On importance of "please" and "thank you"

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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jan Seli
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Joined: Sat Jan 09, 2016 4:03 pm

On importance of "please" and "thank you"

Post by jan Seli »

jan ali o, toki!

Don't really know how the things are now, but I read somewhere that there are no tp analogues for please and thank you words, and that it's by design.
Is it really so? If yes, then (in my humble) this needs to be fixed. Rationale in the last paragraph.

I've made up these variants. What do you think about them? I''d like to see yours )

please: sina pana pona la ...
thank you: sina pona.
you are welcome: sina pona kin.

Now on necessity of verbal gratitude. You may well skip the rest of the paragraph, unless you're curious about this quirk of human talk.
I'm translating some behavioral science to my mother tongue and here's the reasoning why those words are necessary to the language. (All credit to B. F. Skinner, who was very clever a man indeed).
There are three kinds of speech, if you divided it by its "reinforcements". To put it simple, they are commands ("I want a candy!"), names for things and events (in a very broad sense, "red" for example, or "on the table") and modifiers to the speech itself (for example "for example"). There are many further subdivisions, but let's look the first type, mands. What makes them different is that they are reinforced by the listener's action, specified in the mand. "Give me a candy" specifies exactly what listener's action will be reinforcing to the speaker.
Now to the point. I know it's long and may seem kinda irrelevant.
In other types of verbal behavior the benefactor is the listener; only mands are for the benefit of the speaker himself.
That's exactly the reason why in every single culture there exist rituals around mands: equivalents of "please", predisposing the listener to act for the speaker, "thank you", which reinforcers listener's cooperation to ensure that he will cooperate again in the future, and "you are welcome", reinforcing that reinforcement.
Hope that makes sense to you as it does to me )

sina pona tawa mi tan ni: sina lukin e sitelen toki ali mi.
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jan_Lope
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Re: On importance of "please" and "thank you"

Post by jan_Lope »

jan Seli wrote:jan ali o, toki!

Don't really know how the things are now, but I read somewhere that there are no tp analogues for please and thank you words, and that it's by design.
Is it really so? If yes, then (in my humble) this needs to be fixed. Rationale in the last paragraph.

I've made up these variants. What do you think about them? I''d like to see yours )

please: sina pana pona la ...
thank you: sina pona.
you are welcome: sina pona kin.
jan Seli o, toki!

pona! kama pona! (Thank you! Welcome!)

There are often no single words in Toki Pona for politeness because it is a very small language. But you can use phrases like in other languages. For example "Thank you" (two words), "You are welcome." (three words).

Here are some phrases in the sections "Addressing People", "Interjections", "Commands" in
http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona ... 0000000000

But your variants a good as well.

You are right Toki Pona has no word for "please". But other languages have no word for "please" too. For example the Pirahã:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUxkzMaqYQ8

The language of the Pirahã has some more similarities to Toki Pona, for example grammar without nested subordinate clauses or other recursions. I would highly recommend to read the book of Daniel Everett "Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes".
https://daneverettbooks.com/portfolio-i ... re-snakes/
pona!
jan Lope
https://jan-lope.github.io
(Lessons and the Toki Pona Parser - A tool for spelling, grammar check and ambiguity check of Toki Pona)

On my foe list are the sockpuppets janKipo and janSilipu because of permanent spamming.
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jan Seloki
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Re: On importance of "please" and "thank you"

Post by jan Seloki »

I don't imagine the OP really meant there should be a single word for "please" & "thank you". Only that there doesn't seem to be an agreed upon/official way to say it, as there is for 'car'. Some things really need to have an official way to say them instead of leaving it up to the speaker to figure out how to say something, or the listener to guess what they mean. I have always felt like some tokiponists focus WAY too much on it being simple & don't seem to care that it's difficult sometimes to figure out what somebody is trying to say. All of the different meanings for 'pona' are a good example, but that's another subject. I would suggest 'pona o' or 'o pona' for please mostly just because no better equivalent exists in the vocabulary. For example, "pona o sina pali e ni." You could even use 'pona la' as a way of saying "it would be good/nice if...". Welcome is 'kama pona' so I guess you could simply use that for both forms of welcome like English does.
人り有え人上ら人り要物無。
ین لی یۆ إ ین سوی لا ین لی ئولی أۆ إ ئیو ألا
.ין לי יו א ין סוי לה ין לי וילה ייו אלה
ܝܲܢ ܠܝܼ ܝܘܿ ܥܹ ܝܲܢ ܣܹܘܝܼ ܠܲܐ ܝܲܢ ܠܝܼ ܘܝܼܠܹܥ ܝܼܝܘܿ ܐܲܠܲܐ.
ญนํลีโญเอะญนํเศะวีลญนํลีวีเละอีโญอล.
janKipo
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Re: On importance of "please" and "thank you"

Post by janKipo »

“Please” is assumed with all requests. “Thank you” and “You’re welcome” are both ‘pona’. These are old established expressions. If you want to be fancy (but why?), you could say ‘sina wile la’ or ‘ni li pona tawa sina la’ for “Please”. But, as noted, all this has been dealt with from very early on.
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