The artist is at work! Letter names

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jan musi pi len noka
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Re: The artist is at work! Letter names

Post by jan musi pi len noka »

jan Josan wrote:I mean to say, specifically, trying to play around with the grammar or punctuation in order to add a level of meaning that isn't already there using cannon tp.
Hmm, interesting. I respect the goal of letting the language designer do their job and just being a fan using a language according to spec, but if we give ourselves free pass on things like intonation to signify end of sentence (which isn't in the spec), then why not other things? Just thinking a loud, I suppose there isn't a good answer for what is creative use of the language, what is a community innovation, what are just accidents on their way to becoming convention, and what is out-and-out conlang creation.

And on the topic of intonation and what punctuation is strictly necessary, we probably could say tp questions in monotone and use no punctuation because tp questions either have seme or a li X ala X construction.

sina wile ala wile e telo nasa pan.
sina wile e telo nasa pan seme.
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jan Josan
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Re: The artist is at work! Letter names

Post by jan Josan »

Yes, I'm quite sure that questions wouldn't rely on the cues we use in, say English. I've noticed this in the Mandarin, which uses a similar "X 不 X" structure, or specific questions words (and didn't have any written punctuation until recently). Toki pona wouldn't be relying on tones for meaning either though, so it's anybody's guess what would happen. Probably regional differences that would mirror the wide latitude possible in pronunciation.

I'm not sure what you mean by free pass on intonation-- besides there being few written rules for oral tp (pronunciation and stress on the first syllable if I remember). I hope when people do have a chance to speak tp they don't start quickly trying to make up new rules about how it is said somehow adding meaning to what is said.

I like solutions to problems that arise again and again. I'd like to see names for 'left' and 'right' be settled once an for all, for instance. But I'm weary of making up rules for situations that haven't even necessarily occurred, and innovations that leave people speaking or writing their own personal versions of tp that no one coming here fresh out of jan Pije's lessons would have a clue how to decipher.
Logomachist wrote:
I wonder: what is the value of naming the letters, especially for such a minimalist language?
Back to this original question though, I could imagine this would come in handy as soon as we started learning/teaching tp orally instead of only reading lessons. But I wonder why she is giving names to letters like 'b' that aren't in toki pona. And I really hope 'Jota' ends up next to "j" instead of "i" or it will really mess me up with my limited Spanish.
jan musi pi len noka
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Re: The artist is at work! Letter names

Post by jan musi pi len noka »

I'm not sure what you mean by free pass on intonation-- besides there being few written rules for oral tp (pronunciation and stress on the first syllable if I remember).
From the current wiki
There are no set rules for sentence intonation. It is not necessary to raise the tone in questions as we do in English, however there is also nothing wrong in doing so.
So I can indeed legally give my questions the intonation of a fire truck! But this brief line doesn't cover the other possibilities. Would it be wrong to consistent use intonation that carries meaning beyond the words of the sentence, say by falling back to the intonation rules for ones L1? The intonation might convey surprise, disappointment, etc, which might not be anything one could read in the sentence. I'm leary of imagining these are linguistic universals.
jan Josan wrote:Toki pona wouldn't be relying on tones for meaning either though, so it's anybody's guess what would happen. Probably regional differences that would mirror the wide latitude possible in pronunciation.
Another possibility is that the language would have so many allophones that each word would have dozens of pronunciations. This would probably lead to people subconsciously assigning specific meanings to different pronunciations of the same word. Anyhow, an experiment for a future century.
jan Josan wrote:I like solutions to problems that arise again and again. I'd like to see names for 'left' and 'right' be settled once an for all, for instance. But I'm weary of making up rules for situations that haven't even necessarily occurred, and innovations that leave people speaking or writing their own personal versions of tp that no one coming here fresh out of jan Pije's lessons would have a clue how to decipher.
jan Pije is style is a very specific style. He uses bare words more often than modified words and simple (i.e. non-compound/X la Y) sentences more often than compound ones and generally uses short or no chains (e chains, li chains, pi chains, etc). But he does use all those some time. A harder to read style is to use all available mechanisms. But it's still syntactically valid. Also, moving out of bare words to modified phrases, that is where beginners are really going to get lost because one just has to memorize that tomo tawa is a car, etc.

I think part of toki pona's simplicity was because it was a brand new language and initially even jan Pije wrote rather simple stuff because that is all he could write. Now he's more talented in writing and in Where the Wild Things are, he use a particularly good example of a li chain that had prep phrases in both verb phrases. This is something that many posts have been posted about, without a quick answer, even though many people in the audience presumably have read jan Pije's lessons.
leoboiko
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Re: The artist is at work! Letter names

Post by leoboiko »

Hi,

I’m completely new to toki pona :) but wouldn’t it be more in spirit of the language to name the letters for words starting with that sound, like most (all?) alphabets did originally? For example, “Gamma” is just the Greek adaptation of Phoenician Gimel, “camel”, a word which started with that letter; similarly, Aleph the name of the letter was taken from the word for “ox”, Elder Futhark “L” (ᛚ) was named from Proto-Germanic *laguz “lake” and so on.

In toki pona there’s even that famous(ish) picture by Lament ( http://bknight0.myweb.uga.edu/toki/lesson/aei.jpg ) which establishes precedent most learners are familiar with (I guess?). So one could call “a” sitelen akesi, “p” sitelen pipi and so on… just my humble 2¢.
janKipo
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Re: The artist is at work! Letter names

Post by janKipo »

I suppose the main problem that 'sitelen akesi' might be a picture of a critter or some other sort of representation, that is, it already has a use in the language. Also, we do have the pattern of names being hung on as modifiers and outside the the language proper. That aside, it makes sense.
The main reason for letter names is their use in addresses of various sorts (for which we need the whole Latin alphabet at least.
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