kulupu nimi "sona 'Piloloki'" li pona ala pona?

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jan Ote
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kulupu nimi "sona 'Piloloki'" li pona ala pona?

Post by jan Ote »

aikidave wrote:
  meli lili mi li kama sona e sona 'Piloloki'.
I can see some questions here:
1. Is it a science named 'biology' or is it a 'philology'? ;)
2. Why to use English name for a science (even if it would be preceded by 'nimi Inli')? Science is universal.
3. How to say 'biology' in toki pona? We can say 'sona kasi' for botany ('plant science'), maybe 'sona pipi' for entomology ('insect science') or for arthropodology. We can use 'sona waso' for ornithology. We can try 'sona kala' for ichthyology (though not all 'kala' are fish). But 'zoology' is science of (soweli+akesi+waso+kala+pipi), and 'biology' is 'zoology'+'botany' (putting aside bacteria, viruses etc.). And tp does not have a word for 'to live', 'living', 'life' to substitute this 'bio-'...
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Re: kulupu nimi "sona 'Piloloki'" li pona ala pona?

Post by janKipo »

Oh dear! I never thought of philology, which does look just the same tpized.
Yes, one minor tremor in tp-land is that, for a positive language, it seems to have mainly negative words, so, in this case, death but not life, Strictly speaking, 'lon' means (inter a whole lot of alia) "alive," but 'sona lon' looks to me like ontology, not biology. I think having a single word for biota is probably untp, so maybe sciences are too (I would think not, however). Nice problem.
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Re: kulupu nimi "sona 'Piloloki'" li pona ala pona?

Post by janKipo »

Maybe it should be 'Pijoloki'?
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jan Josan
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Re: kulupu nimi "sona 'Piloloki'" li pona ala pona?

Post by jan Josan »

I think you could maybe generalize 'Biology' as "sona pi soweli en kasi" and be understood. but yeah, tp does not seem to make an easy distinction between "alive" and its opposite, or "organism" and "inorganic". maybe intentionally?
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Re: kulupu nimi "sona 'Piloloki'" li pona ala pona?

Post by jan-ante »

the problem is a bit bigger. there is no universally accepted definintion of life or living thing. there are some, like capability to give progeny or producing the negative enthropy, but they all have substential drawbacks. the branches of biology cannot be categorised according to the organisms they study, e.g. genetics (as well as the most of branches) studies all the organisms from hereditary point of view.
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Re: kulupu nimi "sona 'Piloloki'" li pona ala pona?

Post by janKipo »

I think the point is that tp is not for scientists or specialists of any sort, but for just folks doing just folksy things.
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Re: kulupu nimi "sona 'Piloloki'" li pona ala pona?

Post by jan Ote »

jan-ante wrote:the branches of biology cannot be categorised according to the organisms they study, e.g. genetics (as well as the most of branches) studies all the organisms from hereditary point of view.
Some branches of biology cannot be categorized this way. I doubt they are "the most of branches" (how to estimate it? just counting branches or using weights by number of scientists?). Anyway: biology is about living things, no matter how we want to divide this science.
jan-ante wrote:the problem is a bit bigger. there is no universally accepted definintion of life or living thing.
There is no universally accepted definition of anything (what is the definition of, say, bread?). The borders are fuzzy but they do exist. Biology is about insects but is not about stones. The problem is that there is no way to say in toki pona "a living thing", "it's alive". If one knows the concept of 'moli' - 'dead', then he must know the concept of 'alive'. No matter how precise the term "living" is.
josankapo wrote:I think you could maybe generalize 'Biology' as "sona pi soweli en kasi" and be understood.
It presumes that "soweli" (a mammal) means also, in a wider sense, "an animal", a common language category for mammals, reptiles, amphibia, fish, birds, insects and so on. Is it the case? In some languages 'bird' and 'fish' are not naturally subordinated to 'animal'. See Genesis -- the superordinate category is 'a creature'. Birds and fish are not 'animals', but they are 'creatures'. As janKipo has pointed out
janKipo wrote:tp is [...]for just folks doing just folksy things.
Folk taxonomy in ordinary common English (and in many European languages) goes as follows:
  living things: creatures, plants
  creatures: birds, fish, animals
  animals: mammals
  animals (wider sense): mammals, reptiles, insects
But... despite of this you're right, josankapo, in ordinary common language we use 'biology is about animals and plants', although we usually use 'animals'=='mammals' in any ordinary context.
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Re: kulupu nimi "sona 'Piloloki'" li pona ala pona?

Post by jan Josan »

jak Ote wrote: It presumes that "soweli" (a mammal) means also, in a wider sense, "an animal", a common language category for mammals, reptiles, amphibia, fish, birds, insects and so on. Is it the case? In some languages 'bird' and 'fish' are not naturally subordinated to 'animal'. See Genesis -- the superordinate category is 'a creature'. Birds and fish are not 'animals', but they are 'creatures'. As janKipo has pointed out.
I was looking for the most 'pona' definition, under the big assumption that the old definition of soweli (n animal, especially land mammal, lovable animal) could be attributed to the kingdom Animalia. You brought up bacteria and viruses, but we are all assuming kili are part of kasi, which would raise the ire of any Mycologist or mushroom connoisseur! So yes, it's really closest to the Carl Linnaeus definition, which wouldn't satisfy anyone at this point, strictly speaking.

You raise the interesting point, that it is not a just a lack of language which denies us a clear category, it's the lack of a universal definition. It reminds me of that great (fictitious) account by Borges:

"These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into
(a) those that belong to the emperor;
(b) embalmed ones;
(c) those that are trained;
(d) suckling pigs;
(e) mermaids;
(f) fabulous ones;
(g) stray dogs;
(h) those that are included in this classification;
(i) those that tremble as if they were mad;
(j) innumerable ones;
(k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush;
(l) etcetera;
(m) those that have just broken the flower vase;
(n) those that at a distance resemble flies."
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Re: kulupu nimi "sona 'Piloloki'" li pona ala pona?

Post by jan-ante »

jak Ote wrote: There is no universally accepted definition of anything (what is the definition of, say, bread?)
no, this is a joke.
If one knows the concept of 'moli' - 'dead', then he must know the concept of 'alive'.
to mi, moli is an irreversible destruction of something. e.g "kill the process", "my printer is dead". also i am not sure what is "living" for tp philosophy. may be stones are living things. at least some of them were alive ages ago. may be they still pilin ike when scientists crack them just to publish an article in prestigeous journal
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Re: kulupu nimi "sona 'Piloloki'" li pona ala pona?

Post by janKipo »

Well, one Daoist tradition would have the uncarved block (of stone) as the ideal, in some sense, but I don't think it means that it is alive: it just has all its potentials still available, not yet having been (mis)shaped in some way. To be sure, varieties of Daoism (but probably not the tp kind) do slop over into animism and popular spirituality in both China and Japan.
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