toki! anyone has texts about Toki Pona?

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janMato
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Re: toki! anyone has texts about Toki Pona?

Post by janMato »

Correct: mi toki jan. -- I talked about people
Unmarked juxtaposition means "about" ?!

It's tricky to deal with this because who's to say what is wrong and what is right, who is the real language designer for toki pona--is it jan Pije or jan Sonja or is it a living language and the total corpus actually reflects the rules better than the putative designers?, etc.

That said, jan Pije is wrong. Unless this is a predicative sentence, everything following the verb until you hit a preposition is part of the verb phrase. So either we have the oblique being incorporated into the verb, (I people-talked, I gossiped) or this is just missing an "e" or a suitable prepostion. If we have noun incorporation into the verb-- or marking some obliques with only juxtaposition, then "e" and prep dropping becomes quite alright in just about any situation-- I'm seeing people continue to use "e" and prepositions-- I'm not seeing the corpus a lot of e dropping or prep dropping-- at least nothing that looks intentional. Beginners tend to drop e, people who've been writing for a while don't.

mi toki (e nimi mute) tawa jan pona mi lon jan.
I gave a speech (talked) to my friend about the people.
Like most obliques that aren't concerned with spatial relationships, toki pona is impoverished in options that don't require some sort of arbitrary metaphor.

If we use juxtaposition, we get an adverbial reading
mi toki jan (e nimi mute) tawa jan pona mi.
I humanly (like a human) spoke some words to my friend about people. Something about the talking had a salient quality of humans-- so which ones? Probably something abou how those humans speak.

If we did want to have noun incorporation into verbs, it would make more sense to use "pi", because "pi" introduces a noun (as opposed to a modifier) and prevents the adverbial reading.
mi toki pi jan(mute) (e nimi mute) tawa jan pona mi.
We have more evidence that noun incorporation is a innovation-- the is no strong reason to have 2 words after the pi in a verb phrase, which breaks the rule that the last pi in a pi phrase be followed by 2 words.

Noun incorporation could be useful in multi "li" phrases, e.g.

jan pali suli pi ma Mewika li pali pi pan li moku pi moku li pona e supa moku mi. (Yes this could be 3 sentences, but with anaphora in tp being as weak as it is, I'd rather a strong subject and not have to repeat it 3 times)

Anyhow, it would be an innovation. I'm not opposed to innovations, but they just need to be done consciously.

This page also has "li pi", which is something that almost no one uses-- just because it's in the language spec doesn't mean it's right and the collective community of toki pona users appeared to have considered 'li pi" as wrong.

Unmarked juxtaposition for tawa has better grounding, as it turns out several natural languages do predicates that imply motion. Unmarked obliques just because we're not sure what a suitable preposition would be is just wrong.
janMato
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Re: toki! anyone has texts about Toki Pona?

Post by janMato »

jan Ote wrote:My English is not good enough, I suppose. This has been intended as an example of one sentence with one realization: "o pana e ilo moku tawa mi", "give me a fork". The opening "would you like to" is just a "politness sugar", nothing more. The problem with autism spectrum disorders is that these people tend to take "would you like to do it?", "could you do it?" sentences literally as a questions, not as sentences with a politeness code.
More likely my mental model of an Autistic person is that they lack a mental model of whats going on in other peoples head, and you are seeing it as a lingusitic phenomena-- i.e. they are misunderstanding the sentence.

If I have a mental model of what is going on in your head, you can speak word soup to me (just jumble everything up) and I'll be able to use paralinguistic information to pull out from your message what you really meant to say.

I'm not an expert on people on Autism, so I suppose either one of use could be right or we could both be wrong.

mi pona. mi wile ala utala e sina.
I (good, simplicity, positivity,good, simple, positive, nice, correct, right) . I don't (to want, need, wish, have to, must, will, should) to (hit, strike, attack, compete against)

So among the various readings are:
"I am right. I don't have to compete against you." So if the neighbor was predisposed to believe you were up to no good, he's probably wondering how you intend to eliminate the competition.

On the other hand, if jan Ote comes to Arlington Virgina, and says, "mi pona. mi wile ala utala e sina", I happen to have the extra information that jan Ote is a rather nice person and I can discard all evils sounding options for interpreting the sentence. The language isn't helping me figure out which of the various semantic meanings, in fact, toki pona makes this task much more difficult.
janKipo
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Re: toki! anyone has texts about Toki Pona?

Post by janKipo »

Well, I would deny that any society can get along without 'esun' and probably 'mani' in their root senses. But "I come in peace " is a bitch: 'mi wile ala utala' sound a bit too much like surrender. And so on. Beyond that, I wonder who are these people who talk about tp as getting closer to reality or as being less ambiguous (or vague) than some other language. Basically, ain't no such thing (reality is incongruent to language at some ultimate level, let's say). tp may help us get into synch with reality, but that is something else altogether. ('mi kama tawa sona' doesn't mean "I come to fix":'mi kama tawa pona' though that is equally ambiguous as the first isn't quite.)

