Toki Pona Forums

How do I say?

Vacuum - ilo pi kon tawa wawa

Clean - jaki ala

I protect her - mi weka e ijo ike tan ona
or from the discussion at http:/forums.tokipona.orgviewtopic.php?f=5&t=1601
mi awen weka e ona tan ijo ike

aikidave wrote:How do I say?

Vacuum - ilo pi kon tawa wawa

"li pona e X" is to clean X

ilo ni li pona e anpa pi tomo mi. This machine cleans my house.

Now comes the hard part, getting that sentiment into a noun place--

ilo li pona e anpa tomo. ilo ni li pakala li wile pona kepeken jan ni. jan li pona e ilo.

this machine cleans the floor. This machine is broken and needs to be fixed by a guy. The guy fixes machines.

Shortening a bit

ilo li pona e anpa tomo li pakala li wile pona kepeken jan ni. jan li pona e ilo.

Still, it isn't a satisfying solution-- 19 words.

If we had a suitable way to make agent-nominalizations...

ilo pona = cleaning machine ... not really. I read this as good machine. Cleaning machine wouldn't occur to me, ever.

Now pi forces the upcoming word to read as a noun.

* ilo pi pona .... okay what comes next?
ilo pi pona pali. Device of working cleaning. Additional modifiers with a sense of motion help block of a reading of "device of goodness"
ilo pi pona ijo. Ijo makes for a nice semantically blank word.
ilo pi pona pona. Device of clean/good cleaning. I don't really need or want that modifier, I just want to be able to legally use pi. So reduplication is ok.
ilo pi pona kama. Device that causes cleaning.
ilo pi pona tan. Device that causes cleaning.

If the salient factor is something like a noun:

ilo pi linja suli pi kalama wawa pi kon tawa. Devices of the long cord, loud noise, moving air. (But this also describes the popcorn popper, the pneumatic drill, etc.) Tawa is a nice modifier that reads easily as the salient action, unlike pona, which reads most easily as "good"

single sentence strategies
ilo li pona e supa mi li pakala li wile e pona tan jan ni: jan li pona e ilo. (again, it isn't vacuuming anything right now, the cleaning is just a salient feature)

ilo li pona e supa tan wile mi li pona ala e tomo lape. I vacuumed the floor but (and) not the bedroom.

ilo li pona e supa li lon tomo namako. The vacuum is in the closet. (It isn't vacuuming anything right now!)

Compound word strategies. I don't think tp compounds, there isn't a formal mechanism for it and it is almost completely absent in the official corpus (except maybe kama sona, awen sona and the like)-- however, compound attempts are hard to detect
e ilo pona - clean device, cleaner
e ilo pi supa pona. Floor clean device, floor cleaner
e pona supa - floor-clean(er) This the feel of a compound word more than any other.

Basically, I agree with Mato, though I prefer (for no reason I've never worked out) the order 'pona tomo' for "housecleaning" and the like. I don't tjhink, for practical, i.e. tp, purposes we need to go into the details of how a house-cleaning tool works; the function is what counts.
The how version of a vacuum cleaner is a good word for "fan", which, of course, is what a vacuum cleaner is on the other side.