toki. mi jan Loteni

[loteni]

jan Lope o. toki.

Your lessons and resources are surprisingly easy to find. I think I worked through your lessons before I got a copy of Sonjas book.
It wasn't until really studying the official book I came to realise the language had amazing depth. If resources about this kind of thing exist online I think they are very hard to find. I know others are working through the book as I am, since I see plently evidence of that. My post, I suppose, was maybe aimed at possible lurkers, or something, in the hope the not so subtle clues in the OP spoke to them as to similar endeavours. Maybe helping them to make contact, and so get people to work together for efficiently learning the richness of official version of the language.

[loteni]

Maybe im too lazy lol...

I heard somewhere about toki pona, lets see where was it? Ah yeah, I had decided that Mandarin was bit much for me seeing as I cannot pronounce the words properly, I havent really delved back into it for awhile. I was looking around for other languages, impressed by polyglots on youtube, freely switching between multiple languages as they have a conversation. I started to read some blogs about language learning. I became more interested in latin.

Then I came across a blog which described something that resonated with me. It described the issue about monoglots biggest hurdle being the second language, and went on to recommend Esperanto, for reasons such as ease of learning. The idea being that if you can become atleast semi confident in a second language faster, the confidence and brain-rewiring, pays dividends in learning another language. Going from there, and believing that idea, I found toki pona!

So I worked stepwise in learning toki pona;

1. The real basics - learn the words -- I used memrise.

2. How to use the words -- I used lope and pije online lessons.

3. Extended thoughts pertaining to these things -- I read Kipos blog.

4. Is there anything next ? I thought not, but then the official book arrived !

5. Revision/correction of what ive learnt so far, extraction of advanced toki pona from the book.

The problem is that at point 5. there are no online resources to help learners at that level. The book offers this information, but additional help is always nice

[janKipo]

Interesting. My biggest complaint about Sonja's book -- aside from its deviance from common usage and somewhat wierd formulation of rules -- was that it didn't cover much beyond the very basics. Pije and Lope go a lot farther and I have at least mentioned and tried to deal with still further items. But there is no systematic treatment of even intermediate topics like compound sentences or embedded sentences ("displays" in my chats) or mixed predicates as opposed to compound sentences or .... (the list goes on and keeps being added to). I think the only way to get to these problems is to encounter them and ask. Hopefully, the community will come up with a solution.

[loteni]

Well my knowledge of linguistics and even basic grammer is next to non-existent. Maybe this is a problem for learning the language, maybe it is a boon, since I just learn the terms as she uses/examples/defines them.

About systematic treatment ; Yeah that is what I want, that makes things a lot easier, but the book would be a lot bigger. What she has done is provide this level of information in a compressed form. So it takes some time to decompress it. As a rough estimate I suppose the expansion of the book to a systematic form, increases its size by about 10 fold, but my ability to guess accurately at this time is minimal.

I am not really sure about what you mean by terms like; compound sentences, embedded sentences, mixed predicates.

At a guess, I think compound sentences are only possible in this language with "la", you can progressively setup a few levels of "context" with that though. I do not think embedded sentences are possible; I cannot put a sentence instead of a NP after "tan", although I am not sure if the relaxation of that rule would really matter much...

Mixed predicates; I think maybe you mean x li [y] + [z] ? where y is a noun, adjective, verb, or pre-verb, and z is a noun, adjective or verb ? And what the rules might be for modification of [y] and [z], and knowing what is what in the first place. Oh I forgot to add the preposition stuff... yeah the rules for all this stuff are in the book, but I have yet to map them out fully.

Often though there will be things you want to know how to do, which the scope of the book wont even cover, like toki e ijo pi (x). The community has devised a nice way to say that. Maybe if I iterated through all possible ways to express that given the book only, I would have eventually realised that is a good method, but maybe I wouldn't have even considered it, it could have potentially taken a very long time either way.

[loteni]

I don't want to seem to be dismissive, I do not intend to be dismissive. I keep making these wild claims about the official book being super duper and having everything you possibly need and presenting a power superset of the language commonly in use!

I've read the book so much I think I will soon need to buy a new one, since this one is getting tatty, ive only had it a couple of weeks!
I've written out rules and expanded dictionaries and notes, a few times already and had to throw them away again, as I learn new things that makes those things ive written out incorrect. I know so little of the language it's really great; there is so much to learn!

I keep underestimating the content of the book, and I don't want to keep throwing out expanded dictionaries and grammer rules, so I am going to take it slow and steady. I really need to map out how words work first, I think i've basically got that down now. The dictionary is massive, my first was like four or five lines per word, the next will be a few pages per word, atleast!

We kind of live in a culture today, that makes this book hard to understand. We want to be spoon fed everything, even technical stuff, needs to be stepwise laid out. This language has the philosophy of older systems where you have to put a lot of work into really mapping things out yourself. Things are spread out and weaved together, you need to tease things out, with lots of cross checking and sensibleness.

The core concept is "friendly", the book is friendly, the language is literally called "friendly language". You need to read it like your listening to a friend. This is law in natural language anyway, we all do this all the time, it is also something you learn is law if you learn about argumentation in prose. What you do is take the best possible interpretation of things.

