Toki Pona's community

Toki Pona news: new website, upcoming book, announcements from the language's creator
Tokiponaj novaĵoj: nova TTT-ejo, venonta libro, aperonta libro, anoncoj de la kreinto de la lingvo
Kuti
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Re: Toki Pona's community

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janKipo
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Re: Toki Pona's community

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To be fair, what was your criterion for learning? Reading sentences without undue look-ups? Writing same? Writing correctly? Consistently doing the aforementioned? Somewhere along this spectrum, we all took more than two days and somewhere farther, we aren't there yet. But two days seems about right for feeling that you can introduce your self and say that you are learning tp (longer, of course, if you read the lessons rather than the forums).
Kuti
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Re: Toki Pona's community

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jan Josan
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Re: Toki Pona's community

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I think my litmus test for 'learning' toki pona would be knowing how and when to use la and pi.
(jan kuti o, tenpo kama la mi wile pali e kalama musi pi toki pona qualifies you for both of these) :)

I've noticed linguists seem to pick up toki pona in an afternoon or two. I seem to remember it was about a month before I had made it though all the lessons and could say something without at least one missing e or inappropriate pi.
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Re: Toki Pona's community

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jan Kuti o You probably don't need 'wile' in your test sentence, 'tenpo kama la' covers the futurity adequately, unless you mean that you will come to have a desire to do some singing/composing; I took it that you already had that desire and would come to fulfill it.
'kepeken' in the first sentence appears to be the preposition and so does not need 'e'.
I take 'mi sona toki' as a shot at "I know how to speak", but 'sona' is not a modal (so far as we know at the moment), so can't take a verb as complement. (I think this is actually a good construction and should be adopted -- thank you!; but that is another issue.) We don't have a good way to say "I know how to do something" The closest I can think of is 'mi sona e ni: seme li nasin tawa ...' and even that doesn't get skill, only descriptive knowledge. Help, anybody (before we baptize 'son' as a modal)?
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jan Josan
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Re: Toki Pona's community

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janKipo wrote:jan Kuti o You probably don't need 'wile' in your test sentence, 'tenpo kama la' covers the futurity adequately, unless you mean that you will come to have a desire to do some singing/composing; I took it that you already had that desire and would come to fulfill it.
Interesting, to use wile implies a future action, as does tempo kama la, so it feels right when translating from English, but it doesn't actually make sense to have both in the sentence unless you are actually talking about a change in desire.

janKipo wrote:I take 'mi sona toki' as a shot at "I know how to speak", but 'sona' is not a modal (so far as we know at the moment), so can't take a verb as complement. (I think this is actually a good construction and should be adopted -- thank you!; but that is another issue.) We don't have a good way to say "I know how to do something" The closest I can think of is 'mi sona e ni: seme li nasin tawa ...' and even that doesn't get skill, only descriptive knowledge. Help, anybody (before we baptize 'son' as a modal)?
I suppose we have use ken in this case. mi ken toki kepeken toki pona. And for understand, mi ken sona e toki pona. But I'm not against the use of sona as a modal. Many languages have this distinction between innate ability and learned skill (and language skills do a confusing dance between these two), or knowledge skill and performed skill. ken and sona both as modals could create either of these distinctions.
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Re: Toki Pona's community

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But 'wile', unlike English aux "will", implies more than just future action: intention or necessitation of some sort (on some other line there is an ongoing discussion about just what is involved) (I am not going to pay any attention to folks who claim that there is significant content difference between aux "will" and aux "shall').
As for 'ken' and 'sona', good point -- I didn't think of 'ken' for "know how to" because I was caught up in the "know" part, not the practical consequence. Still, we like to make something like these distinctions from time to time. Let's see if anyone salutes this particular flag.
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Re: Toki Pona's community

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Re: Toki Pona's community

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More to the point, I'm sorry to be so American that I can't write even vaguely intelligible French. I change my comments (which were directed to an anglophone's habit of using 'wile' for "will" habitually) to say that with 'wile' "want to", you don't need 'tenpo kama' since futurity is entailed.
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