mi wile sitelen e ijo

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janKipo
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Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm

mi wile sitelen e ijo

Post by janKipo »

mi wile sitelen e ijo tan ni: tenpo esun pini la jan ala li sitelen e ala (mi sona e ni: ni li kepeken tu pi nimi 'ala'. o sona e ni sama kalama suli. taso kepeken ni li tan lawa pi toki pona ala). ijo li kama ala kama. kama la o sitelen e ijo pi kma ni. ala la o sitelen e ni: kama ala li tan seme?
janMato
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Re: mi wile sitelen e ijo

Post by janMato »

janKipo wrote:mi wile sitelen e ijo tan ni: tenpo esun pini la jan ala li sitelen e ala (mi sona e ni: ni li kepeken tu pi nimi 'ala'. o sona e ni sama kalama suli. taso kepeken ni li tan lawa pi toki pona ala). ijo li kama ala kama. kama la o sitelen e ijo pi kma ni. ala la o sitelen e ni: kama ala li tan seme?
I'll take first stab at translating.

"I want to write something because last week no one wrote anything. [I know this uses the word 'ala' twice. Know that this usage is like an loud noise (exclamation). But this usage is not from the grammar of toki pona] Will something happen or not? If something comes up, write something about this happening. If nothing, write this, why does nothing happen?"

Yeah, pretty quiet in toki pona world-- even google is turning up rather few new mentions of tp outside of the forum. kalama li ala lon ma pi toki pona. Without an organic reason for using the language, it's kind of a creative process, so things happen when the muse moves someone. jan ale li jo e wile tan ni: jan li kepeken ala e toki pona la ike li kama ala. jan li kepeken e toki pona tan ni: jan li wile pali e ijo musi. sona pi ijo musi li tan jan sewi Musi. jan sewi Musi li pali ala la jan li pali ala.

tenpo ni la mi kama sona e nasin toki luka. ni li musi tawa mi tan ni: jan lili sin ken kepeken e nasi toki luka. taso jan lili sin li ken toki ala kepeken uta kepeken kalama. (taso jan lili sin li ken mu sama soweli ike!)

toki pi nasin luka li sama toki sin. mute la kulupu mama li pali e toki pi nasin luka sin. taso jan ni li sona ala e ni: ona li pali e toki sin!

ni li lupu tawa lipu sona:
http://www.babysignlanguage.com/

So that what I've been up to. I was considering a manually signed toki pona-- but sign languages need to have a really high ratio of content to function "words" (I know-- content and function again, the distinction is useful to me. As a illustration-- if you try to add a sign for person tense and number for each verb and a number and gender to each noun, you have to sign dozens more symbols to get something simple. ASL for example is highly isolating and makes a lot of things optional that in spoken languages are routinely grammaticalized/obligatory)
janKipo
Posts: 3064
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm

Re: mi wile sitelen e ijo

Post by janKipo »

first time: 'jan lili sin LI ken'
I think it is unfair to blame the Muses, see the 'ala la' case mi pilin e ni: ni li pona ala: sina toki ike e ijo pi jan sewi Musa. o lukin e nimi lon monsi pi nimi 'ala la'.
The notion of tp sign language doesn't make much sense unless you want to do signed tp, word-for-word copying. Sign languages, even ASL, are separate languages, with their own rules, their own cheirology (or whatever replaces phonology in them), their own styles, and so on. What you need is just a good sign language, independent of what vocal language you have (ASL is used for non-English speakers, though not as much as British SL and French SL was, at one time, very widespread -- courtesy of the teaching at the Instutute for the Deaf and Dumb, whathisname of the Wild Child).
janMato
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Re: mi wile sitelen e ijo

Post by janMato »

Just to make sure we're on the same page-- I think we are-- manually signed English is like writing English, no more a different language from spoken English than writing with letters is a different language. On the other hand, ASL, BSL, FSL are all different languages, about as similar to their host countries spoken languages as Khmer is to English. The various attempts to teach the deaf the manually signed version of the host country language failed because they resulted in extraordinarily verbose sequences of signs. Languages as systems adapt to the environment they are in-- sign has to adapt to the high cost of creating a sign, where as spoken language can lean on how cheap it is to add another morpheme to a word (hundredths of a second to say "d" to indicate past tense-- certainly not that fast to even finger spell "d")

I figure manually signed toki pona would be a failure just as much as manually signed English for the same reasons. For example, obligatory subjects and obligatory "li" would need to drop out-- they are too expensive to sign relative to the information they bring to the sentence. And if I think about it, if I was deaf and wanted to use tp to communicate, I'd probably write it-- Beethoven went deaf as an adult and decided writing on paper was fine and didn't bother to create a manual version of writing in the air.

A tp inspired sign language would have these elements: (actually any small language, signed or xeno or art or whatever)

- most word classes closed
- relies on non-lexical strategies (morphology and syntax) to express anything
- optionally, draws on basic lexical items from the same 120 some tp words, minus la, li, pi, e
- optionally, maintains the same basic sentence structure [S la]* s v o [PP]*
- has a small core, maybe closed set of rules for generating new sentences-- unlike English, where a comedian can name a book, "I am American and you can, too!" and after hearing it a while it just sounds like normal English, or where Pauley Shore used -age as a suffix enough I just got used to it. (tune -> tunage = music)

What I'm still learning is what makes for a good sign language-- other than just economy of signs.
janKipo
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Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm

Re: mi wile sitelen e ijo

Post by janKipo »

Yes, I think so, tough I haven't thought about the cost of various features. And I am not so sure that there is no carry over from spoken to signed language, even leaving finger spelled words out of account: order remains and surprisingly many idioms (if I remember the old Stokoe[?] papers aright). But making one-to-ones is not very fruitful; simultaneous signing is incredibly impressive but very much an art that goes for the gist, not the details (except for jokes, sometimes -- or legal stuff). Or maybe it is that one sign incorporates a lot more than what one word does: I see signed masses every once in a while and great chunks of the epiclesis (say) seem to be a single sign in motion.
I think it will be hard to keep a small cheirabulary, since the urge to onomatopoeia is irrepressible: long tp phrases will become virtually single signs if the need arises ('soweli pi linja uta' come to the standard ASL "cat", after all).
"-age" is still officially productive in English, even without Pauley.
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