[janKipo]

Well, I agree that there are depths within depths in tp and that it takes time to work them out (I have been at it 10 years and find new things every week). I suppose that, since pu is a basic tp textbook, all these possibilities are there in some sense. MY point in only that many of them (even fairly significant ones) are never mentioned or illustrated and the underlying moves to get to them are not laid out. You may find them eventually, but not in any obvious way from the book; they come from regular engagement with the language in use. I think, generally, that tp time is better spent writing tp to be read by others than with rereading pu or all the textbooks available (don't miss --if you are going to keep reading -- 76 Illustrated Lessons). Your writings that I have read are pretty good, so what you need is to be a bit adventurous and press into new areas. I know you aren't much for small talk, but trying to describe the events in your life can often turn up situations that press your linguistic resources.

I admit I would like to write a very hand-holding tp grammar, but I probably never will. Still. it has some virtues just to think about what goes in. I keep adding new chapters between 1 and 2 and the rest, which means I never get up to direct objects even.

Compound sentences in tp are built with 'ala' and (although pu is very unclear about this generally) 'and' But never 'en' for some reason. They are just two sentences glued together with the connective. The more interesting cases are collapses of these (and of strings of sentences taken together but without 'en'), which give compound subjects (joined by 'en' or 'anu', but never 'la') and similar prepositional objects and prepositional phrases, then similarly developed predicates (each introduced by a new 'li') and direct objects (each with a new 'e') and something that deals with 'anu' but is not at all clear (all the obvious choices make terribly ambiguous heaps). Mixed predicates are cases like "blue and white ball, where the predicates each apply to part of the object, and so cover cases of mixed groups of any sort: men and women, and so on. These seem all to involve 'en' and are mysteriously forbidden in pu in the predicate position -- and not mentioned in others. In a related issue, pu does mention that 'anu' is a question word but never says anything about how to use it or how to distinguish it from a simple conjunction (which is says almost nothing about). The grammatical status of 'anu seme' and, indeed, of 'x ala' is left untouched. And so on for chapters of not even advanced stuff, like how to deal with the things that come after 'ni:' if it is more than one sentence (or less, for that matter) or if it is a question or exclamation or if the sentence with the 'ni"' continues after it. (They can't be embedded sentences because of the no-recursion -- except with 'la' -- rule.)

[jan Pilo]

jan Kipo o
What do you mean by this: "
(They can't be embedded sentences because of the no-recursion -- except with 'la' -- rule.)"

nasin ni: 'ni: X ni: Y ni:' li lon, lon toki pona.
Isn't it a simplicity marketing trick "there are no embedded sentences"? Sentences do not change internally, when they are inserted into a larger sentence, that's true. But the inner clause (eg. Subject, predicate, DO, PP) is treated as a noun, adjective or adverb - from the point of view of the outer sentence (well, assuming that there are any nouns etc. in tp)
Maybe I don't understand the theory of grammar (or just it's formal declarations), which may be caused by focusing on semantics and pragmatics.

[janKipo]

I'm still trying to work this out in a satisfactory way, hence the notion of displays. English has an array of with slightly different linear rules but most of which come down to a rule allowing S* (for various sorts of *s) to go in place of a DO noun or an adjective and then get shifted around to the right place. tp pretty clearly does not allow the adjective case, since neither 'li' nor 'e' can occur in the modifier string of a noun (although Sonja did once consider this with 'pi li' but decided against it). So relative clauses are handled by separate sentences connected in various ways with 'ni' and 'ona' and sometimes 'la'. That leave oratio obliqua (and indirect questions, as they are in English). The standard there in tp is 'ni' followed more or less directly by a colon and then a discourse of indeterminate length of separate sentences. The assumption is that everything else with the initiating verb goes before the colon. But there is nothing to prevent that discourse from containing sentences that initiate further indirect discourse. And no mark when any of these discourses come to an end. This leads to a terrible muddle, potentially -- and occasional already actually. (See Punctuation in jan nasa.) The grammatical question is how to describe this situation. Triggering a complex like this with a single expression, 'ni...:' looks like a transformation, so suggests that the other sentences to be brought in are already around in some form and just need to be folded in. But the other sentences often are clearly NOT already around, since they are not separately assertable in this context (indeed, may be denied or at least doubted) nor is there any obvious way to generate them separately except by a strange rule that says gives A e ni B: Sn as a right hand of some generation rule, whose oddity is already noted. It seems easier to allow a rule that imports displays from the external world using deixis. The assumption is often that what is imported are tp sentences, but they may be many other things as well, single words or fragments or pictures or sounds or ...., depending on the verbal base. This is all very unsatisfactory theoretically, but as a jury rig, it gets us through a lot of practical issues.

[janTepanNetaPelin]

Hi, I am learning toki pona

I am really loving the language, I got the official book and read it 100s of times, and really meditated on it, and have begun to understand some of it .

But I am finding it hard to find online resources and pointers to help with this.

Maybe there are people here who also are working through the book in this way ? And could maybe give me pointers or join me in understanding the language ?

For instance currently im a bit stuck on this puzzle : why does ike not mean good ?

Thanks

ali li pona

jan Loteni o,

I'm also a follower of the official book. In my signature you can find a link to my description of describing the official Toki Pona in contrast to the dialects that have emerged. I hope you find it interesting.

Regards