Draft one of toki pona lesson for twitter

Language learning: How to speak Toki Pona, translation problems, advice, memory aids, tools and methods to learn Toki Pona and other languages faster
Lingva lernado: Kiel paroli Tokiponon, tradukproblemoj, konsiloj, memoraj helpiloj, iloj kaj metodoj por pli rapide lerni Tokiponon kaj aliajn lingvojn
aikidave
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Re: Draft one of toki pona lesson for twitter

Post by aikidave »

Ok, I worked my way thru the rest of your Twitter messages.
janMato wrote:#tokipona Grammar. X li N e Y. This means X makes Y into N (a noun). jan li soweli tomo e soweli. Man domesticates it.
I didn't know this. I would have had trouble figuring out this translation.
janMato wrote:#tokipona Grammar. Verb phrases additional verb phrases start with li. Not en
Maybe reword this? I know what you are saying but a newbie may not.
janMato wrote:#tokipona Grammar. Manner is expressed in prepositional phrases at the end of li phrases. mi tawa sama waso.
I read this as: 'I'm travelling like a bird.' Is that correct?
janMato wrote:#tokipona Grammar. Questions must have an X ala X, seme or "anu seme?" construction to be a question.
Maybe add 'Yes or no questions...' to this Twit? You do cover it better in another Twit further down.
janMato wrote:#tokipona Grammar. Some verbs take unmarked complements. mi kama sona. Parsing these is controversial.
I don't see where 'kama sona' is controversial. It is one of the idioms that I have learned and everyone uses.
janMato wrote:#tokipona Grammar. Yes/No questions are answered "No" by wile ala. sina wile ala wile? ala.
I would rewrite as: Yes/No questions are answered "No" by using ala. sina wile ala wile? ala.
janMato wrote:#tokipona Grammar. Join the arguments of a prep. phrase like this: tomo li lon nena en nasin.
I never knew this (or else I've forgotten about it). Thanks.
janMato wrote:#tokipona Vocab. Toki pona has somewhere between 118 and 140 words depending on which words you count. 124/125 are in common use.
I would just stick with the 124/125. No use confusing Twitter folks with old words.
janMato wrote:#tokipona Vocab supa is a flat horizontal surface
While we are talking about surfaces, how about adding sinpin as a vertical surface, in addition to its other meanings?
janMato wrote:#tokipona Vocab sinpin means face. But also front. meli pi lukin pona li jo e sinpin pona.
Also torso and my favorite: wall !
janMato wrote:#tokipona Vocab unpa means sex, but also fuck. The community really does treat it as taboo.
pakala is a swear word too; I see you added it later on.
janMato wrote:#tokipona Vocab kon means air, but also magic.
Didn't know about the magic meaning. Thanks.
janMato wrote:#tokipoan Vocab kon, ko, kiwen make up a set classifiers, gassy, gooey, rocky.
Something else I didn't realize or think about closely enough!
janMato wrote:#tokipona Vocab ante is also a conjunction, "otherwise, else" mi wile e moku ante lape.
I didn't realize ante was a conjunction; I'll have to review my word definitions!
janMato wrote:#tokipona Vocab esun means a store. It also gets used for all sorts of commerce related phrases.
'tenpo esun' also means week.
janMato wrote:#tokipona Grammar ijo might be used in a passive construction. ijo li moli e mije. The man was killed.
I thought TP generally frowns on passive voice, although sometimes it can't be helped?
janMato wrote:#tokipona Vocab tomo is a people-sized container(car or building), poki is a smaller container
Nice way to think of containers!
janMato wrote:#tokipona Vocab monsuta means fear. mi monsuta e akesi. mi mute li wile monsuta e monsuta taso.
#tokipona vocab namako means spice and extra. pona kin li namako lon moku. nimi mute li namako.
#tokipona Vocab kipisi means cut. sina wile e pali la o kipisi e linja lawa.
#tokipona Vocab alasa means hunt or gather. jan pi tenpo kiwen li alasa tawa moku.
Maybe mention that above 4 are new words? Maybe just ('new word') at end of each sentence? By the way I still don't have these 4 properly memorized!
janMato wrote:#tokipona Phonetics. There's no guidance on intonation or sandhi. Maybe anything goes.
Maybe talk about pronunciation of vowels - like Spanish, Italian ?

