Double-speak in toki pona?

[janMato]

Thinking about doublespeak

"downsizing" mass firing of employees
"collateral damage" killing of civilians
"pre-emptive war" invasion of a foreign country

Here is one non-canon attempt to say things in tp, which chooses the ...single-speak(?) way of saying things
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=375

While I agree it is harder to think about complicated things because they get harder to say faster than they do in large vocab languages (or maybe it's just because I'm still a beginner, I can't say downsizing, collateral damage or pre-emptive war in French, Icelandic or Russian--I can barely order coffee), I'm not convinced yet that it is harder to use double-speak.

mi jan lawa pi kulupu esun. esun mi li suli. mi wili e esun lili. mi li kama pali e esun lili.

mi jan lawa pi jan utala. mi mute li utala e jan jaki. kin la tenpo kama la mi tan e pakala lili pi poka ante* taso ni li ijo lili.

* little mistakes on the side

pre-emptive war. This is double speak in the sense of "preventive war", it isn't doublespeak in the sense of "war of first strike" : "marked by the seizing of the initiative." As any good toki pona reader should know, when we have many options to pick from, by context we should choose the one that makes the most sense, which is "war of first strike" and "start a war to prevent the war" is just a non-sense paradox.

Pre-emptive defense is closer to double speak--i.e. using aggression for defense, two items that feel sort-a-like opposites. (I had to hit him because he *looked* like he was going to hit me). Lemme see if I can making into such in tp.

mi jan lawa pi ma suli. jan mute mi li jo e pilin monsuto tawa jan jaki ante. mi wile e ni: wan la jan jaki li utala ala tawa ma mi.
"war of first strike":
wan la mi wile opin e utala suli tawa jan jaki.

"war to prevent war"
mi li pali e utali suli tawa ma ante tawa ni : utala li kama ala. Nonsense to nonsense.

[janKipo]

I agree that doubele-speak can be achieved in any language.The point of Newspeak was to make singlespeak impossible, at least on certain topics.
'mi mute utala e jan jaki' (fight'em, not fight for them, right?) The "on the side" idiom doesn't really come over well -- not that I have an alternative to suggest.
Note that, for example, 'utala pona' is not overtly absurd and, given that, almost any kind of war can be made reasonable (and has been).

[janMato]

Note that, for example, 'utala pona' is not overtly absurd and, given that, almost any kind of war can be made reasonable (and has been).

Interesting... makes me think of oxymorons.

kala lili pi suli suli. Small fish of great size. The "kali lili" would have to be interpreted somewhat idiomatically (krill, plankton, shrimp, as opposed to small whales) Hmm, and I made an example of accidental-reduplication-of-meaning-shift.

jan pona jaki - Unpleasant friend.
jan pona ike- Unskillful or complicated friend.

utala suli pi utala ala- cold war.

[janKipo]

jumbo shrimp, as I took you to say (but aren't they pipi kala or kala pipi?)
And, of course, the realm switches, which take us back to reduplication, like 'wile wile'. So double speak may not be contradictory and single speak may seem to be. Another ideal language shot down (or language ideal, I'm not sure which).

[janMato]

Another ideal language shot down (or language ideal, I'm not sure which).

Hmm. I'm incline to judge the success of a language based on if it meets the goals of it's users. Esperanto, Klingon, Laadan, Lojban are all failures to some extent by their designers' goals, but they are in the top 10 for successful conlanguages with regards to attracting people who are using it for *something* that makes them happy..

tenpo pi suli linja li kama tawa toki pona! Long live toki pona!

[janKipo]

Your aesthetic is impeccable; it is the only rational one. Unfortunately 1) I have found (trying to apply it) that even it has an irrational component a yard wide and 2) everybody wants something more than mere utilitarian success. The first problem turns out (as of the late 1950s) to be endemic in science and so is no surprise here. The second is at the hear t of aesthetics and so is even less of a surprise.
1. What constitutes success for a language with a specific (relatively speaking) purpose? Very few international organizations or meetings or business are conducted in Esperanto (or Interlingua or ...), yet many Esperantists claim the language is a success, pointing to, say, speakers in every country (pretty much) or acceptance by the International Telegraph Union (this is probably outdated by now) or ... . Loglan/Lojban can never be used to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (whatever that is in any detail) but it is a success in a number of other things which have become goals as success approached. Klingon is a successful Poohbahing of because it "sounded right" and lotsa people bought into it while nobody that counted (my college roommate's brother, the producer, say) objected. Ditto, probably, Na'vi and the forthcoming tv language from the LCS. (I've noted that the bar is low here and suggested, that if the Prawns used a language, it inventor did a more challenging job, apparently.)
2. The case is easiest with the Poohbah languages. Practically, they only have to be appropriately weird and coherent. Relexing English with gutterals (for barbarians) or mainly feminine words (open sylllables, no clusters, etc,) (for elves and fairies and maybe Polynesians) will probably work for the purpose at hand (and would make life easier for the actors). But the conlang community -- including the creators, even if not officially in the group -- want more: naturalness, plausible patterns, explainable deviations, Lord knows what else. I am going over the web critiques of Na'vi and the LCS critiques for their contest to see what people really use and no very short list is emerging. If one goes on to auxlangs or engelangs of various other purposes the matter becomes more indistinct (can you fault a language designed to combine ergatives with aspect, if its phonology "doesn't hold together"?)
I would welcome any discussion along the lines of at least spelling out the range of issues involved.

