I'm confused. So when we have a partially designed language, do you expect the more verbose or less verbose variant to be the expected variant? I'm saying that in partially defined languages, we have to look for rules of thumb to decide how the resolve the rest of the language. So in absence of the things that normally cause people to be prolix (giving them selves time to think, sounding more formal or polite, trying to paint a picture (like the way tolkien describes trees), people would be expected to choose what ever is shorter to say. If a speaker has an unacceptable pronoun, they'll have to look for something else, and if it isn't explicitly illegal, it might serve the role of a pronoun. Imho, the hard thing here is conclusively coming up with the diagnostic tests for what is a pronoun.jan Ote wrote: I prefer to not repeat 'jan' in the next sentence than to have one syllabe less. Avoiding monotony, boredom in talk/text is natural. More than counting syllabes.
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Some conlangs (e.g. Interlingua) aren't economical by design and their users like it, because they feel this more natural and usefull.
Re: Using "on" in Slavic languages-- "on" is masculine-animate. Slavic languages do have grammaticalized noun-categories, so not a very good parallel.
Re: Slavic pronoun dropping and using only the bound morpheme i.e. 3rd person singular verb suffix, (which covers much the same ground as ona in toki pona). Still not sure if this illuminates toki pona, because it isn't controversial that Slavic languages have grammaticalized noun-categories, even if they don't *always* use them.
If anything, this helps my case because if Slavic languages have noun categories even when they don't always use noun categories, then toki pona might have noun categories that sometimes are ignored.
I'm trying to assert that toki pona does have noun classes, and can be inferred by looking at it's pronoun system. The language definition originally made all sorts of assertions ("toki pona has no plurals", well, actually plurals exist, they're just optional, "it has no tense", well, actually it has tense, it is just optional) And exactly how optional? If one wants to be understood, some of these optional markers will appear 50%, 80%, 90% of the time. Somewhere along that cline the construction becomes an obligatory grammaticalization. The day that toki pona readers see "mi en jan Foo en jan Bar li musi. tempo ni la mi li pali ala" and think it's unacceptably ambiguous and instead consistently say "mi mute li pali ala", then "mi mute" might as well be obligatory.
Any how, I'm starting to think that if I tried to make my case based on modified pronouns (which have official precedent) I might have an easier time making my point.
ilo li olin e ilo. is wrong because if we used pronouns we'd get ona ilo li olin e ona ilo. And "ilo" class pronouns can't love or be loved.
jan ilo li olin e jan ilo is okay because if we use pronouns we'd get ona jan li olin e ona jan. And "jan" class pronouns can love and be loved.
Therefore toki pona has noun classes which explain the difference between "olin" and "pona tawa". And it looks like there are ~100+ noun classes (one per modifier in the tp lexicon). As a conclusion, it's probably not really provable or disprovable, so keep in mind here, this isn't exactly science.