'ale' and 'ali'

[janAetherStar]

I've just thought, I know that this may be impeding on the simplicity of toki pona, but since 'ale' seems here to stay, why don't we either revert back to it or give it another meaning? I was thinking of that in terms of infinity - the all AND the nothing together, not just all. ni li pona ala pona?

[janKipo]

ala. My preference would be to do away with 'ale' altogether and stick to 'ali' (or get a new word for "all" that didn't have the problem -- but don't get me started on bad word choices from the point of view of easy confusions:'suwi, sewi, suli, seli'). In addition, it would be odd to have a word for infinity but none for three (or a hundred, if you think 'tu wan' covers the early case). I don't get the "the all and the nothing together" remark about infinity.

[soweliPeka]

mi pilin e ni: nimi 'ali' li pona. taso mi wile weka e nimi 'ale'.

I think I get where you are going with the infinity thing, but if I do get where your coming from then that IS covered by ali.

I'm with jan Kipo. I'd rather just do away with 'ale' altogether. The only reason that it is still taught and mentioned, AFAIK, is that it was changed late in the game, and a lot of texts already had 'ale'.

[janAetherStar]

Aww ok. I still like 'ale' though (come on, won't anyone agree that there are too many 'i's in tp? soweli lili li lili tawa mi, for instance).
With 'ale' for infinity, I meant that it covers everything (matter and energy I guess) and the nothing inbetween the matter (which is not anything at all, or we don't know what it is or something, as far as I've read, so it can't exactly be 'ali').

[soweliPeka]

I could get all philisophical and say how defining nothing makes it into something, and thereby it would be covered by 'ali' but then we'd have to talk about getting rid of 'ala'.

But, yeah, I think the nothing you are describing would still be covered by 'ali'.

[TheRationalOne]

I don't think "ale" is here to stay. And why can't you abolish it? Couldn't you just urge the rest of the community not to use it?

[janKipo]

As long as we have 'ala', 'ale' is a problem, so I would be glad to be rid of it. But we have 15 years of usage to buck. (Personally, I like the biquinary number system that made it sensible to use 'ka' for 0 and so for all the negative notions. Then we could keep
al' or 'ali' or both without problems.)