o kama sona e toki pona!

[PimejaWalo]

when going through the tutorial by jan Pije, i encountered a sentence Whom did you go with? translated as sina tawa poka jan seme? and i can't wrap my head around why is it not sina tawa lon poka jan seme?. especially given that I'm eating with you. is mi moku lon poka sina.

is the text wrong or am i?

[PimejaWalo]

and another one, in lecture 11. He is a good musician. is translated as ona li jan pona pi kalama musi. this sounds just as a friend of (any) music to me. by feeling, i would prefer ona li jan pi kalama musi pona., a man of good music. is one better than the other?

[janKipo]

‘poka’ v ‘lon poka’. ‘lon poka’ means "by the side of, next to” with ‘poka’ a noun object of ‘lon’ and so needing a pi to attach a two word phrase that means what we would take as the object of “next to” ‘lon poka pi jan pona mi’. ‘poka’ , on the other hand, is a preposition meaning “with, accompanying” and so takes its object directly: ’poka jan pona mi’, which doesn’t require physical proximity as ‘lon poka’ does.

Just where adjectives go in a string is an unsolved (and largely uninvestigated) issue. We tend to follow the habits of our L1 so far as possible. But many choices do make differences it what is said. In ‘jan pona pi kalama musi’, Pije says the person is a good person (‘jan pona’ doesn’t always mean “friend”) who plays music. That does not mean (maybe it implies) that the relevant goodness is in his playing, but that is a bit of a stretch. So that is not very satisfactory. On. the other hand, ‘jan pi kalama musi pona’ is, as a first shot, “a good musician or, at least, a person who plays music well”. If ‘jan pi kalama musi’ is a musician, then we get a good one by adding ‘pona’ to modify the who preceding phrase. On the other hand, playing well is ‘kalama musi pona’, with ‘pona’ an adverb on ‘kalama musi’. The two expressions may amount to the same thing and look just alike, but are different (I tend -- when I notice the problem-- to put a comma before ‘pona’ in the “good musician” case to show that the connection is not with the immediately preceding bit but all that has gone before).
In any case, your version -- whichever it is -- is probably better.

[janTepanNetaPelin]

[janTepanNetaPelin]

[janKipo]

Well, “with” was ‘lon poka’ for a while and then changed to just ‘poka’ by Sonja, of course, In pu she uses ‘lon poka’again, ignorig her own objections to it and nowhere explaining the reversion (NOT updating). The community standard is ‘poka’.
The right place for adjectives is unsolved and we just do what works best in the case. I think ‘jan pi kalama musi, pona’ is best here since fronting pona means that the goodness does not depend on his music, which I take to be the point. Or a rewrite or ‘jan pi pona pi kalama musi’.

[janTepanNetaPelin]

[PimejaWalo]

[janTepanNetaPelin]

[janKipo]

Now more or less officially yet another dialect, the ‘poka’/‘lon poka’ divide. So far as i can tell, the bulk of the community of long standing is on the ‘poka’ side but understands the ‘lon poka’ position. More recent members follow Sonja’s revised position (‘lon poka’) and ignore her older one (‘poka’), which is , admittedly, a revision of her original position (‘lon poka’ again).

This makes yet another clear dialect difference, joining ‘kepeken (e)’ and fused predicates with ‘mi/sina’ and probably a few others, as well as scattered usage of non-pu vocabulary and unapproved generalizations of unapproved versions of pu rules.
mixture ‘en’ (from Pije but generalized), general ‘en’ and ‘anu’, ...