I take the whole to say that "about" is the natural relation of an NP to a verb of cognition/communication/prehension and 'pi' is used then when the NP is two or more words long (as usual). OK, that I can live with gladly. But note that it is different from a noun complement(which doesn't need 'pi' for a two or more word NP). I note that he use of 'pi' or juxtaposition for "about" is restricted a class of verbs already selected out as taking propositional DOs (toki, pilin, sitelen, sona,...) so this is not a general dropping of preps or objects, just another way of dealing with a polyvalent predicate. The 'li pi' bit is a bit of bad old tp which I would have thought 'jo' had killed, but apparently not. It goes back to the notion that 'pi' is just a possessive marker rather than a regrouping device for modifiers and ought to die a natural death. But probably won't except that no one will use it. (I can't by the way, make out what 'jan pali suli pi ma Mewika li pali pi pan li moku pi moku li pona e supa moku mi.' is meant to mean, since the words with 'pi' (incorrectly) are not verbs of the right class.)

Context, as we keep saying, will decide (yes, but ...).
Last edited by janKipo on Fri Feb 26, 2010 11:55 am, edited 1 time in total.
janMato
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Re: toki! anyone has texts about Toki Pona?

Post by janMato »

janKipo wrote: ('mi kama tawa sona' doesn't mean "I come to fix":'mi kama tawa pona' though that is equally ambiguous as the first isn't quite.)
nimi pi sama mute li ike tawa mi! I don't like minimal pairs!

janKipo wrote:I note that he use of 'pi' or juxtaposition for "about" is restricted a class of verbs already selected out as taking propositional DOs (toki, pilin, sitelen, sona,...) so this is not a general dropping of preps or objects, just another way of dealing with a polyvalent predicate.
I don't grok this at all.

"li toki" in the corpus is almost entirely, "... li toki e ni:" (propsition takes e ni), "li toki tawa ..." (oblique takes tawa), and many fewer instances of "... li toki Kanse..." (predicate or adverbial speaking in french fashion), "li toki sin e..." (adverbial), "li toki utala tawa..." (compound verb/fighting speech)

I failed to find a single use of jan Pije's pattern for toki.

Pilin is much the same. Most the proposition takes "e ni", rarely the proposition is just a colon, but is then followed by a complete sentence, meaning they forgot the "e ni". Many uses of li pilin ike, but ike is adverbial. It's feeling in a bad sort of way. It's not feeling feelings about the bad.

Sitelen likewise, almost entirely "e ni" followed by a proposition, or "e" (usually drawing or writing a picture or the like). I got one instance of "jan li kama sona mute li sitelen toki", which is I supposed could be parsed in the jan Pije pattern.

Anyhow, if this is part of toki pona right now (and isn't an innovation or a mistake), this a mechanism that hardly anyone is using-- no one that has attempted to learn the language got to the point where they felt strongly enough in the belief that obliques could follow verbs unmarked that they should actually do so.

Switching to marked with "pi". This actually doesn't bother me much. "pi" is just being used as a generic preposition, or it is isomorphic to noun-incorporation.
"li sona pi" - 2 hits, both were ordinary predicates.
"li toki pi"- 12 hits, some of them meant "about something"
"li sitelen pi"- 2 hits, both were ordinary predicates. (as opposed to "someone draws a picture of pangolins")
"li pilin pi' 1 hit : "tenpo suno ni la mi mute li pilin pi jan pona Maten Kin." Today we are thinking about Martin Luthor King.
janKipo wrote:The 'li pi' bit is a bit of bad old tp which I would have thought 'jo' had killed, but apparently not.
It's an anachronism-- only 6 uses, half from jan Pije the rest from some of the earliest livejournal posts. "li pi" was a mistake and the community has soundly rejected it-- according to the corpus.
janKipo wrote:(I can't by the way, make out what 'jan pali suli pi ma Mewika li pali pi pan li moku pi moku li pona e supa moku mi.' is meant to mean, since the words with 'pi' (incorrectly) are not verbs of the right class.)
It's noun-incorporation. It happens in English, Samoan, etc. It's a valence decreasing operation where by the patient is incorporated into the verb (or in tp's case, the verb phrase) creating a new intransitive verb.

I birdwatched all day. <--- Nothing in the accusative position, but pragmatically speaking, the birds are being watched.

mi tawa tomo. I go home. This is predicate with a preposition that implies motion. Okay, I grok this one, it took me a while, it turns out lots of languages do this-- its an unusual form of a predicate.
mi kama tomo. I arrive home. ditto. (however, I don't pretend to understand kama in the sense of "become"/"turn into")
mi toki jan. I talk about people. This is wrong. There isn't a good adverbial sense for "jan" Either this is incorporating the object into the verb phrase (which is the same operation as dropping the e, which generally is considered wrong) If we do want to incorporate nouns, it would be better to add a pi, because one of the faces of "pi" is to introduce something that is nounlike as opposed to being modifier-like (i.e. adj or adv)
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jan Ote
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Re: toki! anyone has texts about Toki Pona?

