sitelen linja en sitelen supa

Tinkerers Anonymous: Some people can't help making changes to "fix" Toki Pona. This is a playground for their ideas.
Tokiponidistoj: Iuj homoj nepre volas fari ŝanĝojn por "ripari" Tokiponon. Jen ludejo por iliaj ideoj.
janKipo
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sitelen linja en sitelen supa

Post by janKipo »

If you want to really give a writing system that would help make tp better, I think the right move is to consider writing system that are non-linear, but rather two (at least, but I don't want to get too far ahead) dimensional. tp has only one deictic pronoun, 'ni,' and one anaphoric pronoun, 'ona.' If you have occasion (as I did just the other day) to want to point to two things verbally (typically sentences in tp) or want to refer back to two things, what do you do to make matters clear. Well, rewrite is one possibility, but one that often results in sentences that seem forced. As the saying goes, repetition is also anaphora; that is, rather than using 'ona,' you repeat the original expression, perhaps in a simplified form. But that is often awkward -- and not guaranteed to make the referent any clearer. Then there is tagging, dividing 'ni' into 'ni poka' and 'ni weka.' 'ona' into 'ona mije' and 'ona meli,' for example. The examples, though recreating familiar patterns from English in tp, are not going always to help, in just the way that "this/that" and "he/she" fail in English. So we could try adding 'nanpa wan' and 'nanpa tu" on (or some similar device -- though I can't think of another), with some rule about which is the first and which the second from the source for 'ona' and probably a 'la' clause added for linguistic 'ni.' But suppose we could use the second dimension to indicate what matches up with what: a line from anaphoric pronoun to referent, similarly lines from different modifiers to the modificand, maybe setting them vertically parallel to show they each apply equally.

At first this looks like nothing more than a minor elaboration of sentence diagramming. But, of course, it could be extended beyond sentences to paragraphs and whole discourses. More importantly (?), since this scheme is built on the assumption language spoken face to face conveys more than the written record, we could include indications of many of the clues that the direct situation uses: pitch, stress and juncture, posture, facial expressions and hand (etc.) motions, the whole of Labanotation and Stokoe on ASL. Any suggestions how to go about it (and that includes how to get a computer to cooperate)?
mije Wi
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Re: sitelen linja en sitelen supa

Post by mije Wi »

ona li ike. ni li pona tawa mi. o lukin e ni. ona li ni. nanpa wan la mi sona e ni. nanpa tu la mi sona e ante. nanpa tu wan la mi sona e ante ante.

I hope it was correct tp!
Bye
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janKipo
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Re: sitelen linja en sitelen supa

Post by janKipo »

The tp is fine, though I am not sure I get your point. Is the 'ona' a back reference to a suggested 2-D tp orthography?
mije Wi
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Re: sitelen linja en sitelen supa

Post by mije Wi »

nimi Ona nanpa wan li tawa toki sina. nimi Ona nanpa tu li tawa kon.
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janKipo
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Re: sitelen linja en sitelen supa

Post by janKipo »

Old questions: do you need a 'pi' before 'nanpa' in this construction? should the 'nanpa n' attach to 'nimi'? In this case, I think the answer tio the last is "No," but this is aesthetics. The first is still up for grabs, with cases on each side.

'toki tawa' looks like a good way to assigning referents, though I suspect there is a more technical way as well.

But why refer to air? Or do you mean it goes off in the air. tp gets wordy because so much context has to be crammed in to make the rest fit together
mije Wi
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Re: sitelen linja en sitelen supa

Post by mije Wi »

Maybe with pi it is better: one could express different meanings without pi (no e.g.)

The second ona is abstract (it was just to have a subject and have an example sentence).
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janKipo
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Re: sitelen linja en sitelen supa

Post by janKipo »

'nimi Ona nanpa tu li kon (taso)' Indeed, the whole sentence is unnecessary, since what you want us to see is just the three steps listed next. We really do try to avoid using the indefinite 'ona' although it comes from that usage in other languages.
mije Wi
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Re: sitelen linja en sitelen supa

Post by mije Wi »

Ok!
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jan Josan
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Re: sitelen linja en sitelen supa

Post by jan Josan »

I have been playing around with a non-linear hieroglyphic writing system for toki pona. It doesn't deal with referencing as you have described it, but you could easily try adding arrows in this manner. I just posted a link under the sitelen toki section of the forum under the subject line sitelen suwi.
janKipo
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Re: sitelen linja en sitelen supa

Post by janKipo »

Someone on another list, who works on non-linear writing systems (there is apparently a list for that), points out that the big problem with attaching reference comes with intersecting lines, which are topologically almost inevitable in 2-space. I suppose we could go to 3-space or at least pseudo-3 somehow.
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