[janMato]

Conlang for prawns? Maybe a dialect of shrimpish?

2. The case is easiest with the Poohbah languages. Practically, they only have to be appropriately weird and coherent. I am going over the web critiques of Na'vi and the LCS critiques for their contest to see what people really use and no very short list is emerging. If one goes on to auxlangs or engelangs of various other purposes the matter becomes more indistinct (can you fault a language designed to combine ergatives with aspect, if its phonology "doesn't hold together"?)

Toki pona. I'm pessimistic about some of the goals regarding modes of thought (see above), but the use of toki pona for depression/medical purposes is very interesting. Some of the anti-depressants are said to work because they're neurotropic, ie.prompt brain cells to grow more vigorously than usual, so it's plausible that the cognitive shock of learning a language would be the push to getting out of a stable but unhappy mood. Toki pona would fit the bill in a therapeutic setting because it is eminently learnable(more so that Esperanto or Spanish)-- not so much because it is inherently a happy language. We may have to wait a while to see this tested scientifically. Toki pona has some attention from the deaf community (ok, it looks like about 3 or 4 people). It occured to me that if I went deaf from old age or what have you (not entirely uncommon) I'd teach my friends and family toki pona sign language instead of ASL-- ASL is just too damn hard, it's like learning Chinese. These accidental successful uses shouldn't be ignored--the art and science of creating conlangs is old but rather shallow (since medieval times, but not a lot of people working in the field at any one time)-- we are still learning what is useful to aim for and what is folly. (Auxlangs were folly, Blisssymbols was genius, movie and book conlangs seem to help commercial success, etc.)

Movie Languages
Aside from mere usage, Klingon was a success in that it matched the sound of previous words (continuity counts in sci-fi), and sounds aliens but, that's art so taste may vary. It was a failure in that subsequent script writers did not like to continue to use it for the TV shows. I take it that the TV show are on a tighter budget and didn't have a linguist or polyglot on hand just to write proper Klingon. The q and Q and some of the other consonants can't be reliably pronounced by actors, so that's failure.

Na'vi also had to match a list of existing words (mostly succeeded, although some of the legacy words are recognizably as somehow different--they have more English like phonotactics maybe). Na'vi had to be actor pronounceable, which it was, but only with attentive coaching. If it was entirely pronounceable, it probably wouldn't have sounded alien, this may be an impossible goal for the movie conlang writer. Na'vi had modest goals and from the interviews I gather Paul Frommer considers any additional success just frosting.

Reconstructed Algonquin
I got the movie sitting on my desk with reconstructed Virginian Algonquian. The movie was a box office flop and the linguist who wrote the conlang for the movie doesn't seem to have put anymore thought to letting the conlang live. That language just needed to sound like any Algonquian language and use the 200 or so remaining Algonquian words. It maybe that reconstructed algonquian just didn't fit in with conlang fashion at the moment, but that may change if Na'vi keeps going like it is now (1600 members on the learnnavi forums!), it may get some love from the conlang world.

Did they care if it succeed? Can it be successful as a dead languages?
The conlang Fursic may or have been a success at what ever it's goal was. I still haven't been willing to pony up the $2.00 for the electronic version of the dictionary and grammar because not only has the language, and it's community disappeared from the net, you can hardly find the the word "Fursic" on google. I'm not picking on Fursic or the creator (heaven knows there must be 10,000 of conlangs in similar states), but when they lack a community of fans or speakers, the language is dead and it's goals are irrelevant even if was dead on for achieving all of them.

And I'd make the same harsh judgment for the rest of the unspeakable, community-less languages-- if it isn't used in communication, then it's just creating beautiful grammar summary and dictionary-- it proves as much and is judge-worthy in the way a biology textbook could be judged. (And I don't think being unspeakable or community-less is a permanent situation-- lojban will evolve to become speakable by it's fan base and even Fursic could come (back) to life)

A grammar guide as pretty as a tree...

mi pilin e ni: mi lukin ala e
lipu mute pi lawa nimi ni: lipu li pona lukin sama e kasi suli.

I THINK that I shall never see
A grammatical-summary lovely as a tree.

kasi ni li moku wile mute kepeken uta
lon nana mama pi ma ale

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

kasi suli ni li lukin tawa jan suli tawa tempo suno wan,
kasi li sewi e luka sama tawa nimi pi pona wile

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

kasi suli ni li len e tomo waso
lon linja lawa sama

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

telo lete li lon sijelo ona kasi
telo pi waso suli li anpa tawa ona kasi

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

mi sama e jan ni: jan pi sona ala li pali e toki sin pi jan pali,
taso jan sewi kin li pali e kasi.