How about adding a Twit for each of these categories? (some you have already)

animals and plants : jan, soweli, akesi, waso, pipi, kala, kasi, kili
body parts : sijelo, luka, noka, oko, lawa, monsi, pilin, nena, uta, sinpin
the senses : lukin, kalama, kute, pilin, oko, nena
food : moku, suwi, sin, seli, kili, kala, pan, soweli
sex : mama, meli, mije, olin, unpa, pakala
nature : ma, telo, kon, seli, wawa, suno, mun
culture : mama, toki, ilo, kulupu, tomo, poki, len, sitelen, mani, nasin, pan, esun
states of matter : telo, kon, wawa, kiwen, ko, lipu, palisa, linja, sike, lupa, supa, selo
quality : pona, ike, jaki, nasa, lete, seli, meli, mije
quantity and number : nanpa, ala, wan, tu, luka, mute, lili, taso
colors : kule, walo, pimeja, loje, jelo, laso
pointers to objects and persons : ni, mi, sina, ona, ijo, ali, ala
human activities : moku, lape, musi, sona, pali, jo, pana, kepeken, pakala, utala, unpa, olin, moli
tense : kama, pini, wile, ken
sentence type : wile, ken, o, seme
spatial relationships : sewi, poka, anpa, insa, selo
movement : kama, pini, awen, tawa, weka, open
philosophical terms : ma, tenpo, ijo, ali, wan, sama, nimi, ala, ante
prepositions : sama, kepeken, tawa, poka, tan, lon
conjunctions : ala, la, en, anu, taso
separators : pi, li, e, la, o
interjections : a, ala, pona, ike, jaki, mu, o, pakala, toki

So once you start sending out these Twitter messages, how do I subscribe? I don't currently use Twitter. I am on 'toki lili'. Will you Twit these to 'toki lili' too?
janMato
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Re: Draft one of toki pona lesson for twitter

Post by janMato »

janKipo wrote:This will take a while. The first problem is, as noted, that several levels of analysis are treated indistinguishably and so these have to be teased apart to even begin.
For now, just this: why in the wide world would you say that 'll, gonna, 'd, 've are not content words? The test seems to be that we can contract them. But by that logic, n't is a mere function word, too. All the contractions show is that they are different (content) words from other more or less similar words, which can't be contracted. But we knew that already from the different function they perform.
The point wasn't that words that contraction are function words. The point was that will, will and Will are 3 different words. One of them is a function word. The other two are content words. The first can be contracted. The other two can't. It would be nice to be able to crack open the skull and put some electrodes on each neuron and demonstrate that the function words are stored in a different area of the brain and each of the three words is managed by a different collection of neurons, but the technology isn't there yet. So we we use imperfect mental models, which at one point or another are going to break down or in someway not be airtight representations of what our brain does when we use a word.

We're back to "I know it when I see it." There are case where people say, that's porn, that's not porn and stuff that isn't so clear like Renoir and Ruben. But I'm not ready to think this means that pictures of carrots on a table is porn, or that Hustler magazine is taxonomically in the same category as The Economist. A magazine store would not be served by discarding a taxonomy because some categories are fuzzy and place the Hustler next to Ranger Rick.
janKipo
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Re: Draft one of toki pona lesson for twitter

Post by janKipo »

We just have different mnotions of function and content words. For me. the contractions all are content words because they make semantic differences, independent of their grammatical function, Function words don't. Just ehat your definitions are -- even fuzzily or vaguely -- I no longer think I have any idea. If you know one when you see one, then, since you see 'll as a function, not a content, word, we are clearly talking about different things.

