Ardipithecus

[Sonja]

li suwi mute!

[janMato]

soweli pi jan sama "Ardipithecus" li tawa kepeken noka tu tan unpa.

sina pilin e ni: mi sitelen li lon ala li pakala?

mije soweli pi wawa lili li pana e moku tawa meli soweli. mije soweli pi wawa lili li kepeken luka sama tawa meli. ni la mije soweli li tawa kepeken noka tu.

mije soweli pi kiwen uta wawa li moli li lon ala. meli soweli li olin e ni: mije soweli li pana e moku.

oko la mije soweli li olin e ni: meli soweli li pana unpa.

[jan Ote]

[janMato]

[jan Ote]

[janMato]

If I can't put "tan" in a "la" clause and if I can only put "ni" in the prepositional phrase, this isn't so useful. Is suspect on the contrary, any noun phrase can follow the "tan" when it starts a prepositional phrase.

mi moku tan insa mi ala. I eat because of my hollow insides.

I agree that the only places you can put sentences appear to be before "la" after "la" and after "ni". If there are more places let me know!

[janKipo]

Well, as a professional logician (retired) and mainly as a persistent buttinsky, I have to say a few things about all of this. First, thanks for the citation; I hadn't heard that one for a while and it is nice to see it coming round again.

I am curious about why 'mije soweli' rather than 'soweli mije,' "beastly male" rather than "male beast," not to mention why 'soweli' rather than 'jan,' the general term for hominids.
'kepeken e luka sama,' just to confuse things thoroughly, 'kepeken,' as a verb, takes the instrument as direct object, not as complement (object of the preposition).
'ni la' is pretty clear, 'oko la' less so. One moves toward "obviously" or "apparently" or maybe even "it is easy to see that"
What jan Ote says about 'olin,' though I doubt whether it will survive, given mainly English speakers in the community.

All the "a"s and "b"s mix apples and oranges, so that it is hard to dig out the point. So, given a, b as sentences, 'a la b' means "if/when a, then b." Given that a, b refer somehow to events, 'b tan a' means "b because of a" (assuming, in addition, that this is all grammatical). Under this latter assumption, with b now a sentence, I suppose, and a a noun phrase, 'tan a la b' means "Because of a, b." It is not a pleonasm, because a has to be something that actually occurs (all the usual caveats) whereas, in 'a la b," a need not occur (or, indeed, even be possible), but IF/WHEN it does, then b does (b also has to occur in the 'a la b' case (usual caveats).) 'a la b tan a" is also not a pleonasm, since it adds the information that when b occurs upon a, it also occurs because of a, which is notma given (cf. post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy). jan Ote, quoting me, has the rationale for at least the different placements of 'tan ni' covered. For other a than 'ni' it is harder to explain and I have to fall back on individual preferences, since most such cases seem to work either way (but there is a lot of work to be done on 'la' yet). I don't understand case 6 at all unless we are into causal strings, which I try to avoid for sanity sake.
Sure, any word that referes to something that can be a cause or source of something (and I suspect that is just about any content word) can come after 'tan,' a perfectly normal preposition. The 'tan ni' forms are just stressed because they tell how to deal with a common English situation, "because" as a conjunction, which tp treats differently.
There are no places to put sentences aside from: all alone, before 'la', after ' ... la,' and after 'o'. Any place else English might tempt you to put them has to be worked around somehow, usually involving 'ni' (cf "that" in English).

[janMato]

So...
a la b tan a means a <=> b, i.e. equivalence.

I'm confused by the olin rule.

mi olin e jan. <-- this has gotta be okay
mi olin e ona. <--Ok? No antecedent, so it could be human.
mi lukin e mani. mi olin e ona. <-- illegal? Antecedent is not human/not animate
mi olin e ni: jan. <-- illegal? (ni followed by one word sentence, even though it's obvious that the semantic object of love is a person)
mi olin e soweli. <-- illegal? Animate, but not human.

mi jan ilo pi kiwen suno. mi onin jan. <-- If the inanimate can't be loved, can the inanimate love?

mi jan moli. ona li jan moli. mi olin e ona. <-- Zombie love?
soweli li olin e soweli <-- puppy love? no humans on either side.


Робот, робот, робот,
Я тебя люблю, мы так хотели
Робот, робот, робот,
Я тебя включу и полетели

jan ilo pi kiwen suno, ilo pi noka en luka en lawa,
mi olin e sina, tenpo pini la mi mute li wili kin,
ilo pi jan sama, ilo pi jan ala,
mi wili e ni : mi open e sina en mi mute li tawa waso sama

[janMato]

I'm try to convey both human and animal, but not predominately either.

I had in mind a double headed noun phrase, the opposite headless noun phrase where both words in the noun phrase are modifiers. "low life", "oil mice" (examples from Pinker) A low life is not a "low" or a "life". Ardepithicus is a human and an animal at the same time.

Going through the permutations I get

0 + mod + mod => beastly-humanish headless noun. Probably controversial to say this is valid toki pona.
noun + noun => animal-man/man-animal. Probably controversial to say this is valid toki pona.
noun + modifer => beastly-human, humanish beast. Probably not controversial.

Interestingly, the above three rules only express themselves in translation. On paper in tp they'd all look the same. Subjectively, people could be using all three rules and it would be hard to detect or for the language community to correct it.

Wordier alternatives
noun + mod + mod => humanish beasty human, beasty humanish human. Implies the qualities of one or the other rule.
soweli jan soweli, jan soweli jan

pro-form + mod + mod => humanish beasty thing.
ijo soweli jan. Implies inanimate, although I've seen people call animals ijo.
seme soweli jan. Again, implies qualities of humanity rule and sounds like a question.
seme jan soweli.

[janKipo]