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)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).
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
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!?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.
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:)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).