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Passive and Causative (pana (e) sona)

Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2016 8:57 am
by janTepanNetaPelin

Active: The children are learning Toki Pona.
Passive: Toki Pona is being learnt by the children.
Causative: The parent is teaching the children Toki Pona. (i.e. "makes them learn")


jan pi toki pona o,

Outside of pu, I have observed forms like *"pana sona" instead of "pana e sona" (to teach).
  • mama li pana e sona pi toki pona tawa jan lili. (The parent is teaching Toki Pona to the children.)
    → *mama li pana sona e toki pona tawa jan lili.
It reads well (for an English-speaker), but it's not pu. The root for this seems to be that Toki Pona doesn't have a causative, and no passive. Otherwise a sentence expressing "The parent is making Toki Pona something known to the children" might have emerged. But such a sentence seems not to be possible because it would look like this:
  • *mama li sona e toki pona tawa jan lili. *(The parent knows Toki Pona according to the children.)
The reason for this seems to be how pu shows how to "convert any verb into a noun" (pu, page 26):
  • toki (something that you speak)
    moku (something that you eat)
So *"ijo toki" (something to speak, something talkable) and *"ijo moku" (something to eat, something edible) turn into "toki" and "moku". The implicit rule seems to be that "ijo" is omitted before a transitive verb (*"ijo sona" → "sona") which prevents us from forming passives and causatives. I hope this "rule" can be interpreted like this, though: "ijo" is omitted before transitive verbs (like "toki" and "moku") except when used in order to express passives and causatives. Here's what I mean:
  • nimi sin li ijo toki. (The new words are being spoken.)
    kili li ijo moku. (The fruit is being eaten.)
    toki pona li ijo sona. (Toki pona is being known.)
  • mama li ijo toki e nimi sin tawa jan lili. (The parent makes the children say the new words.)
    mama li ijo moku e kili tawa jan lili. (The parent makes the child eat the fruit.)
    mama li ijo sona e toki pona tawa jan lili. (The parent teaches Toki Pona to the children.)
This is not a "pona" style, but it seems possible.

jan Tepan

Re: Passive and Causative (pana (e) sona)

Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2016 10:08 am
by janKipo
This is interesting and deals with a real felt problem with tp. While tp does have an array of causative constructions, from making transitive verbs from nouns and adjectives to using 'kama' as a transitive verb (though that has problems), it does not have passives. And they would often be useful. I don't quite see, however, how Tepan's ideas work toward this. 'ijo moku' has perfectly good (though rare) meanings in tp, either "something eating" or "something edible" ("context etc. "). Adding a new meaning hardly seems helpful.
Things like 'ijo moku' are also not obviously (at least) the source of the move from a transitive verb to the genus of its direct object, which seems a simple move in its own right that covers all transitive verbs and prepositions.
Nor does the situation with 'pana sona', which is just incorporation, provide any useful information that I can see.
So barring quite a bit more detail, I don't see a case for passives here.