125- monsuta

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janMato
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125- monsuta

Post by janMato »

UPDATE: I think my count was off. 125. I probably forgot kipisi.

http://en.tokipona.org/wiki/monsuta
previous synonyms

jan kon - ghost
jan akesi - zombie, vampire, etc
akesi pi lon ala
kala akesi - sea monster
waso akesi - sky monster
akesi ike - nasty, icky creature

Potential uses... fear related things.
pilin monsuta pi nanpa luka luka tu wan -- triskaidekaphobia

Could be handy for Halloween.
Last edited by janMato on Tue Jan 12, 2010 10:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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jan Josan
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Re: 124- monsuta

Post by jan Josan »

It still amazes me, when working with ~120 words, how one more here or there seems to change the whole landscape.
jan Ape
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Re: 124- monsuta

Post by jan Ape »

How many more words must Sonja add? The vocabulary is getting larger and larger.

Toki Pona is a positive language but there is a word for death but no word for life? A word for lost/absent and now a word for monster? Toki Pona is a very lovely language but it will make it harder for new beginners to learn if more and more words are added.
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Re: 124- monsuta

Post by janMato »

jan Ape wrote:How many more words must Sonja add? The vocabulary is getting larger and larger.
As for toki pona, personally I'm with you on this one, but in the end it's language designer's prerogative.

tp has variously been called a personal, philosophical and semantic prime language (ie. minimalistic). A personal language will have as many words as the inventor feels like adding, philosophical as many as needed to express philosophy in the desired manner.

If tp ever hits 1000 words, it would have as many as Klingon, na'vi, and many other constructed languages that aren't really considered semantic prime languages, imho. <-- (look English is getting evidentials, lets all use this in speech so it gets into the OED)!

However, the the upper and lower bonds for morpheme count in a semantic prime language is probably a testable proposition. I'm guessing about 100 to 500 morphemes. If we had a large collection of mature semantic prime languages, I would test each one by seeing how many novel compound words and phrases a can be understood by a competent speaker-- for example, would a competent speaker of na'vi understand unil-tìran-tokx without additional paralinguistic evidence, definitions and so on? (It means dream-walk-body or "Avatar").

(btw, lets see here, calqued that would be "sijelo pi tawa pi sitelen lete", or maybe "jan ilo pi soweli laso" robots of the blue animals, or maybe "jan ilo pi jan laso" depending on how you feel about calling aliens homonoid.)
jan Ape wrote:Toki Pona is a positive language but there is a word for death but no word for life? A word for lost/absent and now a word for monster? Toki Pona is a very lovely language but it will make it harder for new beginners to learn if more and more words are added.
Sonja recently clarified in the "ala" definition that "ala" is indeed productive in the same way that Esperanto "mal-" and English "un-" is. I think this means that it might be safe to say the following:

mi wile moli ala. I want to live. (but also, I want to not die. I want to come to life)
mi pilin pona tawa moli ala. I enjoy life. (but also, I enjoy being a zombie (undead), I like not dying)

As for ease of learning, proper names, eponyms, loan words via "nimi Fuba pi toki Inli" (word foobar of the English language) and non-transparent noun and verb phrases (jan sewi = god) are what really drive up the number of lexemes someone has to memorize. I'm not sure what would be a good solution for a semantic prime language. Even if proper names were built out of base morphemes, they'd probably be just as opaque as a transliterated word.
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Re: 124- monsuta

Post by janKipo »

I'm not (yet) a fan of 'monsuta' either. But then, I didn't like 'mani' for a long time and then Sonja began to expand and clarify it and it made good sense. Maybe 'monsuta' will develop as well; we have been having problems with "fear" in any case -- distinguishing it from just "sick," for example. On the other hand, I hope that the era of new words is about over. What has been added of late are -- as often noted -- rather marginal, although they have some of them been expanded into significant items (but 'pu' remains an enigma). There does not seem to be any rhyme nor reason for the newest few, except, of course, that Sonja has thought of a need for them -- which may be enough for now (but must eventually find some rationale). Notice that the rationale cannot be completeness, since tp is not strictly a semantic prime language (no claims to completeness, no claims of discreteness, no description of construction process), so it has to be practical. And, then, the need for a word for monsters seem slight (since there are none around to talk about), but something dealing with fears -- however baseless -- does clearly have a modern use (and probably an even greater one in Daoist paradise). Of course, there is not much reason to get all atwitter about anew word; it is just that, when yo start at 120 or so, each new one is a marked increase, unlike a natural language like English, which adds a few new words every day but loses them in the hundred thousand that went before. So, let's wait and see (but I would sure like to hear more about 'pu').
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jan Josan
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Re: 124- monsuta

Post by jan Josan »

It does seem more useful for emotional states than creatures.

What emotional states do we have so far?

pilin ike - a general catch-all for feeling bad
pilin pakala - which seems to be an alternative that covers much of the same ground
pilin jaki - a possiblity but for what-- guilt? shame? probably would usually read as physically feeling dirty
pilin pi wile moli ala - closest I can think of for fear
pilin pi wawa ike - anger, agitation
pilin anpa - defeated, low (calque, probably)

and on the positive side:

pilin pona - a general catch-all for feeling good
pilin wawa - feeling energized
pilin sewi -- something like sublime, if what Sonja has in the draft for sewi makes it into the new definition.
pilin sin - either feeling refreshed, or a feeling of deja vu. :?
janKipo
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Re: 124- monsuta

Post by janKipo »

'Sewi' is starting to lap over into 'kon' (or conversely) from their original (?) physical meanings. That seems perfectly natural to me, except that the physical meanings are getting lost or downgraded -- not a good idea, to my way of thinking.

'pakala' is much worse than 'ike' (or 'jaki,' for that matter) so 'pilin pakala' is ether a sense of doom or the last reaches of despair, I think.
'jaki' is "dirty, disgusting" and so "shame" is a good reading for 'pilin jaki'

As usual, the positive side is harder to do in this positive language. And the problems with 'sin' will get back to us some day, I expect.
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Re: 124- monsuta

Post by janMato »

janKipo wrote:'Sewi' is starting to lap over into 'kon' (or conversely) from their original (?) physical meanings. That seems perfectly natural to me, except that the physical meanings are getting lost or downgraded -- not a good idea, to my way of thinking.
The cat is on top the fridge.
soweli li lon sewi pi poki lete.

The table cloth is dirty.
len pi supa moku li jaki.

The physical sense seems to still work. I'm going to make a wild guess that the subjective experience of which sense of a tp word is primary (as in 1st in the dictionary) depends on recency. If I've been recentinly using lawa in the legal or government sense, I forget it means "head" as well.
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Re: 124- monsuta

Post by janKipo »

I was looking at Sonja's draft, hence the worry, though I suppose she is subject to the recently clause too.
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Re: 124- monsuta

Post by jan Ape »

According to this; Toki Pona is
...is the auxiliary language of international contact
Which is probably why Jan Sonja is adding more word (hopefully not to many). If this is the case, I support it (of course under the conditions that it keeps it's minimalism to some extent)!

Now that I look at it, monsuta may be a very good word for Toki Pona:

pilin monsuta (fearful feeling)
pilin monsuta pi nanpa (fearful filling of numbers)
numerophobic

tenpo monsuta(?) - Halloween(?)

sitelen tawa pi monsuta(?) - Horror movie(?)

alasa is the same as "kama jo e" but now since "alasa" means "hunt" it can probably also mean "search/find" and it will probably give a whole new range or weapons from "utala".
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