Truth is probably somewhere in the middle of the opposite ends of the POS question. Modifiers and nouns are open categories, Verbs mostly open, VT and VI maybe closed, auxillary verbs almost closed, prep almost closed, clitics completely closed. I'm starting to doubt the value of the original spec as embodied by things like the classic word list, too. There is so little jan Sonja canon, that unless we say canon is jan Pije text, toki pona has already moved into the realm of a natural language. The language is evolving without a central authority.janKipo wrote:<<sina ijo moku" can still mean "you objectify food", so it's not unambiguous.>> Needs 'e' for that reading, not that I want to encourage more detailed (or less) definitions of "spam." I like 'mu'.
Copula are redundant.
If you change 'ijo' from a Noun, to something else which is never a verb, you probably have to change other words as well; including some whose verbing is very useful (not that 'ijo's isn't sometimes). BTW "you objectify food" is probably the more intelligible and reasonable reading of the (corrected) sentence. I see Mato has come up with others that would have to move, doing away with 'wawa suno.' 'ike sijelo' 'suwi pan' 'jan sona oko' 'ma nena' 'jan soweli' soweli mani' and on and on.
I guess I'm off topic--tenpo suno tawa ni jan li lukin tawa olin sin.