Constructed language are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

[janKipo]

Ah, yes, the other problem. It is often not very clear what the goalis/goals are: jan Sonja has said a number of things, some of them more or less along similar lines, some apparently qquite divergent (but maybe not in her mind), aUI has a similar list. So, the question of success is even more difficult than when there is a clear goal (I take "testing the Whorf Hypothesis" to be clear, even though what the Hell JCB thought that hypo was is not so much).
Poohbahing -- the movies being the clearest cases for the moment (literature has a number of the opposite process -- writing stories to use languages you have created, JRRT for starters, even bits of Alice). I didn't know there were some pre-words for Frommer to hit in Na'vi; I know there were a handful for the LCS project. And, of course, a little bit for Klingon. (The Prawns reference is to District 9 -- I suppose you know, but your comment left some doubt). The whole notion of fitting sounds to supposed characteristics is an interesting one. I haven't delved into it deeply yet, but I suspect the gutteral barbarians is a product in English of the 100 year difficulty with Germany and that it didn't really get bad before the first world war or maybe even the second (my memory of Rider Haggard is only of Arabic, which is gutteral enough -- so that may be another source; I need to poke around in Burroughs -- non-Tarzan, mainly -- and the like). Someone asked to produce Mongolish conlangs for nomadic barbarians came up regularly with things very different from actual Mongolian and closer to Schwytzerteutsch. But that is what the public expects. Na'vi -- properly pronounced, which the actors did not do very reliably to my ear -- is somewhat jarring to the Edenic image (see also Polynesian or, for that matter, tp).
The conlang community is, from the LCS point of view, largely uninterested in the popularity of the languages and more concerned with their structure, their linguistic features. But just what features and how various approaches to these count is hard to figure out for me right now, at the start of this investigation. And, of course, the group (either the smaller org or the larger net) don't speak with one voice on any of these issues. Even ignoring the internal divisions among the highest level different goals. Most of the highly prized conlangs have barely one speaker, many of the popular ones (well, there aren't many popular ones but the bulk of what there are) are more or less joked about just because they are popular -- although their grievous faults are noted as well -- more readily than the same faults in uniglots.
Reconstructed languages have a special place in that there is a science with which to test them: do they cover the the various synchronic slices in a reasonable diachronic story. I don't know the movie you are talking about (some dim flickers in the back of my head about a missionary massacre, but I'm not sure that was even Algonquian), but surely the language could be tested for accuracy, however well it did (or didn't do) in the story. And the conlangers would count that as the relevant fact. (I just remembered that I never did check on the accuracy or the consistency of the Aramaic and (misguided) Latin in Mel Gibson's splatter flick).

[janMato]

The conlang community is, from the LCS point of view, largely uninterested in the popularity of the languages and more concerned with their structure, their linguistic features.

Probably because of the auxlang community-- if proselytizing is annoying enough, people will overreact and stop promoting at all, which I'm thinking is a sad end. The difference between a language with a community and without is like the difference between an archeological dig of pre-historical Cro-magnon and a busy day in Paris. The language is the living part, the definition is just the bones.

On the otherhand, I've read about mini-throw-away conlangs used in the lab to test people's word choice biases when the use fake languages with grammatical gender and then describe biologically neuter things like bridges --they pick biologically stereotypical adjectives to describe bridges based on the grammatical gender. Ref-- random popular science article ...somewhere.

... they are popular -- although their grievous faults are noted as well

A language is a technology and technologies often have 1st mover advantages. Ternary computers were better than binary, dvorak is better than qwerty, betamax was better than VHS, at least one of the Esperanto-clones was better than Esperanto. But for the class of people who want to speak a IE creole, it would be nuts to use anything but Esperanto. And if a language has design virtues or faults, it may lose them overtime. (I still got a blog post in me about toki pona's dynamic stability waiting to get out... something about how certain changes would be rapid and inevitable if some household decided to switch to exclusive tp use for a year or two)

Reconstructed languages have a special place in that there is a science with which to test them: do they cover the the various synchronic slices in a reasonable diachronic story.

Indeed, PIE has been invaluable for archeology and working out some details of European pre-history. My favorite book of the year (The horse, the wheel and language, except the tedious parts about Ukrainian pots.)

I don't know the movie you are talking about (some dim flickers in the back of my head about a missionary massacre, but I'm not sure that was even Algonquian)

The New World ... Here is the link. Blair Rudes, professional linguist did the deed, but AFAIK, didn't publish the grammar or dictionary and I don't know how complete the conlang was (for all we know it was a relex of one of the not-yet-extinct Algonquian languages still spoken in Canada.)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10950199

..., but surely the language could be tested for accuracy, however well it did (or didn't do) in the story.

That makes me think of an interesting experiment. I guess one would need a repeatable methodology, pick a language or family of languages whose history is known over 10,000 years, using half the data (first or second 5,000 years), attempt to construct a language as it was originally using the newer data or construct which way the language will go base on where it started out.

the Aramaic and (misguided) Latin in Mel Gibson's splatter flick).

Yup, reconstructed Aramaic, here's the ref to the guy who did the conlang:
http://archives.conlang.info/qhi/jechin ... lfoen.html

Of course without written history (short of a sudden discovery of more text), there isn't a good way to say if a reconstructed language hit it target or not-- just linguistics speculating about what in the realm of plausibility.