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toki pona text language?

Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 1:18 am
by janAetherStar
How easy would it be to comprehend a toki pona text language? There's not many words so things like klma would have to be kalama, ik would have to be ike, etc.
I'm not going to write a list of every word, so here's some examples I had in mind:

mi wil/wil e mku ni? Did I need that food? (maybe using slash instead of writing ala every time a question is made?)

ni li ik/ik twa sna? (of course sna could be changed into sona as well as sina..) Is this bad to you?

Maybe even extreme contractions like tenpo suno > teno and tenpo pimeja > teneja?

Now that I'm looking back over this it looks messy, but is it still a plausible thing?

Re: toki pona text language?

Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 4:18 pm
by Ila
It could be useful if you'd like to send an SMS in toki pona. For example: mi tw sna. a1 e mi. (a1 → awan which sound like awen) I'm on the road, wait for me. The contractions like tenpo sunoteno and tenpo pimejateneja (why not teja?) are, firstly, abundant, secondly, are against ideas of toki pona. Toki pona is a language that is supposed to be free of linguistic clichés and is a highly subjective language.
If you want to really shorten writing system of toki pona, just use hieroglyphs, technologically, it would be a range of 120 symbols in Unicode's private area which is shown by a special font.

Re: toki pona text language?

Posted: Sat Sep 21, 2013 10:32 am
by janKipo
Hieroglyphs and the like require, as you note, another whole typing system, which limits their usefulness.
The abbreviations for texting, on the other hand, use readily available means yet manage to be as obscure (apparently a desirable feature). A rather thorough set of abbreviations has been developed over in the sitelen pi toki pona group on facebook; straightforward acronyms of the OMG variety (ajsm 'a jan sewi mi').
The system here is sort of a middle ground: less obscure than either of the other two. The two problems with it are 1. the fact that there are pairs of words that collapse to the same ('sina' and 'sona' cited, but there are several others -- the word space was not optimally used here) and 2. the temptation to actually use some of the resulting forms as words in their own right (teno, leaped to my eye), carrying the cliche way too far. But many expressions do get used a lot and some form of abbreviation is inevitable, especially given twitter and the like. We should, if not systematize usage, at least keep track of what is being used.

Re: toki pona text language?

Posted: Sat Sep 21, 2013 12:32 pm
by janMato
short hand
Yes! But so far lots of systems have been proposed, only jan Ante and the Chinese system have seen much use (chinese/japanese appears to be only used by people who already knew Chinese/Japanese and how to type it.) The optimal system, imho, is 1 symbol per word and 1 symbol per syllable for proper modifiers. In the hypothetical world of a real toki pona, imho, that would be the inenvitable evolution of writing.

contractions for set phrases
Sounds like something that would naturally evolve in a spoken language, haven't seen it written. I have seen MPEN used by more than just the original person who suggested it.

m kpkn e nsn n la tp li wl pl tw ni: tan li pln e sn.
mi kepeken e nasin ni la toki pona li wile pali tawa ni: tan li pilin e sona.

Hmm, I think tp is hard enough to read without *lossy* compression (i.e. compression that is ambiguous or losses some part of the original).

Re: toki pona text language?

Posted: Wed Sep 25, 2013 4:36 pm
by janEwiku
I've actually made a shortening of all words that are five letters or more, if you're interested http://janewiku.blogspot.com/2013/05/nimi-lili.html

Re: toki pona text language?

Posted: Thu Aug 15, 2019 8:10 pm
by jan Seloki
http://tokipona.net/tp/Compress.aspx is a tool for compressing toki pona words to 2 letters.
a sentence like 'sina ken ala ken sona e ni?' would be sakeaakeso~ni? (sa/ke/aa/ke/so/~/ni). It also shows the hanzi & kanji characters, & can decompress too.

Re: toki pona text language?

Posted: Thu Aug 15, 2019 8:12 pm
by jan Seloki
janEwiku wrote:I've actually made a shortening of all words that are five letters or more, if you're interested http://janewiku.blogspot.com/2013/05/nimi-lili.html
The link says blog not found.

Re: toki pona text language?

Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2019 8:04 am
by Folgore_202
Well, it's a blog from 2013 after all, the author must have stopped it a while ago... However, the compression tool is quite an interesting tool if you ask me!