right way to learn tokipona?

Language learning: How to speak Toki Pona, translation problems, advice, memory aids, tools and methods to learn Toki Pona and other languages faster
Lingva lernado: Kiel paroli Tokiponon, tradukproblemoj, konsiloj, memoraj helpiloj, iloj kaj metodoj por pli rapide lerni Tokiponon kaj aliajn lingvojn
solsang
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon May 24, 2010 7:12 am

Re: right way to learn tokipona?

Post by solsang »

janKipo wrote:The tp plan is just not to use numbers as cardinals or ordinals; the new system is just as bad (or worse) than the old one and introduces real confusions (as Mato notes).
I feared as much, and having tried different numbering systems came down to the system using fewest words would be binary, thus having a word for 1,2,4,8,16 etc - almost as good is 1,2,5,10,20,50,100 which is interesting since a boring and quite possible grammatically horrifying solution would be in a frame of ten wan, ten tu, ten luka... (42=tu en ten tu tu)

Being used to word-agglunitation in esperanto is a big difference for learning tokipona for me, i equally love speaking esperanto as much as am frustrated by its vocabulary and grammatical oddities (mainly coming forth while teaching) yet the ability to construct new words is truly facinating, and the number system works fairly well
The only word which is not pretty well understood is 'pu', about which we know nothing and therefore speculate a lot (most of it cloud-cuckoo landish).

This does explain a puzzle to me, i thought the process of defining was open between the forum and Sonja, thus i gather that she likes having certain areas to rumage around alone before presenting them
The most interesting problem remaining is about word classes, noun, verb and the like. Except for the purely structural words (li, e, la, o,...) it is best to assume that any word can occur in any slot, with a meaning pretty reliably dependent on its basic meaning.
I certainly prefer this and see it as the main strength of esperanto that each word is able to be a noun, verb or adjective simply by adding as,o,a - my main gribe with that is transitivity, which in esperanto is fixed where i absolutely prefer a flexible system, thus any word can be made transitive by adding -ig- seemingly the same way e is used here!?
Meanwhile, do what seems right and either you get away with it or you get criticized (and maybe you change or maybe your critic does).
Thanks a lot, sounds like fun and slightly scary, i have learned from esperanto to avoid coming with new ideas to old people, thus i am happy to have a living community here where change is actually possible:)
janKipo
Posts: 3064
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm

Re: right way to learn tokipona?

Post by janKipo »

I am not sure about change, but pinning stuff down is definitely still going on. As for Sonja's role, she will have the final say, of course, but she does not obviously pay much attention to what happens here and rarely intervenes. Indeed, she hasn't done much publicly about tp for a while (she actually has a job, for one thing) and so we have to assume that the book is percolating without much of its content being revealed beforehand.
tp phrases are not like Eo's compounds: they have less fixed meanings and are much freer in formation. They do not, in general, mean the same thing in all contexts, but rather serve to point out thing in a given context as effectively as possible. What works to pick out one thing in one context make work to pick another thing in another context, while what the the first first picked may in the second case be picked out by some other expression. This is the chess side of tp, after the checkers of easy rules and the tic-tac-toe of strategy.
tp forms change roles without any external marks (which occasionally leads to a problem) but just by turning up in the appropriate slot. Figuring out what a word means then is somewhat trickier (and I, at least, often go way off base in this area). But there are some general rules which are beginning to emerge for big cases (a noun as a transitive verb, for example) or a preposition as a verb. Hopefully more will be systematized as we go along (and Mato has a corpus to plow through for rules).
But for now, we are all feeling our way, with varying degrees of certainty, and a willingness to try something to see if it flies. Not really scary, but often exciting.
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