Controversial Phrases

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janKipo
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Re: Controversial Phrases

Post by janKipo »

Looks like, but isn't. Although 'sike' isn't officially a preposition, or at least doesn't have an assigned meaning,
Yes, we are neutral, as planned and I don't see a reason to change. Part of the deal is to get way from misleading emotional involvement, whereby one can be persuaded to act against one's own best interest, by framing the presentation in apparently descriptive, but actually loaded, language (cf. the current health bill debate).
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Re: Controversial Phrases

Post by janMato »

janKipo wrote:Yes, we are neutral, as planned and I don't see a reason to change.
Neutral sounding writing isn't a sign of neutral thought. I think this so-far rare occurrence of good opinionated compound words is the communities lack of experience with language. The wikia article on cars take a strong anti-car, anti-sprawl stand but the writer didn't have the phrasal vocabulary to express what they were thinking and come across as being less opinionated. http://tokipona.wikia.com/wiki/tomo_tawa
janKipo wrote:Part of the deal is to get way from misleading emotional involvement, whereby one can be persuaded to act against one's own best interest, by framing the presentation in apparently descriptive, but actually loaded, language (cf. the current health bill debate).
So a hypothetical health care debate in toki pona would be grounded in the merits and not in prejudice, self interest over the communities interest? I think that is more than a language can be asked to do.

Maybe in Vulcan, but Vulcan comes with an explicit conculture that emphasize logic, reason over emotion and intuition.
(Wow I found a link to Vulcan: http://web.archive.org/web/200410192204 ... master.htm)

Toki pona is missing scales of this sort: ill-considered, sort of bad, bad, very bad, inconvenient, problematic, catastrophic--- but it's a matter of time before these phrases are coined and become widespread.

By this measure (of simply no knowing good opinionated compound words), I should be able to engage in calm, rational discussions in Icelandic because I don't yet know enough words at the extreme ends of any scales. (Bad is vond and I'm not sure what word would mean something worse)
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Re: Controversial Phrases

Post by janKipo »

Of course there can be opinionated views (are there any other kind?) but they can be expressed without triggering merely emotional responses. That is, you may get an emotional response but it is based on the content of the view expressed, not merely on its mode of expression. I have actually seen abortion discussions between deeply committed people on both sides that vigorously laid out the positions and the supporting information without once using "baby-killer" or "womb Nazi" or, indeed, any other charged words, finding even mutually acceptable words for the being in utero. You have to look hard for them but they are out there. And, of course, much of it was still based on prejudice (mainly shown in cherry-picking the available information) and on various sorts of self interest. But the point is that it was carried on in a non-arousing way. You might be swayed, even aroused, by the arguments but again this was reaction to content, not wording. And indeed, there were use of strong disapprobation (and approbation, for that matter) on each side, but these value judgments based on principles an data, not merely soul-stirring battle cries.
tp is lousy at nuance (hell, it's lousy at oldance or whatever the opposite is), but it can build up what it needs from the material at hand: mute & lili, pakala (and no opposite), and so on. But they don't have to be blindly enraging or seducing.
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jan Josan
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Re: Controversial Phrases

Post by jan Josan »

Another factor we have in toki pona is the extreme lengths we go to just to discover the right words for even neutral concepts. If it takes a page of forum posts to decide if the definition of a zebra does injustice to the panda, or how many years now to find left-side and right-side definitions that don't insult the 1 in 12,000 people with Dextrocardia, I can imagine any emotionally charged definition will have to go through a thorough vetting before it's allowed into the co-op. And to be accepted it would have to please both those who are invested in the concept, as well as those who are invested in proper grammar!

As far as abortion goes, I think it would have to involve a "weka" of some kind, or at least a 'pini'. For the foetus-not-yet-child we had a definition for seed floating around in the modals at one point, 'ken kama' I believe. So my vote would be for something of the "weka pi ken kama jan" variety.
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Re: Controversial Phrases

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And yet we have no trouble insulting half the world with our words for North and South. Part of the trouble is that, whether we like it or not, expressions we make up for a particular occasion tend to become fixed and used on other occasions when they are less germane (or where other expressions would work better). Having a dictionary encourages this, even though the official line is that the expressions there are exemplary not final. And part of that is just laziness; it is hard to make up an apt expression every time and it is even harder to puzzle out one every time, so we fall back on the tried and (often not so) true. And part is practical in another way: if people in both North and South American called their continent 'Mewika Lete' some confusion would surely arise sometime soon. And yet contextualism should be a guiding principle in tp. So, there are problems. (I don't want to go on about abortion except to note that part of the emotional work is done by universalizing expressions which are quite correct and informative in some contexts; they jar in alien contexts.)
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Re: Controversial Phrases

