POS - first pass

[janMato]

Where the official grammar is quiet, we aught to tread carefully.
- community constructions used once by one person, don't make a trend
- if the entire community makes a mistake, it isn't a mistake anymore, it is the rule
- innovations that closely follow existing patterns are probably safe (e.g. poka is a bare preposition by the classic word list, but we have another pattern that says locational preps should be prefixed by lon, eg. lon anpa, lon supa, lon sike, so to continue the pattern, it should be lon poka regardless to what the classic word list says)
- innovations that are more avant garde, are only right to the extend that it sounds right and people copy it.

li lon X e Y is avant garde, imho, I'd have to see more people use it (hopefully un-self consciously!) before I'd really trust it.

[janKipo]

Wish I had my notes on all this stuff from way back when. This is not innovation, but part of the regular pattern with 'lon', 'tawa' and 'tan.' I think it has been used less with 'lon', more with 'tan' and most with 'tawa'. There is a long note in one lesson, about "objects" that are not affected by the action; this is the same point , made in a different, less precise, fashion.
'poka' as a preposition means "with(accompaniment)". 'lon poka' means "at/on the the side", a somewhat different notion, being mainly spatial. They converge in the not so literal sense, however, when the talk of making choices of allegiance in a conflict.
'lon x e y' is old hat, just largely ignored.
And who is Mato to talk of treading warily? pu!

[janMato]

[janKipo]

I don't think 'poka' is enough to build a new pattern on, but I do expect that the 'lon' is going to fade from a lot of those combinations (though maybe not from 'lon poka').
I do think 'li pi' may have made it into one exercise in Bije's book, but I'm not sure. The stuff with 'tawa' is a bit more common. and maybe a couple with 'tan'. I'm not sure that there is any with 'lon' though. But it is a pattern.
Very true about evolution, but I'm still trying to get a fairish number of people who can work with its now form.

[jan Ote]

[janKipo]

Hmmm! Not a bad thing to have. How would you say it otherwise? (kili) ni li kili mi. (tomo) ni li tomo pi jan Tami (ilo) ni li ilo sina. (ma) ni li ma pi jan Tosi. (toki) ni li toki pi mi mute?

[janKipo]

BTW If you think 'lon kasi' is strange, consider 'mi kwn pali e ilo e jan' "I helped a man make a tool." Maybe this is what 'pu' as virgule is for, to break these really badly ambiguous sentences. Of course, we can combine them: 'mi ken tawa ma Kansa e jan lili bi jan meli e meli ni' "I helped a woman mover her kids to Kansas"

[janMato]

Those are ditransitives. I was thinking about that, but ditransitives right now are conjunctions.

I can create a tool and a person.
I can move to Kansas this woman and her children.

Where would the pu (tentatively) go to change these from the conjunction meaning to the benefactive?

[jan-ante]

[janKipo]

Meaning is given in the general rule for prepositions. It is always possible, of course, to double up 'mi lon e ilo suno lon kasi' But there is no problem with the intransitive form:'mi lon tomo mi', where it is both (or a verb that takes NP complements). Why get twitchy with the transitive form?