o kepeken

[Baerdric]

I wonder if there can be more to toki pona than a linguistic exercise.

For there to be, I believe it has to be integrated into a spoken community, family and friends. But family and friends largely already speak a common language. In some cases tp may be helpful as a international language, but that almost necessarily cuts back on the quantity of actual spoken conversations. Why would anyone but language buffs learn to speak it?

Perhaps the next largest need for a new language is the range of cryptolects or cants. Subcultures often develop them from mispronunciations, inclusions, etc in order to have a secret code against the dominant culture. But I doubt many people who learn tp really feel that need - or if they do, they probably already have a working cryptolect.

But nuclear families are the ultimate subculture. Even among the (eg) gay albino bahamian catholic jewel thieves of Minnesota, your actual offspring are probably more precious to you than your brothers and sisters of the Faith and Trade. So toki pona should be your secret language.

You should speak it while shopping, to tell your kid to go get the cat food. You should speak it at the bank to tell your husband to take out money for the movies. You should speak it in the yard to tell your family that it's time for dinner. You should speak it while waiting at the Post Office, to wonder what that woman was thinking when she put on that spandex to go out in public.

To me, as a newcomer, toki pona immediately seemed like a language of sharing food, working with friends and coming home to family. Unless we use it that way, it is a language or a hobby?

[janKipo]

There have been a lot of discussions about the point of tp. Yours is a particularly realistic one as a goal, but a notoriously hard one in fact (no on has succeeded in even the first steps of it). It is probably also not a goal of most tpers, who are divided among a large number of goals of greater or lesser significance and plausibility. I am on a couple of the "scientific" jags, myself (saying everything, getting a compact grammar). Others are more psychological. Others practical (a good start on learning another language, say). And probably many more. But they are all working, more or less, on the same language, which is what ultimately counts.

[janpona120]

tp goes slowly, because its dictionary is not developed enough. I think, we should direct our efforts to make a dictionary for 10.000 meanings. For example, we may develop 100 type of lines, using a templet "linja X":

1. linja sike -- a bow, an arc -- (a line as a part of a circle)
2. linja meli -- a smooth line
3. linja mije -- a direct line
4. linja suno -- a central line
5. linja sama -- a parallel line
....
100. linja kule -- a gradient line

And the same work for each a tp word, like "tomo X" to describe 100 type of buildings, etc.

[Baerdric]

I like that, in fact I thought that's what would happen when I first heard about toki pona's 120 word limit (how twitterish).

But I doubt that a formalized system will win many adherents right away. Although a little of what you outline has already happened, it happened organically and using obvious pairings such as linja sinpin for beard. Right off, I can see complaints that women can be direct and men can be smooth.

But don't take that as a criticism, I like it. I hope something like that happens. I just saw that jan kipo posted a spreadsheet of some constructions and I started searching and memorizing the usages as I needed them. I thought about making a script that would filter through text to find such pairs and start categorizing them.

It will happens one way or another.

[janKipo]

Well, someone will update the 2009 spreadsheet to take into account the larger corpus since that time. But it is important to notice that these are just reports of people's usage, not definitions of new "words"... To be sure, some are so commonly used that they have achieved the status of idioms and it is often hard to use the combination in some more normal manner -- 'jan pona' just for a good person but not a friend, for example. Dictionary building is a feature of the "be able to say everything efficiently" school of tp usage and that is not a dominant school now -- or ever, so far as I can tell.

[Baerdric]

I would not place myself in the "say everything efficiently" group, speedtalk has it's place but that's not what I came here for.

I did, however, hope that with careful thought and patience, I would be able to say important things with some clarity. If I have to formulate seriously long sentences to describe internal states like "nostalgic longing for my childhood walks in the woods with my dog Shadow", fine. I would like to be able to do it. Even if it takes a couple of hundred words, I would want to actually be able to say it so that someone else would understand. "that feeling of small people walking in the plants with an animal named black" doesn't quite do it.

[janKipo]

So, say more and choose more carefully. That phrase is probably only going to work out for you after a considerable development, starting with fairly concrete memories and descriptions and easily codifiable emotions. It's early times yet (it is for me , too, though I don't aim so high).

[janpona120]

I doubt that a formalized system will win many adherents right away.
Although a little of what you outline has already happened

Right. The formalized system allows an automatization. It is a key condition for extraspeed spreading. A voice recognition system will be able to serve user's requests for searching of images, videos, peoples, etc. So, if tp will have a set of linguistic formulae and a 10t-dictionary, then a quantity of tp-adherents will grow very fast.

I can see complaints that women can be direct and men can be smooth.

Fine. It is simple. "meli mije" and "mije meli", or some like this. No reasons for any worries. In my opinion, tp is very capabile to satisfy anyone.

"nostalgic longing for my childhood walks in the woods with my dog Shadow"

tp needs to have a wide set of high specialized makers (la, li, e, en, pi... jen, no, tej) to support long sentences, By this, any speech will be highly structured, and fit for any type recognition. To convert your sentence in tp, we may begin with a linguistic formula "pilin X". It gives about 100 variants of emotions, including "nostalgia", like "pilin laso".

jan Kipo:
some are so commonly used that they have achieved the status of idioms and it is often hard to use
the combination in some more normal manner -- 'jan pona' just for a good person but not a friend, for example

-- good person ("jan pona")
-- friend ("jan pona mi", "jan pona sina", "jan pona ona") -- a friend is a good person personally for me

[janKipo]

The urge to systematically generate a vocabulary is a notorious one in conlangs. There are Lojbanists (and were Loglanists -- there still may be) and aUIists and so on who do almost nothing else. Their results are politely filed away somewhere and forgotten, usually as useless, occasionally as superseded by a spontaneous creation from left field that fits in with the Sprachgeist of the moment. tp, for all its apparent simplicity, has waves of complexity that can be -- and have been -- brought to play (often unconsciously) to produce all manner of useful combination for the nonce and occasionally for idioms. Preempting that feature is a disservice to the language (as well as, as noted, doomed to failure unless we get a language czar). It is also limiting in that it tends to use just a small number of the potential structures as bases, whereas the language allows them all. I see that janpona is somewhat aware of this in that he sees that the two 'jan pona's, "friend" and "good person" are derived from different structures, in one of which the befriended is explicitly involved (though elided) and the other of which moves that reference into the pragmatic from the grammatical realm. So "friend of x" comes from 'jan ni li pona tawa x' ('jan ni' is a late reflex of an abstract identifier), whereas "good person" comes from the simple 'jan ni li pona', where the fact that the evaluation is the speaker's is not mentioned but is inherent it tp pragmatics.

[janpona120]

There are two waves of intentions in the language modifying. First, to enlarge a vocabulary. Second, to reduce one. By this, the language becomes alive, breathing. When the language has not a geist-circulation, it becomes dying.

Surfers are using an ocean wave at a time. Next time, they use another wave. It is normal situation. Deja vu. And, if tp "wants" to be alive (and agile), it needs a fresh "kon". A used air becomes useless. Breathing in, breathing out. To be good and fun, tp has the need in both processes.