Toki Pona Forums

Question - the pu section on glyphs says that "a single adjective can be written inside or above the word it modifies" - does this apply to verbs and adverbs too? so for "I nibble fruit" being "mi moku lili e kili" can you write the "lili" glyph inside "moku", like you would if it were "small meal"? Or does this only apply to adjectives and nouns?

Apologies if already asked - I did a quick search and couldn't find anything obvious.

Also for adjectives - if you're talking about a dirty child then the one adjective that goes in the noun is I assume the most relevant - so you'd write "jan" with "lili" inside and then follow it with "jaki"?

Thanks all!

JWL

I don't use sitelen pona, but if I used, I would certainly combine moku and lili in "mi moku lili e kili". But not in "mi wile moku e kili." obviously.
I'd surely write jan pona lili as either jan-lili jaki or jan lili jaki (not having "-" means writing in sequence, instead of above or inside). Never jan-jaki lili or jan lili-jaki. If it was a short dirty man I would equally write as jan-jaki lili or jan jaki lili. I don't think it is compulsory to combine glyphs. But maybe that's wrong and combining is, in fact compulsory. For me it's improbable that it is compulsory, since, for example "suli" is too big to fit either above or inside any glyph. And as for combining all three in one single supercombined glyph jan-lili-jaki seems to become clumsy and confusing. If that's possible though I would interpret the glyph inside to precede a glyph above. Maybe they can both be in the same position, in which case reading would follow the sequence they are in from left to right or up to down (instead of down to up). I wish I could send illustrations of how any of these ideas might work out.

I'm not a fan of codes, so I don't allow sitelen x closely, for any x. But, as far as I can gather, the rules in sitelen pona seems to be aesthetic -- combine if it looks good. This is modified somewhat by a desire to combine idioms like 'jan pona' or 'toki pona' or 'tomo tawa' and so on. Conversely, I think that there is strong resistance to combining symbols for words not syntactically joined. So, the 'suli mute' of 'soweli suli mute' "many big beasts" would not be joined, although in 'soweli pi suli mute' "very big beast" they might be. In any case, totally unjoined, linear writing seems to be acceptable always.
I understand sitelen sitelen even less. But it does seem that at least the following are require: the glyph for 'li' encloses the "verb" (but not the whole predicate -- I'm not sure about adverbs on the verb nor about modal+verb). Similarly, I think that 'e' encompasses the DO. Maybe 'pi' encompasses its phrase and maybe 'la' its. Beyond those, aesthetics seem to take over again, though I think Gabels gave some further rules.

As for sitelen sitelen, "li" encloses adverbs and modal+verbs as well. "e" encompasses the DO and "pi" encompasses its phrase. That's useful for differentiating multiple pi-phrases from nested pi-phrases and separating a pi-phrase from other modifiers after it e.g. jan (pi pali pona mute) and jan (pi pali pona) mute. 'la' seems to be treated like punctuation marks in Josan's site lessons, but behaves similarly to "pi" in his famous contract with Mato. In my opinion, it's better to use it encompassing it's argument, because again we can distinguish nested 'la''s from multiple 'la'''s. "o" encompasses the vocative or the subject in sentences like "jan lili o musi." be it optative or vocative+imperative I suppose, because for Josan only the latter was possible (but if it's only vocative, then it's followed by a comma glyph). The vocative seems to come after "o", as consequence, but it's actually inside "o" and the reading doesn't change. Josan's Lessons don't make some rules clear, in some cases we have to search for examples. Aside from that, I'm particularly not sure about how to handle prep-modifiers, because they require "pi", but Josan simply sticks prepositions after the noun it modifies, and it is clear they are prepositions because prepositions encompass their objects, thus "pi" becomes redundant. Also the ordinal numbers were handled with "pi" at the time he created sitelen sitelen, but maybe now we can just put blocks together in sequence just like normal writing. In addition to that, it's always possible to write any word, including prepositions and particles, using the syllabary, and in that case the encompassing rules don't apply, although I'm not sure if words with more than one syllable can be written as such (couldn't find any examples), but I suppose they can, from what he says when teaching the syllabary.

Thanks. As I said, I don't follow codes closely (at all, really) so I didn't have more than passing impressions about how sitelen sitelen worked. The encompassing feature does make it a little clearer than the standard text on some occasions, but I am not sure the extra effort of learning the code is worth it (commas do a lot of that work in clear text, though still not all).

jan waso lape wrote:Question - the pu section on glyphs says that "a single adjective can be written inside or above the word it modifies" - does this apply to verbs and adverbs too? so for "I nibble fruit" being "mi moku lili e kili" can you write the "lili" glyph inside "moku", like you would if it were "small meal"? Or does this only apply to adjectives and nouns?

Apologies if already asked - I did a quick search and couldn't find anything obvious.

Also for adjectives - if you're talking about a dirty child then the one adjective that goes in the noun is I assume the most relevant - so you'd write "jan" with "lili" inside and then follow it with "jaki"?

Thanks all!

JWL

toki! From my understanding: yes. What is valid for adjectives, is valid for adverbs, too. That's why I use the term "modifier" for both of them. So, in "mi moku lili e kili" I would write the "lili" inside the "moku" glyph.

One glyph only. "jan lili jaki" has "lili" in "jan" and "jaki" is a separate glyph next to it.

mi tawa.

Reminds me of Esperanto a bit - emphasis in the order. So "jan lili jaki" would be a child who also happens to be messy, and "jan jaki lili" would be a messy person who also happens to be little?

jan waso lape wrote:Reminds me of Esperanto a bit - emphasis in the order. So "jan lili jaki" would be a child who also happens to be messy, and "jan jaki lili" would be a messy person who also happens to be little?

Yes. (But nothing Esperanto-centric from my point of view.)