toki "Damin" li sama lili e toki pona.

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Altruismo, alternativaj kulturoj, teĥnologio, simpla vivado, daŭrigebleco, primitivismo
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janMato
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toki "Damin" li sama lili e toki pona.

Post by janMato »

*edits in bold

meji "Steven Pinker" li meji pali pi sona toki. meji li sitelen e ni: "toki "Damin" li jo e nimi pi nanpa ale ale!" lon sitelen "The Language Instinct", linpu pi nanpa ale ale mute mute mute tu tu (264)". jan ante li sitelen e ni: toki "Damin" li jo e nimi pi nanpa ale mute mute luka luka (150) e nimi pi nanpa ale ale mute mute luka luka (250). *numbers now spelled out

toki pi nimi "Damin" li toki lili pi toki pi nimi "Lardil". toki pi nimi "Damin" li lon ma Oselija. *tokiponification of an ususual foreign word renders it unrecognizable and is a barrier to communication. The alternative I guess is to provide a glossary with posts?!

sona ni li sona musi mute e mi.

toki "Damin" li jo e nimi lili tan seme? toki "Damin" li toki pali pi toki sewi. jan toki li wile e ni: "jan ale li sona ala * e nimi ni : "jan pali pi ijo sewi li toki e nimi.""

* ... what's the rule on double negatives? English or Russian style?

Wikipedia article on Damin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damin


Popular Article on Damin
http://www.rickharrison.com/language/damin.html

Scolarly Article on Damin
https://segue.middlebury.edu/repository ... n_hale.pdf
Last edited by janMato on Sun Dec 13, 2009 3:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
janKipo
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Re: toki "Damin" li sama lili e toki pona.

Post by janKipo »

janMato wrote:meji "Steven Pinker" li meji pali pi toki sona.
A wise speaking worker or a linguist? 'jan plai pi sona toki'
meji li sitelen e ni: "toki "Damin" li jo e nimi pi nanpa ale ale!" lon sitelen "The Language Instinct, pp 264". jan ante li sitelen e ni: toki "Damin" li jo e nimi pi nanpa 150 e nimi pi nanpa 250.
I'm not too fond of this dodge around tp's prohibition on large (i.e three or greater) numbers, but it is a step.
toki "Damin" li toki lili pi toki "Lardil". toki "Damin" li lon ma "Australia".
All these quotes should strictly be with 'pi nimi' or else rendered in tp. Fussitude.
sona ni li sona musi mute e mi.
"This wisdom very amusingly means me" Not sure what the target was, but I think the shot was wide.
toki "Damin" li jo e nimi lili tan seme? toki "Damin" li toki pali pi toki sewi. jan toki li wile e ni: "jan ale li sona ala * e nimi ni : "jan pali pi ijo sewi li toki e nimi.""

* ... what's the rule on double negatives? English or Russian style?
I would suppose English (don't do dat). Note, you don't have a case of double negatives, merely the ambiguous "Everybody doesn't understand" I am not sure what is better (of the logically equivalent but rhetorically separate) 'jan li sona ala' or 'jan pi ali ala li sona' 'jan ala li sona' is too strong, as the next sentence shows. (there is the usual unresolved issue of the scope of 'ala', here taken to be only predicate long).
janMato
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Re: toki "Damin" li sama lili e toki pona.

Post by janMato »

sona ni li sona musi mute e mi.
"This wisdom very amusingly means me" Not sure what the target was, but I think the shot was wide.
Goal- "This information is interesting to me."

I think I've almost pinned why the verb phrase distresses me. While noun phrases have multi-way polysemy (jan = person, people, man, woman, sometimes android robot, possibly the remote control golems in the movie Avatar), verb phrases have a lot of grammatical "multi-readings"

Here is my current mental model for the 1 or 2 words following "li":
verb + modifier = li moku lape = (Sleep eating, like sleep-walking, but eating) action going on with the qualities of the modifier. Doesn't seem to correspond to an adverb
verb + adverb = li moku wawa = powerfully eating. Does seem to correspond to an adverb. I have no idea why this and the above feel like different cases.
aux verb + verb = li wile moku = want to eat
intrans/transitive verb + ... + 0/e phrase = ... not hard, but it's one more possibility to keep in mind until the sentence completes
kama + verb = li kama sona = come to know
kama + modifier = a way of happening/coming into being
tawa + modifier = a way of going
tawa + remainder of prep phrase=
verb + (word) + pi + word + word = No idea, but these phrases seem possible.
li + predicate = The verb phrase isn't a verb phrase at all, it's actually a noun phrase.
li + prepositional phrase = li tawa tomo, li lon tomo. Variant on above, except starts with preposition. The 2nd word is not an adverb.

