Who of us is really a toki pona master?

[loteni]

1. Your dialect doesnt, but it misses a major feature of the language of the language. That words have a hierarchy of meaning, which separates out different concepts. It is not even true, that your dialect doesnt do this; since you use a lot of words like this anyway. You just seem to not realise or acknowledge it;

suwi - is not just cute in the baby cutey kind of way; you use it to also denote high sugar content foods.
nasa - is not just intoxication in the drug use kind of way; you use it also to denote the foolish and the strange.
suli - is not just the large, heavy, long; you use it to denote the important also.
poka - is not just referring to close vicinity; you use it to denote "the hip" also.
sinpin - is not just refering to the space infront; you use it to refer to "the face" and "walls" also.

Obviously I could on...

2. "if it is true?", it is true! Trying to differentiate between your "supposed secret wished for dialect" and the one you propagate is a red herring.

3. The point is not for pona in the sense of the pragmatic semantic point of the word. It is an exercise for fun, maybe this will lead to insights of interest as a side effect. The claim the OP makes, I think, is that you would atleast have to have some kind of "mastery of tp" to succeed with such a task.

Your use of "ni" as a verb, to mean "to refer to", I think is consistent with pu, although it takes a bit of genius to realise that verb usage. Nicely reasoned out

[janKipo]

Sorry, my dialect doesn't do what? I've lost the thread here. What is the language of the language? Words have a hierarchy of meanings? I don't see the point of this. Is it that, when we translate into English, we tend to use different words for different contexts (including local POS)? But that hs nothing to do with tp in itself, only about tp as translated into English. What do the words mean in tp?

'suwi' means (as a first approximation, since I haven't done all the distributional semantic yet) "devoid of or countering unpleasantness"
'nasa' just means "deviating from the norm of the appropriate sort"
'suli' means "big in any dimension, physical, sociological, psychological, ..."
'poka' is harder to figure out but the basic idea seems to be that of intimate connection as represented by a central body part.
'sinpin' is easier in that it refers to the front of a thing and the spaced radiating out from that (similarly for many other body parts. All these definitions need work and need some rules for moving from the center to the periphery, but that doesn't mean that, in tp as opposed to our attempts to understand and describe tp, they do not have a uniform meaning, that gets focused in context.

My secret wished for dialect is nothing like (or not very much like) the one I tend to use as the basis for my comments on other people's usage. You can't know that, of course, because I rarely talk about aspects of that dialect (I suppose it is actually a totally different language in fact).

Again, I have lost the thread with only pronouns to go by.

[loteni]

Well yeah, clearly your substitute definitions and obfuscations promulgate a broken system of word meanings for toki pona.

The official dialect on the other hand has well defined multi-meaning specific uses for the words of its language.

[janKipo]

Which, alas, miss some (even as used in pu) and allow only limited options for extension to further new cases. pu is a useful start, but involvement in the reality of using the language tends to force innovations that pu doesn't cover. You really ought to try it.

[loteni]

[edited in after realising above response was maybe inappropriately aimed at pu and not more appropriately kipos own poor definitions, which I first assumed the response was referring to]

Obviously the power, usability and extendibility of pus definitions are far superior than what your semantic blob approach can offer.

[end of edit in]

I'm so new to the language, I fail to understand many concepts and potential issues still.

[janKipo]

Which, of course, makes you a good epigone (remember, the original ones appeared with 17 ways to improve the language, even though they had not yet gotten very far in it). Do get into it and find all the hidden stuff (I get a couple of new ones every week).

[loteni]

Now I am aware of how that term is being used

Thanks

I plan to really map out as best as I can the information I can extract from pu. I suppose I will have to see where I go from there.

[janKipo]

As I say (on some of these threads), stop plotting and planning and get into the hurly-burly. You'll learn a lot more a lot faster that way, since you are forced beyond the limits that the books impose.

[janpona120]

Reply to loteni:

Paragraph 1; context, accusation; I already explained that it seems clear to me pu doesnt recommend the semantic blob for words approach

What is a blob? For semantic, I know: slot, pool, matrix,list, stack... and some others. Semantics has no blobs in any case. For example, "suno": sun, light. Is here a blob? Not. Continue...: sun, light, center (the only place for sun in a solar system). Is here a blob? Not. Next...: sun, light, center, glory (because the sun attracts the planets and it has correlation with social gravity -- popularity). This is no blob too. But, why? Because, the semantics is a structure: head, limbs, body... each meaning has own strong place in a word-sense pool. For me, the expression "semantic blob" sounds like an oximoron.

Paragraph 2; This is entirely circular. You are extremely proactive in "correcting" use of toki pona to reflect the way you think it should be used, and then you "merely" report on that... Trying to have cake and eating it, I think you must know this double standard is more than a bit disingenuous.

This "correcting use" is common property for... any language. It is not unique property of tp. Any language uses "entirely circular": as the way you think as the way you express your thoughts.

Paragraph 3; The contradiction of dictionaries in one language; When dictionaries are written in this way of course there is a floating foundation of meaning, yet we all use these types of dictionaries all the time. The idea is that the reader has a small subset of words that they already know, and can gather the meaning of words they do not based on that foundation. This is not a problem in any other natural language, and it's not a problem in toki pona. Although this issue is more in front view, since there are only 120 words in toki pona, giving rise to questions like; what subsets of words would be needed to understand the rest, is there a smallest subset?

I agree with you. tp must have own explanatory dictionary, at least, to help newbies. Each of them will say: I really understand tp. It means that you may help them to get... real (right) pu tp as you dream. For example, what is your variant for:

• jan (li sama e)...
• unpa (li sama e)...
• meli (li sama e)...
• mije (li sama e)...

or any other words, which you want. The hardest step is -- to start. If you follow pu, you already have some mastery in tp. the tp-world needs your help.

[janKipo]

Thanks for your comments.
I don't much care for "blob", but the idea there is very real and important. toki pona, as a language in its own right, doesn't create words tied to English (or whatever) but its own words, which we, learning the language, try to attach to English words. So, 'moku' doesn't have three or so meanings in tp, just one, which gets particularized in English translation in various ways, depending on context. You can call this one meaning a blob
since it looks amorphous from the perspective of English, but it is a simple unit in tp.

Just incidentally, I am not sure about 'suno' meaning "center" (as an English translation); that is more clearly 'insa'. "Center seems to step outside the "blob" which focuses on refulgence or so. So, "glory" fits in OK, but "center" in any geometric way not so much. To be sure, wearing one of my other hats, I think that there is (very much in theory) a universal list of properties in a multi-dimensional nexus and each language draws its vocabulary by slicing up this complex in its own unique way. So, in the Urtext of any sentence, each ultimate word starts out as a very precise item and loses that precision as it descends through the filters of a particular language (just as every sentence starts out perfect unamphibolous and becomes more musddles as it gets ground down by the grammar of a particular language).

So, to the one-language dictionary. This can only really work if that language has enough discrete items to cover all the places in the original nexus. No language does and tp, because of its size, less so than most. So far, all the attempt in tp have been ridiculously inadequate and inaccurate. I don't expect later attempt to be better. On the whole, the best way to learn the meanings of the words in tp is to use the words from L1 to explain them. You may not get the whole story and you may get some misinformation, but you will get a good start.