Any new obsolete meanings?

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
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janMato
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Any new obsolete meanings?

Post by janMato »

I haven't been paying that close attention for 2 years. Any additional words or meanings of current words become officially archaic? And more importantly, would the Bible translated into toki pona use archaic words?

mi lukin ala e toki pona lon suno sike tu. jan lawa la nimi seme li kama lon e nimi ala? ken la lipu mute pi nasin "Jesus" li kepeken e nimi ala?

(edits in bold)
Obsolete meaning
....

Obsolete Words and Numbers
pasila - good, easy. Use pona instead. (Does not mean stick!)- AFAIK, was never used.
iki - he/she/it, use "ona" instead.- AFAIK, was never used.
kan - the word for “with” or “among.” use "poka" instead- AFAIK, was never used.
kapa - hill, mountain, or a button, use "nena" instead.- AFAIK, was never used.
kapesi- brown, grey, use "pimeja" instead- AFAIK, was never used.
leko - stairs, square- AFAIK, was never used.
majuna - old, use "sin ala" instead. - AFAIK, was never used.
pata - sibling, brother, sister. Use "jan sama" - This is the odd one out in the section, as it is used rarely.
powe - unreal, false, untrue, pretend, deceive, trick, use, use "lon ala"- AFAIK, was never used.
tuli - three. See explanation for ‘po’, use "tu wan".- AFAIK, was never used.
po - four. "tu tu"- AFAIK, was never used.

Joke Word
kijetesantakalu- armadillo (probably obsolete because this was an April fools joke...or was it?) -

Updated to include words considered in polls:
ipi- he/she/it proposed alternative to iki, (which was too similar to ike), became ona- Has never been used.
wawa ma proposed canonical phrase for stone, became kiwen- Has never been used.
jalan proposed alt to noka - Has never been used.

Implied to be obsolete by the wiki
noka redirects to anpa in the wiki. It isn't clear if this is a death sentence for noka. Imho, the word has been in use too long.

Words in the wiki talk section.
pu Official word, but has no assigned meaning.
apeja "to single out - expose ; to reveale the guilt or wrongdoing of - to attack non-physically (verbally attack) - to expose to shame blame to fault accuse to cause to feel shame to dishonour, disgrace a painful emotion resulting from an awareness of having done something dishonourable, unworthy, degrading, etc."
pake Not clear what the destiny of this word is, or if it even is a word, it appears to mean "block the way"

Words That Are after the 118 (potentially new to *you*)
These words are official, have official meanings and the community is using them.
mani - money (well established)
esun - store (well established)
pan - bread (well established)

kipisi - to cut (still new to some people)
alasa - to hunt (still new to some people)
namako- spice, extra, unnecessary part, etc. (still new to some people)

monsuta - fear, to be afraid, to fear something (still new to some people)
Last edited by janMato on Tue Dec 07, 2010 6:17 pm, edited 15 times in total.
janKipo
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Re: Any new obsolete meanings?

Post by janKipo »

<<mi lukin ala e toki pona lon suno sike tu. jan lawa la nimi seme li kama lon e nimi ala? ken la lipu mute pi nasin "Jesus" li kepeken e nimi ala?>>
Was it uncomfortable on those two round suns? 'sike suno la mi lukin ala e toki pona.' 'suli mute la nimi seme pi tenpo pin li kama nimi ala' (not totally happy but 'kama' needs work). Lotsa nasin other than nasin Jesu use these pages.

This is an interesting list. I think everything is on it (note, btw, that 'pasila' doesn't now mean stick, that is 'palisa' -- glad we got rid of 'pasila') the suggested replacement of 'powe' is 'lon ala'

The kinkajou thing was a joke.
Pije
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Joined: Wed Sep 16, 2009 10:54 pm

Re: Any new obsolete meanings?

Post by Pije »

I can attest that leko, pata, and kan were definitely used in the early days of Toki Pona, circa 2002 and 2003. In particular, kan was a very commonly used word. However, you may not find any extant examples of these words being used. Back then, Toki Pona's "corpus" mostly consisted of chat room conversations (which were not preserved) among me, lament (Nikita), and Sonja. I remember putting up some resistance to the removal of kan, and I still would like to see it restored. I wasn't too pleased with the removal of pata, either, and I'm still not.
janMato
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Re: Any new obsolete meanings?

Post by janMato »

kan would be the best word to add back in-- there is a shortage of prepositions. Prepositions multiply the # of ideas you can express, it seems like the number of prepositions is a bottleneck (many choices for picking a complement of a preposition, but few choices for picking a preposition)

I guess toki pona must have gone through a complete recycling of community members about the time those words were phased out. When noka was on the chopping block, no one even noticed and they kept on using it.
janSilipu
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Re: Any new obsolete meanings?

Post by janSilipu »

I miss 'Leko', mainly for things like "corner" or "stairs". And 'pata' seemed a natural complement to 'mama'. But 'kan' does seemed covered by 'poka' and 'pata' somewhat by 'sama'. 'Leko' is still missing.
I expect the preposition shortage is disappearing as more people start using 'Lon N' etc. as a unit and the just 'N' (apparently what happened with 'poka').
Kuti
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Re: Any new obsolete meanings?

Post by Kuti »

we still have to stick to more or less 120 words.
I counted all the old and new words, i found 144. We can't bring them all back, this would be too much
janMato
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Re: Any new obsolete meanings?

Post by janMato »

Words that should die:

mu, a

They are the least word like of all the words.

Also, the word for a pangolin should stay dead and pu should die if it isn't going to be a grammatical particle. A hyperspecific jargon word is the moral equivalent of a proper modifier, so in a pu free world, people would say, kipisi pi lipu mute pi nasin Silami-- that being rather long, I image people might shorten it to kipisi Pu. Proper modifiers cover the semantic range of things for which there is only one of, things that are so specific that it doesn't make sense to describe them generically.

(I suppose I could be jan li lon ma Mewika li pali kepeken ilo sona (etc), bug jan Mato is more pragmatic)

So that would save 3 words. Of the apocrypha, so far, apeja seems useful, pake useless.

It's a pity that iconic writing hasn't and probably won't catch on in mass-- an iconic writing system would really squash the expansion of the lexicon-- you can't accidentally use what you don't have a symbol for.
TheRationalOne
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Re: Any new obsolete meanings?

Post by TheRationalOne »

Out of curiosity, why didn't you disregard Sonja and keep using "kan" anyway? Last I checked, languages are democracies.
janKipo
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Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm

Re: Any new obsolete meanings?

Post by janKipo »

'kan' clutters further an already cluttered space: 'kin', 'kon', ken'. So (as with 'ala'/ale', though more effectively), it was decided to look for "with (accompaniment)" somewhere else. Given the size of the word space and the small number of words, tp has a lot of clusters, most of which cause occasional problems (none worse that the 'al-' set, of course). Cleaning this up (aside from 'al-') seems to be more work than it is worth, though. But an occasional shift, like dropping 'kan' for 'poka', seems to get by without problems (nobody still uses 'kon', although some do refuse to use 'poka' alone).
xnite
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Re: Any new obsolete meanings?

Post by xnite »

janMato wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2013 10:52 am
(…) and pu should die if it isn't going to be a grammatical particle. (…)
guess what
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