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toki Keme li ike

Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2011 2:11 am
by Mako
jan mute pi kama sona li sona e toki Keme lon tomo sona li sona e toki Keme li ike tan ni: ona li jo e sitelen mute. jan mute pi kama sona li sona lili e toki Keme. mi sona mute e toki Keme. mi pana e sona mi tawa jan ante pi kama sona. jan pi kama sona sewi li sitelen e kiwen toki pi jan Ikerenoferete. tenpo kama la jan pi kama sona sewi li sitelen e toki kama pi jan pali ma pi toki pona.

Many students study Egyptian at university. They know that Egyptian is hard because it has many signs. Many students know Egyptian less than I know Egyptian. I release my knowledge to the other students. The upper-level students read the stela ('talking stone') of Ikhernofret. In the future, the upper-level students will read the Tale (toki kama) of Eloquent ('toki pona') Peasant (jan pali ma).

Re: toki Keme li ike

Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2011 6:43 pm
by janKipo
Somehow I got the idea that Keme and Masu were Egyptian, which doesn't fit this very well. So what languages arthey?
'kepeken toki ni', not 'lon'
Don't need 'e ni:' to introduce a noun phrase, just 'e' followed by the phrase.
'jan Pali pi ma pi toki pona'

Re: toki Keme li ike

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 4:11 am
by Mako
janKipo wrote:Somehow I got the idea that Keme and Masu were Egyptian, which doesn't fit this very well. So what languages arthey?
'kepeken toki ni', not 'lon'
Don't need 'e ni:' to introduce a noun phrase, just 'e' followed by the phrase.
'jan Pali pi ma pi toki pona'
toki Keme is Egyptian (or Coptic)
e [NP] - so the direct object noun phrase can be a sub-clause? Does that mean that any main clause verb must come before the 'e'?
I extended the 'jan pali ma' phrase - but if I'd meant 'jan Pali', not 'jan pali', I would have typed it that way.

Re: toki Keme li ike

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 11:59 am
by janKipo
Sorry about the capital letter, iPad thinks it know better than I do what I want to say (and is often right, but not this time).
There are no subclauses in tp; what you wrote (whatever your intentions) is just a long noun phrase. Main clause (the only one there is) must indeed come before 'e'.
I clearly misread the last line; sorry about that. 'kiwen toki' for "stele" is very nice (though I didn't get it), but the word for "read" is 'lukin'. 'sitelen' means "write" or, in this case, "carve". And I read 'sitelen mute' as 'nasin sitelen mute' (which is also true of Egyptian though not of Coptic), forgetting that 'sitelen' means the marks as well as the marking. While I misread the last phrase, it still raises a question: is a peasant a land worker (as you have) or a person who works the land (jan pi pali ma)? These kinds of narrow questions are going to keep turning up, I'm afraid.

Re: toki Keme li ike

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 1:47 pm
by janMato
Many students study Egyptian at university. They know that Egyptian is hard because it has many signs. Many students know Egyptian less than I know Egyptian. I release my knowledge to the other students. The upper-level students read the stela of Ikhernofret. In the future, the upper-level students will read the Tale of Eloquent Peasant.
Here is another translation, not necessarily better or worse than your own. (Although, I got lost half way through reading yours)

jan mute pi kama sona li kama sona e toki Keme lon tomo ona pi sona suli. jan ni li pilin e ni: toki Keme li wile e pali mute tan ni: toki Keme li jo e sitelen nimi mute kin. mi sona e sitelen pi toki Keme mute. taso jan pi kama sona li sona e sitelen lili pi toki keme li sona ike.

tenpo ni la jan suli pi kama sona li lukin e kiwen ni: kiwen supa li jo e nimi mute pi toki Keme pi jan Ikenope. tenpo kama la jan suli ni li lukin e nimi mute ni: "jan pali pi ma moku li toki li toki pona" la ni li nimi ona.


How to deal with titles of books? According to the rules, we can't insert sentences anywhere except in la phrases.
ike means bad. I don't buy into the idea that you can say that "bad" can share the same semantic space as "complex". For some reason, having bad/complex in the same word is about as elegant as a contronym-- they're rare and don't look like very stable words (i.e. they're probably going to lose one meaning or the other)

Re: toki Keme li ike

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 5:10 pm
by janKipo
'lupa ".. "' names are adjectives. The whole is a noun phrase, do you don't need the 'ni:' trick nor the questionable 'la' one.
Or 'toki'' or what have you.

Re: toki Keme li ike

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 5:26 pm
by janMato
janKipo wrote:'lupa ".. "' names are adjectives. The whole is a noun phrase, do you don't need the 'ni:' trick nor the questionable 'la' one.
Or 'toki'' or what have you.
In my translation, the title wasn't a noun phrase. It has a "li" in it.

How about, I read "Men who hate women" aka "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"

* mi lukin e lipu mute ni: nili li "mije li pilin ike mute tawa meli."
* mi lukin e "mije li pilin ike mute tawa meli."
* mi lukin e lipu mute pi "mije li pilin ike mute tawa meli."
? mi lukin e ni: "mije li pilin ike mute tawa meli."

Re: toki Keme li ike

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 6:42 pm
by Mako
I keep forgetting ‘lukin’ means ‘read’.
I have the same problem with ‘ike’, but more because it means ‘difficult’ as well as ‘bad’.

There seems to be some disagreement (big surprise there). If I want to say “They know that Egyptian is difficult” do I say:
1. ona li sona e ni: toki Keme li ike.
2. ona li sona e toki Keme li ike.
3. ona li sona e ni. toki Keme li ike.
4. toki Keme li ike la ona li sona e ni.
5. ona li sona e ike pi toki Keme.

I thought No. 1 was correct and No. 3 a variant thereof. No. 2 looks illegal, but I was chastised for using No. 1. No. 4 is legal (and appropriately hieroglyphic in its tenselessness), but is counterintuitive, at least for me – the ‘la’ phrase is just too vague. No. 5 changes the verb clause into a noun clause, which works here, but what about elsewhere?

Re: toki Keme li ike

Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 12:11 am
by janKipo
1 is ok, 2 is way illegal (well, it legally says "They know Egyptian and are bad"), 3 is ok and, as you say, variant on 1, but less informative, 4is ok but means something different: it doesn't claim that Egyptian is difficult (or whatever). 5 is ok but again slightly different, they now know not only that Egyptian is difficult but how difficult it is.
I don't (I hope) chastise. I don't have an unedited version of your translation any more, so I don't remember what it was exactly, but my memory (and my reading at the time) was that what followed 'e ni' was simply a long noun, without a 'li' in it. Maybe I was mistaken and thus misled you. Sorry ( but always call me out if I say something that seems stupi).
What range of Egyptian do you know --hieroglyphs, demotic, Coptic? I can pronounce the last but can't understand any of them -- except all tha Greek borrowings in religious Coptic.

Quotes are by definition noun phrases, since they are the proper names of the expressions quoted (don't get me involved in the discussion behind that). So,of your four suggestions, none is actually tp grammatical ( under the "proper names are adjectives " rubric. Barring that rubric, the second would be ok. But we can't bar that. The third might be ok, except I don't think propper adjectives require 'pi' -- but the jury is probably still out on that. I would say 'mi lukin e lipu mute "mije li pilin Ike tawa meli"' or some such (my worries are abbot the title, not the rest, ,'pi' aside).