toki pona's pronoun system

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janMato
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toki pona's pronoun system

Post by janMato »

Does the pronoun system work well enough that it can be used more or less like pronouns are used in languages we are familiar with?

I found myself in a convo on Tatoeba and thought getting other people's input would be interesting.
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/617568

So we have 3 basic pronouns, mi, sina, ona. The mi and sina part create little confusion. The ona pronoun co-orodinates with anything you have ever said, or ever will say. It provides no clues to what it co-ordinates with, not by animacy, gender, number or anything else. And it co-ordinates with things in the environment that you haven't and won't talk about. (And ijo might be an indefinite pronoun, maybe sama is the reflexive pronoun, not sure-- people use them as such, but the various lesson plans don't dwell on them... and seme, interogative pronoun)

jan A en jan P li utala. ona li utala e ona. ona li pilin ike. ona li tawa tomo pi jan pi sijelo ike. ona li pilin pona tan ni.

Two antecedents, can't figure out what the heck is going on. This is a contrived example and the English version

For things like this, I think ona does cut it. If one wants to communicate, then you can't rely on ona.

meli en ijo musi li lon tomo mi. ona li pona tawa mi. What does ona co-ordinate with? She is good to me? I like the toy? I like them both?
janKipo
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Re: toki pona's pronoun system

Post by janKipo »

Of course, English is not much better in many cases and we get by. At least 'ona' is strictly anaphoric and can't go off (etymology notwithstanding) to some indefinite "they" nor to an object that has not been mentioned. And, as you have frequently done, you can add helpful hints on, since, unlike English pronouns, tp's take modifiers without any problems. And, as the ancient maxim holds, "Repetition is also anaphora", so that problems can be met by (even partial) repetition of the the earlier word (or even concept: 'jan' would do to cover for 'meli' in the last case). A strict reliance on pronouns won't work in tp, but then it doesn't work anywhere: English, Esperanto, Lojban, what have you. Hence the maxim, actually.
jan Misite
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Re: toki pona's pronoun system

Post by jan Misite »

tl;dr we could do what ASL does.
'Jan Marija li lon ma Mewika.
"Jan Josepi li lon ma Kanata.
Ken la 'jan li tawa lon tomo pi "jan.
Maria[here—gesture somewhere in front of you] lives in America.
Giuseppe[here—gesture in a different spot] lives in Canada.
Maybe she[gesture in the same spot as you did when you said her name] will visit him[gesture in the same spot as you did with Giuseppe] at his home.

I've thought about this quite a bit. Basically, I think that in real speech situations, pointing at stuff and gesturing would play a big part. Sign language could really inspire this. We can describe and integrate this into the language and culture easily enough, and even include it in the writing as little more than punctuation, so it wouldn't be bending the language too much. This is a big part of contact languages anyway, so why not?
If we're using ASL as an inspiration, we could even set up a "signing space"—basically you imagine a little crowd of people in front of you and you point to them—and by pointing to a location you designate a separate pronoun! In punctuation, you could set up a list to keep track of pointing, e.g. you mention a "Maria" aka jan marija, and you would mark her position in signing space if it were a real in-the-flesh conversation and you wanted to mention her again, but on the Internet you could label jan marija with some sort of marker, i.e. 'jan Marija, jan' Marija, jan Marija', jan Marija-i, jan Marija-1, jan Marija-a, etc., and subsequent referents with jan" So-and-so, jan-ii X, jan Y-C, etc., whatever you like to label it but make a list. The limit seems to be anout 9 for most people, but more often 2-4. Subsequently you can point to the space and use several words as reference, e.g. 'jan, 'ona, 'meli, etc. and it would refer to "jan Marija". And I think you can delete the original reference for a place/space by pointing at it and giving it another, e.g. 'jan Bosu, i.e. jan Marija is out of the picture now. I think pointing at people present or not present may or may not be construed as rude, and so pointing or not may have to be different from sign language, in which case we still have a lot of options available, e.g. making pains to use the vocative particle + name instead of "sina", using "sina + name" for persons present/within earshot, "sina ni" to address everyone present, etc.
Despite appearances, you don't need to count to use the system; you don't need to order the referents, it just looks neater in writing. So you could have 'jan, then ""jan next, so long as you keep them straight in writing. (Locations aren't ordered like a series, except if you get into the habit of going around in some sort of motion e.g. clockwise, but its still not the same; you don't really have to keep the order of mention of the referents straight in your mind, you're only stuck matching them in writing.)
To add to what jan Kipo was saying, one of the languages that inspired tp is Bislama. Bislama has a very large pronoun inventory that developed spontaneously from noun phrases. As it stands, pronouns in TP aren't fixed but can clearly develop as "rhetoric" and "best practices" as has so much of the language been developed by users. I think the gestural system I described would be helpful especially online for stories, but it may be hard to get a feel for just online, as does the rest of the system pretty much require people to be talking face-to-face to develop best practices. On the other hand, people can definitely act them out privately and I believe derive a benefit from them. So I think there is only a net gain.
P.S. TP nouns behave somewhat like ASL classifiers as is, so there's further room for comparison i.e. ASL doesn't always need to point, which backs up what jan Kipo says too.
P.P.S. Tell me I'm nasa. :twisted:

Edit: IMO cheating is making a new word. Suprasegmentals are fair game.
Last edited by jan Misite on Sat Apr 13, 2013 2:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.
janKipo
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Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm

Re: toki pona's pronoun system

Post by janKipo »

Well, official sign language here would be cheating a bit, though the informal bits that come in conversation can't be prevented and some conventions might arise. I think that pronominalizing nouns is more likely, or, more usually, just 'x ni' to refer back to some possibly complex x. One important pattern that I don't think got mentioned before is the use of 'ni' to refer to sentences/situations in contrast to 'ona' to refer to earlier nouns.
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