otoke tokpon tenlil

[Tomaniki]

[janMato]

Most of these changes sound like a writing system proposal (in terms of impact)-- a write system can be encoded and decode back without loss of anything-- lots of people have seen that it would be more useful to have a more concise way to write toki pona (and possible a more concise way to speak, but tp isn't a language of in person interaction, it's used by fans on the internet mostly). Personally I like speed writing/talking systems because the solve a problem.

I think I read in there at least one proposal to change grammar-- those are a different issue. When you change the grammar, anyone who is used to the old grammar will hear a different message. pi-chains disambiguate some things that aren't clear with just chains of words. If anything, tp is in need of more variations of "pi" to disambiguate more relationships. For example, most prep phrases could be pi phrases or "unmarked word chains", but there is no point because it would make the phrase even harder to understand.

I'm not particularly opposed to toki pona con dialects-- it's just recreational fun and if it attracts fan use, then super!, but I would quibble over which versions are backwards compatible, forwards compatible or completely compatible. A speaker that drops pi altogether will be unintelligible to a speaker that consintently uses pi. The lack of pi would also trigger the need for compensating strategies and you'd get a lot of very different texts.

Examples are worth a thousand words:
mi moku e kili kepeken ilo. I eat fruit with a fork. (I eat fruit with a machine)
mi moku e kili ilo. I eat forked fruit. (I eat machined fruit)
mi moku e kili kepeken ilo moku. I eat fruit with a eating machine (fork).
mi moku e kili pi ilo moku I eat fruit that somehow is related to a eating machine. Maybe it's the fork.
mi moku e kili ilo moku. I eat the mechanical, edible fruit. I eat fruit that is some how describable by the attributes of a machine and food, but in a way that I only hope that you can guess.

Now having defended pi, if I was going to create a small language, I wouldn't use pi. I would use something different. It's a difficult part of toki pona's grammar, I imagine there are other more creative, easier mechanism to do what pi does.

[Tomaniki]

[janSilipu]

Pedant that I am, I have to note a pi bc pi de and ab pi c pi de and a pi b pi c pide and a pi b pi dce. As well as the ambiguity of the cases where th is a third item after the pi. But the gap/stress recode is no worse than pi for any of these.

[Tomaniki]

jan Silupu o, pona! (jansílupuo, pon!)

I did not even think of multiple pis, but yes, the idea remains that the gap/stress should still accommodate for pi.

As for 'pi' being confusing with three terms: I've always seen it like a distributive property:

a b c d e = (((ab)c)d)e
a b pi c d e = (ab)((cd)e)
a pi b c pi d e = (a(bc))(de) = in my last example: strangely good human-like yellow water

I suppose one could use "en" if they wanted to differentiate between what the pi modifies:
a pi b c en pi d e = a(bc)(de) = so, strangely good, human-like yellow water, or more literally: water of human yellow and of strange goodness

If we wanted to say a(bc(de)), that seems more complicated. My guess is that we can't really say that in toki pona unless we broke it into different sentences. "a li pi ni: ni li b c pi d e." Then that makes it tricky, because, by the time you finish, three sentences might be needed to get the full idea across.

And by this, wouldn't "a pi b pi c d e" be unnecessary. (a(b))(cde) is the same as (ab)(cde) or "a b pi c d e"? Or is there a difference between "jan pona" and "jan pi pona"?

Hmm, I feel like an entire book can be written just about the word pi.

[janMato]

If your scheme encodes pi into the pronunciation, then I'm confused-- pi is still there, just not with p and i. But you said that pi can be dropped. So anyhow. Like I said, if the shortening scheme is round trip-able, then it is a lot like a writing scheme with no impact to grammar.

Okay, in logic, I'm fighting unarmed. I never really groked the pi as sort of a grouping thing. I know that there are several smart people who like to say that pi is just grouping (like parenthesis in algebra or something), but I tend to understand pi as sort of a many-faces-of-pi thing. There are phrases where pi seems to trigger a noun. But not always,eg jan pi lili mute. There are phrases where pi triggers a feeling of some sort of possessive construction, but not always. There is the pi that acts like the English proposition "of". And then there is pi trying to deal with what is modifying what, sort of the way we have to slow down and think about what the sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" might mean. The buffalo sentence can be diagrammed and someone thinks it is a valid sentence-- I don't actually understand it. I would need to add some articles and adjectives and adverbs to help trigger in my mind what the part of speech is for all the parts.

I wish there was an easy way to put up sentence diagrams, it would help with pi-chain discussions.

And there is pi as the preposition of last resort, when none of the 6 preps will do so you do a pi phrase and add a filler 2nd word-- mi toki pi ijo mute-- I talk about many things. And there is pi as the universal relationship. And there is the post verb pi, which is either an adverb or an incorporated direct noun (similar to morphologically incorporated direct objects or sometimes those post verb pi phrases actually signal a transformative statement, e.g. jan li soweli pi tomo insa e jan ante. The one guy domesticated the other guy.

[jan Seloki]

where is 'pan'? There is a 'pana', but no 'pan'? I don't see 'olin' either.

[janKipo]

Many problems with this system, in addition to those you note. Basically, it is designed to fit tp.

[jan Seloki]

I'm not the OP, but since the original link doesn't seem to work anymore, here's a new link.