As for sorting out the various threads, at least one step is easy: scrap all the mentalist and neurological stuff. It is irrelevant to any issue here, quite aside from being speculative (to put it kindly).
janMato
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Re: Draft one of toki pona lesson for twitter

Post by janMato »

janKipo wrote:As for sorting out the various threads, at least one step is easy: scrap all the mentalist and neurological stuff. It is irrelevant to any issue here, quite aside from being speculative (to put it kindly).
It's an idea borrowed from economics regarding modeling complex things. In reality, an economy is made of of a lot of complex entities. In tractable models, we get things that are like systems of linear equations, and those models tend to have significant departures from reality. It's a point about models, not a research agenda to actually model linguistic acts at the neuron level, although, if the computing power existed, that would provide a much better model of what is actually going on. (Just like the perfect model of the US economy would be to create a couple of identical planets populated by clones, and then economic policies could be tested scientifically by varying exactly one thing for each hypothetical planet)

Yes, we've gotten a long way from predicates and intransitive verbs.
janMato
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Re: Draft one of toki pona lesson for twitter

Post by janMato »

aikidave wrote:So once you start sending out these Twitter messages, how do I subscribe? I don't currently use Twitter. I am on 'toki lili'. Will you Twit these to 'toki lili' too?
I will respond to the earlier part, as soon as work stops interfering with my hobbies. :-)

I actually did write an few pages about how Twitter (might) be used in the context of language learning. Of all the online social technologies, twitter is the strangest one that has the least parallels with anything that has gone before (i.e. email was easy to understand, it worked a lot like my physical mail box, twitter works like ... nothing I've every put my hands on)

I'll be broadcasting on either @janMato or a new account that I haven't created yet.

http://learnicelandic.net/twitter/Tutorial.aspx
http://learnicelandic.net/twitter/Tools.aspx

http://tokipona.net/tp/Twitter.Aspx <-- A more tp specific article about using twitter & for tp.
http://tokipona.net/tp/ChatTwitter.aspx <-- No one in tp land is actually doing this, but it shows promise
janKipo
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Re: Draft one of toki pona lesson for twitter

Post by janKipo »

janMato wrote:
janKipo wrote:As for sorting out the various threads, at least one step is easy: scrap all the mentalist and neurological stuff. It is irrelevant to any issue here, quite aside from being speculative (to put it kindly).
It's an idea borrowed from economics regarding modeling complex things. In reality, an economy is made of of a lot of complex entities. In tractable models, we get things that are like systems of linear equations, and those models tend to have significant departures from reality. It's a point about models, not a research agenda to actually model linguistic acts at the neuron level, although, if the computing power existed, that would provide a much better model of what is actually going on. (Just like the perfect model of the US economy would be to create a couple of identical planets populated by clones, and then economic policies could be tested scientifically by varying exactly one thing for each hypothetical planet)

Yes, we've gotten a long way from predicates and intransitive verbs.
We have indeed and are now in totally irrelevant areas. Language models are just grammars (in the broadest sense), anything else is a waste of time, except, perhaps -- and the record is not good on this -- metagrammars. i.e., theories about the structure of grammars.
aikidave
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Re: Draft one of toki pona lesson for twitter

Post by aikidave »

jan Mato o, toki.

Have you been tweeting (or whatever it is called) these tp lessons out? And did I miss them because I know next to nothing about twitter except for the toki lili variant?
I had forgotten about this project until a recent post about Spanish tweets jogged my memory.

viewtopic.php?f=38&t=1847

You have the lessons broken out in categories (Grammar, vocabulary, tools, etc). How did you plan to organize them when you send (sent) them out? Were you thinking a couple of days of vocabulary, followed by a couple of days of grammar?

The reason I ask, is that I was thinking of doing the same thing on FB. I could introduce my 100+ friends to toki pona slowly. Most of them have never heard of toki pona. After 365 toki pona lessons, I might not have any FB friends left!
janMato
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Re: Draft one of toki pona lesson for twitter

Post by janMato »

I hit a plateau with toki pona a shot while ago, so I've been slacking off. On the other hand, I've finally gotten to the point where I can read a surprising percent of Icelandic news, so I've been pouring my energy into that for awhile. (And today it paid off, I got to read really, really, really bad news about Oslo hours before it made it to the US press. That's a benefit, right?)

If figure some subset of the tweets are factoids of interest to a general audience, some of it to just language geeks, some of it just to people who are actively learning toki pona.
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