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jan Josan wrote:Another factor we have in toki pona is the extreme lengths we go to just to discover the right words for even neutral concepts. If it takes a page of forum posts to decide if the definition of a zebra does injustice to the panda, or how many years now to find left-side and right-side definitions that don't insult the 1 in 12,000 people with Dextrocardia
a a a! ken la mi wile e toki sin tawa jan pi pilin lon poka ante.
"weka pi ken kama jan" variety.
Good solution. Science based. I'll have to put some thought into how to express homunculus-removal, so we can get the medieval viewpoint.
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Re: Controversial Phrases

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janKipo wrote:And yet we have no trouble insulting half the world with our words for North and South.
Has anyone done so yet?
ma Mewika lete/ma Mewika seli are just bad science (of the sun circling the earth sort), they forget that it's the pole that are cold, no the southern hemisphere.
jan pi ma pi poka lete en jan pi ma pi poka seli li lon ma ante mute.
People from polar regions and equatorial regions are in very different lands.

For it to be insulting, then lete would have to mean cold in some other sense. The English metaphor of course is COLD is UNFRIENDLY, WARM is FRIENDLY. Probably a lot of opinionated compound words/phrases have metaphors embedded in them.

jan moli li lete e jan ante. The killer (or animated corpse) iced the other guy.
jan moli li moli lete e jan ante. (killed in a cold sort of way)
jan moli li lete moli e jan ante. (iced him in a deadly sort of way)
janKipo
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Re: Controversial Phrases

Post by janKipo »

I don't suppose that anyone thought the southern hemisphere was hotter than the northern and so on, they just though that is where heat comes from for me. As for insults, this is just picking up on the comment about dextrocardiacs and our regular refusal to identify the left side with where the heart is (not that that would be terrible useful to a lot of people). I think importing English connotations is exactly what I don't want to see happen, unless everyone gets it (well, consensus including a number of non-native English speakers at least). If you want a language where the word for cold also refers to unfriendliness, you know where to find it.
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jan Ote
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Re: Controversial Phrases - tenpo sike

Post by jan Ote »

tenpo sike
janMato wrote:Toki pona clearly favors recent science. Even if I personally found science to be bunk, I can't use "circle sun" to mean day, unless I want to be misunderstood.
ale pi tempo suno la mi pali. I worked all day.
ale pi sike suno la mi pali. I worked all year.
'tenpo sike' is "time it takes the earth to go around the sun" OR "time it takes the sun to go around the earth" if you prefer the other view. In both, heliocentric and geocentric, models it would be the same expression, so why do you think this expression favors recent science?
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Re: Controversial Phrases - tenpo sike

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jan Ote wrote:tenpo sike
janMato wrote:Toki pona clearly favors recent science. Even if I personally found science to be bunk, I can't use "circle sun" to mean day, unless I want to be misunderstood.
ale pi tempo suno la mi pali. I worked all day.
ale pi sike suno la mi pali. I worked all year.
'tenpo sike' is "time it takes the earth to go around the sun" OR "time it takes the sun to go around the earth" if you prefer the other view. In both, heliocentric and geocentric, models it would be the same expression, so why do you think this expression favors recent science?
oy! Now my head hurts. When you have 2 or 3 words all related by a near universal relationship, they can fit a lot of models including contradictory ones. I have the same problem dealing with the word for eclipse "mun li pimeja e suno", there is no straight forward way to collapse it to a noun phrase-- however, sike suno/tempo sike is the result of such a collapse.

The two meanings for tempo sike can't co-exist in a single discourse and expect people to understand each other-- tenpo sike would be radically different things. I you are a heliocentric believer and I am a geocentric believer then when we agree to meet in tempo sike wan, we will show up after a year and a day respectively.

The full phrases are "tempo sike suno" (geocentric day) and "tempo sike ma" and the fullest phrases would be whole sentences (see below). The sort-of-official dictionaries say "sike suno", although I see people using tempo sike. To parse tempo sike, I have to know by context what you personally believe, or know what the convention is in toki pona. Which happens to be heliocentric.

Heliocentric:
tempo suno = day
tempo pi sike suno /sike suno = year ... time it takes earth to go around the sun, ma li tawa sike suno. (The sun has several concentric circles around it, the earth is traveling on one)
tempo sike ma = year... time it takes earth to go around the sun, ma li tawa sike ma. (The earth travels a circle and owns it)

Geocentric
tempo suno = day
tempo pi sike suno/sike suno = day. suno li tawa sike ma.
tempo suno pi sike sike = season, time of an epicycle of the sun.

Neutral
tempo pimeja en suno = day. Time of sun and dark. This is most neutral of all because it sums of the entire model, where as tempo suno means 24 hours of which only some are daylight.
tempo pi lete en seli = time of warm and cold season, a year (in temperate regions)
tempo pi telo anpa en telo ala = time of rain and drought, a year (in India)
Last edited by janMato on Sun Mar 21, 2010 10:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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