewhere, there at least a couple of bits on this. In any case, this again does not affect the language except insofar as it may make some compounds or meaning extensions clearer (if everybody gets int the same story).

14) Innovations in logic. toki pona, because it's grammar can be formalized so nicely, can be subject to modern logical analysis to find interesting solutions to "I have to work" mi wile ala pali. taso mi ken ala pali ala. (I'm sure there are better solutions using clever arrangements of la, ken, ala, en, anu
Probably ke ala pi Pali ala to get the right effect. This sort of thing belongs to loglans and are not tp's pidgin.

15) [edit] Part of speech innovations. From time to time there have been arguments over when a word can be moved from one part of speech to another and how the word might change. Also, last time I dinked around with machine parsing toki pona, it was just so much easier to treat most nouns, verbs, adjectives as being capable of playing all parts of speech, while most function words, li, pi, ni, kepeken, lon, sama, kama, tawa etc resist changing part of speech.
Already in the basics:just about any word in the noun, verb, adjective can be used in any of the others. Going beyond that to using them as prepositions or conjunctions or pronouns is more difficult, but has been done. The most obvious temptation is to change lon monsi x to just monsi x (et simil), but keeping the ur prepositions makes parsing easier (though dropping the pi might be nice).

16) .... am I missing any?
Explaining long modifier strings in terms of various possible short sentence rewrites.

Finally, I know it's one of my hobby horses, but a conlang designer that intends to have fans should establish a governance process, not as fancy as L'Academie Francais, but maybe more like the rules of a board game or chess, that helps people known when they are playing by tournament rules and when they are playing by casual game-in-the-pub rules.
Yeah!
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