Nitpicking the Wikipedia article on toki pona
Posted: Wed Aug 25, 2010 5:56 pm
Sorry for the roughness of my notes, my job is interfering with my hobbies. pakala!
Wikipedia nitpicks
"resembles George Orwell's fictional language Newspeak.[6]"
Newspeak was an incomplete idea for a conlang. Toki pona is a language. Comparing apples and oranges. Actually this whole paragraph is unclear-- it wasn't intended to be zen like, it was intended to be taoism-like
Category (purpose)
-- conlang, yes
-- this is a small/mininal language
-- Not really a personal language (used in communication)
-- Not really auxlang (easy, but not practical minded)
-- Philosophical language/Engineered Language (maybe)
Authorship
-- Several people contributed to the earliest tp, Nikita Ayzikovsky, Brian Knight, et al. Since then the community has been playing the same role that speakers in a natural language community do-- tense in la phrases and luka are the best examples of community innovations that are routinely used.
Word Count
"120 Toki Pona roots" 124/125
Phonetic Distribution
Corpus is currently ~500Kb, so it's time to recheck Jim Henry's stats.
Syntax
- ands and ors can join modifiers
- ands and ors fuzzy.
2. Subclauses can be adverbial, mute la, ken la, etc, instead of noun phrases
- doesn't address
prepositional phrase + DO -- 9(c)only hints of this
multi-sentence contructions
(S e ni: S) <-- one unit when a it is a question
-- Ingores recent modal list expansion
"(The modal may be kama (coming/future tense), ken (can), or wile (wants to).)"
* kama isn't really tense here? It means becoming/turning into more than tense
Compound nouns
"Toki Pona relies heavily on noun phrases (compound nouns),"
Legal noun phrases are internally grammatical and noun-noun is not grammatical.
"(For this reason they are called "proper adjectives"; they are functionally the same as compound nouns.)"
Nouns
Order of operations of toki pona? Does involving lojban concepts and grammar apply? Better to say that all modifiers modify the head, except when there is a pi, then the pi phrase modifies the head. pi-chains of 3 or more are ambiguous-- which they would not be in lojban!
Are proper modifier really nouns? A noun is a noun if it can be used as a noun, e.g. stand alone as subject, as object, as prep complement. It isn't a noun.
Verbs
There is a zero copula.[14]
By the taxonomy in Payne, there is a predicate particle-- a zero copula is the same as juxtaposition. Tp requires "li", which is invariant and doesn't behave at all like a verb.
Anti-analytic language bias. *no* words in toki pona inflect. All operation in toki pona are lexical or analytic. Rather than saying "language X has no tense", one should say "tense is expressed analytically or lexically"
"Toki Pona does not inflect verbs according to person, tense, mood, or voice.[14]"
This section should note that the typical TMP layout is:
[Time] la verb [Manner] lon [Place]
Passivation type valence reduction is done lexically, using "ijo" as a subject, possiblly "tan" constructions (need to check how often this has happened). Valency altogether needs more study.
Wrong word count
"The 120-root vocabulary[22]"
"On the word list on the official website there are 123 roots including those not present in the vocabulary"
Numbers
-- Kind of misses the phases
1,2,3,4 -> 1, 2, many -> 1, 2, 2+1, 2+2, luka -> "advance numbers", many community proposals
Obsolete roots
-- no mention of noka
New roots
-- no mention of namako, pu, kipisi, monsuta, ... I forget the fifth
Literature
-- These examples aren't really representative of the corpus anymore.
Community
-- The estimate of 100 speakers is meaningless. We do have a count of how many people have written something in toki pona.
-- Same problem with census in total speakers in upper box (dozens with chat ability??)
-- This describes a point in time. The community was:
irc + livejournal -> yahoo mailing list -> forum + toki lili + other blogs through out this time.
also wikipedia -> wikia (which has since gone quiet)
See also
-- What the hell does Hyponymy have to do with TP? (anymore than any other language?)
-- same for other see-also links.
Wikipedia nitpicks
"resembles George Orwell's fictional language Newspeak.[6]"
Newspeak was an incomplete idea for a conlang. Toki pona is a language. Comparing apples and oranges. Actually this whole paragraph is unclear-- it wasn't intended to be zen like, it was intended to be taoism-like
Category (purpose)
-- conlang, yes
-- this is a small/mininal language
-- Not really a personal language (used in communication)
-- Not really auxlang (easy, but not practical minded)
-- Philosophical language/Engineered Language (maybe)
Authorship
-- Several people contributed to the earliest tp, Nikita Ayzikovsky, Brian Knight, et al. Since then the community has been playing the same role that speakers in a natural language community do-- tense in la phrases and luka are the best examples of community innovations that are routinely used.
Word Count
"120 Toki Pona roots" 124/125
Phonetic Distribution
Corpus is currently ~500Kb, so it's time to recheck Jim Henry's stats.
Syntax
- ands and ors can join modifiers
- ands and ors fuzzy.
2. Subclauses can be adverbial, mute la, ken la, etc, instead of noun phrases
- doesn't address
prepositional phrase + DO -- 9(c)only hints of this
multi-sentence contructions
(S e ni: S) <-- one unit when a it is a question
-- Ingores recent modal list expansion
"(The modal may be kama (coming/future tense), ken (can), or wile (wants to).)"
* kama isn't really tense here? It means becoming/turning into more than tense
Compound nouns
"Toki Pona relies heavily on noun phrases (compound nouns),"
Legal noun phrases are internally grammatical and noun-noun is not grammatical.
"(For this reason they are called "proper adjectives"; they are functionally the same as compound nouns.)"
Nouns
Order of operations of toki pona? Does involving lojban concepts and grammar apply? Better to say that all modifiers modify the head, except when there is a pi, then the pi phrase modifies the head. pi-chains of 3 or more are ambiguous-- which they would not be in lojban!
Are proper modifier really nouns? A noun is a noun if it can be used as a noun, e.g. stand alone as subject, as object, as prep complement. It isn't a noun.
Verbs
There is a zero copula.[14]
By the taxonomy in Payne, there is a predicate particle-- a zero copula is the same as juxtaposition. Tp requires "li", which is invariant and doesn't behave at all like a verb.
Anti-analytic language bias. *no* words in toki pona inflect. All operation in toki pona are lexical or analytic. Rather than saying "language X has no tense", one should say "tense is expressed analytically or lexically"
"Toki Pona does not inflect verbs according to person, tense, mood, or voice.[14]"
This section should note that the typical TMP layout is:
[Time] la verb [Manner] lon [Place]
Passivation type valence reduction is done lexically, using "ijo" as a subject, possiblly "tan" constructions (need to check how often this has happened). Valency altogether needs more study.
Wrong word count
"The 120-root vocabulary[22]"
"On the word list on the official website there are 123 roots including those not present in the vocabulary"
Numbers
-- Kind of misses the phases
1,2,3,4 -> 1, 2, many -> 1, 2, 2+1, 2+2, luka -> "advance numbers", many community proposals
Obsolete roots
-- no mention of noka
New roots
-- no mention of namako, pu, kipisi, monsuta, ... I forget the fifth
Literature
-- These examples aren't really representative of the corpus anymore.
Community
-- The estimate of 100 speakers is meaningless. We do have a count of how many people have written something in toki pona.
-- Same problem with census in total speakers in upper box (dozens with chat ability??)
-- This describes a point in time. The community was:
irc + livejournal -> yahoo mailing list -> forum + toki lili + other blogs through out this time.
also wikipedia -> wikia (which has since gone quiet)
See also
-- What the hell does Hyponymy have to do with TP? (anymore than any other language?)
-- same for other see-also links.