Post by jan Ote »

janMato wrote:It's tricky to deal with this because who's to say what is wrong and what is right, who is the real language designer for toki pona--is it jan Pije or jan Sonja or is it a living language and the total corpus actually reflects the rules better than the putative designers?, etc.
I remember when I visited tokipona.org the first time, a few years ago. jan Sonja was recommending jan Pije's lessons and I started to read them.

Quick check confirms:
Until the end of 2003 tokipona.org included old lessons by Sonja. Then the site had been rebuild, they disapeared (WebArchive doesn't have copies for 2004-2005), and were replaced by a notice
'tokipona.org/kamasona.html' from 2006 (2004?) until Jul 09, 2007 wrote:The official Toki Pona lessons are currently being revised and updated.
In the meantime, you can use the lessons on Pije's website.
On 9 July 2007 this page has been removed and replaced by an announcement of "The Official Toki Pona Book (coming in 2008)".
janMato
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Re: toki! anyone has texts about Toki Pona?

Post by janMato »

jan Ote wrote:Until the end of 2003 tokipona.org included old lessons by Sonja.
Awesome research. I'd had never before tracked this down. I arrived on the toki pona scene long after this had been taken down.

This also concurs with what I've seen too while gathering texts for the toki pona corpus project. From during 2001-2002, jan Sonja was active in the community (at least visibly, I can't tell how much time she logged in chat rooms) and wrote some toki pona that clearly is toki pona but is slightly odd looking. 2002-2004-2005 or so jan Pije seems to have been the person who worked out the enough of the language that fans could write toki pona for most situations. He has a distinctive style and sometimes its hard to separate jan Pije style from toki pona grammar. (For example, toki pona is capable of long complex sentences, but jan Pije doesn't attempt to use them much-- imho, this is style not a grammatical restriction)

From 2004 forward, in my option, toki pona has been evolving as a natural languge, more or less out of control of it's two most important conlangers. I think about 2005 or 2006, jan Kipo arrived on the scene and the consistency in grammar in the corpus shot way up, which in a way has significantly shaped the language, in large part because Morpheme Addict and others wrote out the formal grammar, which closed off a lot of directiosn the originial conlangers may or may not have had in mind.

The original designers aren't contributing enough to the corpus any more to win in the marketplace of ideas (particularly ideas about what consitutes good style and what grammatical constructions are valid, etc), although I still wish somone with rank would make up words for days of the week, numbers over 159, months, names of the letters, a way to deal with decimal digits, a way to deal with time of day, units of measure such as length, volume and so on.

The community will probably sort out polite phrases, culture and acceptable metphors without help from a central authority.
janKipo
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Re: toki! anyone has texts about Toki Pona?

Post by janKipo »

As I noted over on toki lili, I see clearly that the modifier-for-"about" approach is fraught. Since anything can be what a thought or speech is about, anything can go in there, including things which might go there in a normal adverbial way. I can, for example, think about evil, but 'mi pilin ike' is going to be read (incorrectly, I think, but that is another matter) as "I feel bad" (with all of the possibilities for interpretation that context must sort out, from deep grief to a queasy tummy). The problem of "about" thus remains (and another one about modifiers, for later).
Logomachist
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S-W is an invalid hypothesis

Post by Logomachist »

My understanding is, based on a cognitive psychology textbook I read, that the S-W hypothesis is not supported by evidence. A bilingual child who uses one language at home and another at school will come to associate the home language with familiarity, comfort, casual communication and the language spoken at school will feel more sophisticated, exacting, learned and maybe a bit more stressful; but it doesn't matter which language is which- whatever the home language is, it'll be associated with family, and whatever the school language is, it'll feel more professional. At least as far as natural languages go, no studies have been able to connect any significant difference in performance to the language(s) spoken.
janKipo
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Re: toki! anyone has texts about Toki Pona?

Post by janKipo »

My position (after 50 years around the issue in the background) is that no formulation of S-W has so far been devised that does justice to what Sapir and especially Whorf actually said and that no experiments to test the other hypotheses presented have been well enough designed to trust the results and that, even then, none has give any results of any potential significance. The "science" in "Social Science" is probably meant to be ironic (with a few hard-wired exceptions, which are only SS by courtesy -- or rather by imperialism) and yet is firmly believed in by practitioners, who also believe in the late 1940's model of theory construction (or something even earlier).
Logomachist
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How would you design an experiment to test W-S?

Post by Logomachist »

How would you design an experiment to determine whether the hypothesis is valid or not? I know a lot of people believe in the idea of languages controlling what you can think, but if it were true I would think it would have been tested by now.
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