German textbook & new book proposal

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
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bronger
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Joined: Sat Sep 04, 2010 10:09 am
Location: Aachen, Germany

German textbook & new book proposal

Post by bronger »

I have edited heavily the German toki pona textbook (which is a translation of the textbook by BJ Knight) and uploaded it at http://wilson.homeunix.com/toki-pona-de.pdf. The new LaTeX sources can be downloaded at http://wilson.homeunix.com/toki_pona_de.zip.

Unfortunately, both the German and the English version are out-of-sync from now on.

Maybe we should start a new book project, building on top of Knight's book. The "Unofficial introduction to Toki Pona". I myself don't have much time to offer I'm afraid but I could set up a repository (Bazaar, Subversion, Git, whatever most of you can use), a LaTeX class, and a mailing list (in case that the traffic becomes too big for this forum to handle conveniently). So, I could offer the infrastructure.

I think that texts about Toki Pona have started to diverge slowly. It's not yet critical, but I'd love to see most of it merged into one book.
Torsten Bronger
jan Akesimun
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Joined: Sat Jun 05, 2010 2:15 am
Location: Huntsville, AL

Re: German textbook & new book proposal

Post by jan Akesimun »

That would be pretty awesome. We've been needing new lessons for a while now. Right now, it's just learn from jan Pije's lessons (is that what you mean by book, or is there one I don't know about?) and then come here and learn the new words and usages. It'd be great if everything could be centralized into one resource. Especially since it doesn't seem jan Sonja will update the language again any time soon. Or write her own book.
Yo estuve aquí.
janMato
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Re: German textbook & new book proposal

Post by janMato »

The two main branches are the current jan Pije and the stuff right after jan Sonja took down her lessons. I believe this one http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona ... essons.php is somewhere in the middle, closer to the original jan Sonja lessons. The one on rowa.giso.de is my favorite.

I haven't actually seen much divergence in the toki pona that people are producing regardless to what lesson set they used or their mother tongue. An exception is "li pi" which is a mistake-- it's an odd-man-out construction and AFAIK only appears in the jan Pije lessons. I gripe about it at length elsewhere, no need to repeat.

I still, slow, slowly working on translating the current jan Pije lessons into Icelandic. Useful, I know : - ) I guess the underserved language groups are Hindi and Chinese-- I get very few hits to my toki pona fan site from South East Asia, China or the Indian subcontinent. I know there are smart polyglots there, but they have no access to suitable tp materials.

If I ever put my linguist hat back on, I might resume trying to fill out a Payne, Describing Morphosyntax style reference grammar. So many great projects, so little time.
Kuti
Posts: 358
Joined: Sun Feb 28, 2010 3:48 pm

Re: German textbook & new book proposal

Post by Kuti »

janMato wrote: So many great projects, so little time.
« L'art est long et le temps est court.»
Charles Baudelaire

;)
aikidave
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Re: German textbook & new book proposal

Post by aikidave »

Kuti wrote: janMato wrote: So many great projects, so little time.

« L'art est long et le temps est court.»
Charles Baudelaire
mi wile pali e pali pona mute. taso mi jo e tenpo lili.
Jan KoAla
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Re: German textbook & new book proposal

Post by Jan KoAla »

aikidave wrote:
Kuti wrote: janMato wrote: So many great projects, so little time.

« L'art est long et le temps est court.»
Charles Baudelaire
mi wile pali e pali pona mute. taso mi jo e tenpo lili.
mi mute ali li sama ni. tenpo ali li jo e tenpo lili mute.

mi wile toki e ni: mi sona e pilin sina ! a a a :D
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Evertype
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Joined: Wed Apr 20, 2011 5:06 pm

Re: German textbook & new book proposal

Post by Evertype »

If a new grammar book is developed, I might be interested in publishing it.

I've been looking at Toki Pona on and off for some time. In addition to writing systems and linguistics, I've a particular interest in Lewis Carroll and published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in Esperanto a few years back. Sometime in the next few months translations of Alice into Volapük and Neo will appear.

Is Toki Pona, as a language, mature enough in terms of vocabulary to approach a translation of Alice?
Michael Everson
evertype.com
janMato
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Re: German textbook & new book proposal

Post by janMato »

Whoever writes the first book (or book length text) in toki pona will finish toki pona. Toki pona is in this weird place in between a pidgin and a creole, with a well defined, rigid grammar, but lots of things you can't say without inventing something, in tp's case, the author would have to invent a large number of phrases, some of which might not be universally transparent. I agree with jan Kipos assessment that toki pona is complete with respect to use, say in a home, for ordinary activities of daily life.

What better way to make my point than to try to translate what I just said into toki pona?

jan li pali e nimi sitelen suli la jan ni li pini e toki pona. toki pona li nasa li lon poka toki Tokipisin lon poka toki Kuwijo. toki pona li jo e nasin sama kiwen. taso ijo mute jan li ken ala pana e sona. taso jan li sin e kulupu nimi sin la jan li ken. toki pona la jan ni li wile pali e lipu pi nimi ale sin tawa ni: jan ante li ken lukin e lipu mute pi jan ni li ken kama sona. kulupu nimi li ken sama ni: jan li ken sona anu jan li ken sona ala. mi pilin sama jan Kipo tan ni: jan Kipo li toki e ni: "toki pona li pona tawa kulupu mama lon tomo mama"

mi wile e ni: sina sona e nimi mi. tan ni la mi pali li ante e nimi mi tawa toki pona.

I think the above looks syntactically valid, but I doubt many people would understand it on first or second read, especially without the side by side translation. Some of the dodgy tricks I used were the topic-comment pattern, which isn't really mentioned in the jan Pije lessons, I used nimi sitelen suli to mean a book, nasin sama kiwen to mean "a rigid set of rules" is dodgy because it's probably just an english calque. "li ken sama ni" to mean "can be like this" is a bit dodgy, because predicates aren't that well defined, nor irrealis strategies for that matter.
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