Community proposal for poetic toki pona

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.
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janMato
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Community proposal for poetic toki pona

Post by janMato »

I don't usually like to explicitly make community proposals, I usually like to impact the language by accident through making the same mistake until people copy me. This is a formalization of jan Kipo's idea posted somewhere here on the forum.

toki pona forces this order of phrase : S + la, (o),*, li, e, PP. However, you don't generally need that ordering to preserve all the information in that message (at least for li, e, PP's, less so for subjects and la phrases).

(where S is sentence, * is unmarked phrase, PP is prepositional phrase)

Also, the spec doesn't say anything about sentence fragments.

I propose that for poetry, songs and use by real life mafia and street rappers, that the order be relaxed as follows:

1) li, e, and PP phrases may be in any order.
en mije li lukin e meli. en meli li lukin e mije. mije en meli li olin e sama.
vs
en mije e meli li lukin. en meli e mije li lukin. e sama li olin en mije en meli.

2) subjects may be in any order as well, but they must be marked an en (or if you must, by a la + subject phrase)

e sama li olin la mije en meli.

Personally, I prefer the en, because en means another subject, but la means something else entire, it means a conditional has just ended.

3) PP phrases may modify a noun either with or without a pi.
kule lon palisa li pona tawa mi.
or
kule pi lon palisa li pona tawa mi.

I think just about no one notices this technical issue in the grammar anyhow.

4) To move la phrase around, prefix with ni li (for fragments) or ni li ni (for sentences), conditional still ends with la

tenpo suno ni la mi tawa tomo mi.
vs
mi tawa tomo mi, ni li tenpo suno ni la.

telo li anpa la mi tawa ala.
vs
mi tawa ala ni li ni: telo li anpa la.

5) Sentence fragments in this system are explicitly allowed provided that they start with a separator (or end with one in the case of la phrases). If I remember correctly, most grammars and the spec only allow exclamations and idiomatic greetings (which seem more like they should be commands) In writing these should be ended by exclamation points, even if you aren't all excited about it.

lon ma olin! e moku! tenpo ni la!

These were already legal: a! toki! o toki! o kama pona!

Sadly, I'm not clever enough to actually write any poetry to try this idea out.

6) Sentences optionally end in "ni li pini" or "pu..." or "li pini..." Sentence ending would still have to go at the end, sort of like singaporean English that often ends sentences with "la".

en mije e meli li lukin li pini. en meli e mije li lukin ni li pini. e sama li olin en mije en meli pu.

There is more than one meaning of simple-- a grammar can be simple because it takes only a few lines of BNF to describe or a grammar can be simple because it is expressive with a small number of moving parts. I think this addition would make toki pona simpler to use when trying to write poetry, translate songs according to meter, and probably would be a simpler colloquial toki pona.

So, does this grammar have any holes in it?
janKipo
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Re: Community proposal for poetic toki pona

Post by janKipo »

Well, as noted earlier, 'en' is not just "another subject" but can occur in any position, with various meanings. And, pedant that I am, I dislike dropping the 'pi' before PP modifying NP, which loses the distinction between such PP and those that modify the whole sentence. Indeed, I should think that, with freer word order, the distinction would be more important to keep.
Trying to legislate fragments seems a mug's game: we will use the fragments we need: to answer questions, to correct, to drive home a point, to call attention, and so on. The most that can be required (and this is very questionable) is that context would allow reconstruction of the whole from which the fragment was chipped.
Less radical changes help somewhat: we need to get the conditions lined up in an orderly fashion and, at least for the temporals, work out PP equivalents. We should, in the process, open up conditionals to some further uses -- for emphatic placement, for example.
janMato
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Re: Community proposal for poetic toki pona

Post by janMato »

More thinking on this... most of the formal grammars don't admit sentence fragments. But in conversation, this feels wonky.
wile sona: esun sin pi ko suwi lete li lon seme?
pana sona: lon insa ma pi Takomapaku. (In downtown Takoma Park)

Repeating "esun sin pi ko suwi lete li" or "ona li" or "esun li" feels like over kill.

So if those fragments are allowed, then any series of fragments should be allowed. So other than trying to mark subject fragments, this proposal is less revolutionary than it originally seemed.
janSilipu
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Re: Community proposal for poetic toki pona

Post by janSilipu »

I didn't do the transformational part of my grammar (except maybe for li and o) but the repetition deletion stuff and other such bits is pretty boilerplate. Basically, any constituent wordstring can be used in isolation in some context. And there are probably contexts where non-constituent wordstrings are permitted.
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janKalepa
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Re: Community proposal for poetic toki pona

Post by janKalepa »

Oh, that's good. Writting poetry in tp, obeyng all the rules is tricky. When I've finished my "lullaby" l feel like I've wrote one possible tp poem :-) meaning, the only one possible :-)
janKipo
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Re: Community proposal for poetic toki pona

Post by janKipo »

As usual in tp, what you can get away with depends on context. It is hard to break rules (although people do keep managing), but it is less easy to end up saying what you meant, and even less easy to make sure your correspondent gets it.
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janKalepa
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Re: Community proposal for poetic toki pona

Post by janKalepa »

Also, ability to move emphasis sometimes is good for poetry. I've read a gread piece "soweli" where it was used.

Also, I'd like to share my first experiment: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2223
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