So there are at least 7 different grammatical readings for the first 2 words of a verb phrase. Plus each word has maybe 4-5 semantic meanings, so that is a search space of 7 * 5 * 5 different possible meanings. The semantic search space is easier than the grammatical because the possible semantic meanings of one word are clustered, but there is a much bigger psychological distance between "li wili moku" to want to eat and to starve, or the predicate sense vs the intransitive sense of a phrase (li tawa tomo).

Maybe the worst phrase would be, "li wile kama tawa" or "li wile kama tawa moku" Not sure what they mean but because these have both auxiliary and ordinary meanings, there seems to be a lot of possible grammatical readings.
janKipo
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Re: toki "Damin" li sama lili e toki pona.

Post by janKipo »

I think you are overly pessimistic. As for predicates (what comes after 'li') you have
nouns that stay nouns (unless transitivized -- in which case they mean "makes object (after 'e') be a ...")
modifiers that stay modifiers (unless transitived -- as above)
verbs that stay verbs (change slightly when transitive, or, more likely, when intransitive)
prepositions disguised as verbs ('tawa' class take nouns as complements)
modals (take verb predicates as complement, 'wile' class)
'kama' that is somewhere in between (takes modifier and noun predicates, but not noun complements and lotsa other strange stuff)
All of these can be modified adverbially, nouns and modifiers also by nouns and modifiers. And 'ala,' which does its own thing.
The tricky part is to notice that the grouping of all these critters is different for modifiers and for complements.
Sorry, that just looks worse than before. but it is easy, once you get the hang of it, though hard to put into words succinctly. In any case, a given word doesn't enter into so many grammatical possibilities -- most have only one or two, and the worst I know has like four, usually clearly distinct (but, when not, doozies).

This information is interesting to me. Well, 'sona ni (borrowing your form) li namako e mi' 'li musi tawa mi' (not sure about that, but I think that is how the pieces line up, though 'musi e mi' may work , too). The crucial point is that the object of 'sona' is some mental thing, either what you know or what you mean, not you yourself.

depending on what the rest is 'wile kama tawa moku' can means as little as "wants to come to dinner," than which we can surely find something more complex. I like "wantsto become a ravening rover" myself.
janMato
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Re: toki "Damin" li sama lili e toki pona.

Post by janMato »

Update for anyone interested in Damin who finds this thread:

Damin turns out to be more like a constraint language, similar to Basic English. The host language is Lardil, which is a full sized language. The creators of Damin make up 150 -200 new words with a completely different phonotactics and phonetic inventory. They still use Lardil morphology with the new stems. So Damin could have equally been called Basic Lardil, but with a goal of ease of learning instead of (one way) mutual intelligibility.

Here is a quote of myself from a post I made to another forum.
Damin is a dead language and every time I go looking, I find very little about it. Although I did find this, where you search in this book for Damin a few pages. In that book, it is claimed that "can express virtually any idea" I wish there was a public lists of the 150/200 stems or morphemes it's attributed. I also read here that there is a revival project going on. Lardil was the ordinary language spoken by the people who sometimes used Damin. Here is an intriguing quote about the relationship between the two: "It [Damin] must be such that it can be it can be learned quickly and, at the same time, it much be such that it can be used, in cooperation with *Lardil* inflectional morphology and syntax, to express any idea which Lardil itself can be used to express" So this speed reader gets the impression that Damin was kind of like Basic English, but with made-up roots.
jan Misite
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Re: toki "Damin" li sama lili e toki pona.

Post by jan Misite »

^^A bit more of a relex too though, yknow? If Basic English were relexed it would really be quite formidable if you calqued most of English's multiword verbs in, they're ridiculously productive...I've actually thought quite a lot about this.

The idea of a ceremonial language is awesome, and the opposite of practical. That is, it didn't have to have lots of redundancy nor deal with the distonctions of day today things, that was lardil's job. It could afford to be used abstractly. It's the opposite of a pidgin in a sense. It's like a functional Ithkuil.

The vocabulary would be very interesting to study but nfortunately it seems *very* dead or someone would be speaking it, right? I'll try to track down this book.

I can only guess how a 2-pronoun inclusive exclusive system could work. The following article seems to cast doubt on the analysis of the kinship terms. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/6 ... 6309444723
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