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.