POS - first pass

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janMato
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Re: POS - first pass

Post by janMato »

janKipo wrote:Well, I don't know what languages these might be that a native speaker doesn't learn until he's 11 or so
John McWorter, lecture notes from "The Story of Human Language" p122 "Cree and Ojibiwa are so complex that children are not fully competent in them until the age of 10" McWorter is an expert on pidgins and creoles. He sees the creoles as being the simplified languages with all the hard stuff left out because immigrant plantation workers in the field can't be bothered to learn the irregularities or hard parts of the host country. On the other hand, when language communities are at rest for 1000s of years without needing to make concessions to adult language learners, you get American Indian language and Georgian levels of complexity.

Among the IE languages, Danish has a reputation for causing delayed speech among children on account of it's fierce phonetics (the grammar is no more complicated than Swedish or Norwegian), I can't find the ref at the moment.

The relative difficultly of an adult learning a language is confounded by the fact that adults know one language and will be able to learn similar languages easily. The research on children's language acquisition is a better measure of how complicated the language is. For example, kids learning English go through a phase of over-applying rules (assuming past tense is regular for all verbs). I assume the corresponding Esperanto speaking child would get to that stage at about the same time, but once he was there, he's done, while the English speaking child is just getting started on learning the exceptions to the rules.
From what I remember of the talk a few years ago, the claim that kelen is verbless is a matter of definitions.
Someone once said of a verbless conlang that glossed everything as "being-in-a-state-of", "The author is-in-a-state-of pulling our leg."

All of the languages with small numbers of verbs tend to also have inflections. When I looked at the language with 3 verbs, the 3 verb part was a morpheme embedded in a fierce long looking word (it looked like verbs were formed by taking nouns and adding do-make-go to them, the final word is more complex than a 3 verb language implies).
I'm not sure that regular adverbs (pona, ike, mute. musi, etc.) should ever go in the 'la' phrase; the place and time cases are another matter
I think this is going to depend on how the post verb-pre e grammar evolves. As long as we can presume that that section is a negation or adverb, then no problems. As soon as it could be several things, then it's going to be better to move manner to a la phrase just to keep it separate. (imho)
There are a few verbs which also take NP complements: definitely 'nimi' (N) takes the name involved when transitive: 'jan li nimi "Jowan" e jan lili sama' (deferred using 'kepeken' apparently). There has been a suggestion that the verbs (all actually V, I think) that take quotations as deferred direct objects mark the subject of the thought/talk/writing as a modifier of the verb (so, using 'pi' if more than one word is involved) and I suppose that making it a NP complement instead would serve as well (though I am coming around to thinking that the habitual solution, just putting it in as the DO, makes as much sense as -- or more than -- other proposals).
Still feels like a gap in the specs. If I was feeling conservative, I'd say: jan li pana e nimi Jowan tawa jan lili sama. The prep phrases are pragmatically off center stage and that is a problem, I suppose it could be solved by moving it post-verb/pre-e, having 2 e-phrases, having what looks like a PP before the e, I'm not sure if any of these are better than the other. If I was feeling avant garde, I would say-- jan li nimi pi nimi Jowan e jan lili sama. It needs a separator, and once a separator there the proper modifier has to modify something. If it wasn't a proper modifier, then we'd have a oddity, a pi followed by 1 word. Anyhow, pi sometimes feels like the separator of last resort.
(btw, how is 'toki e ni:S' significantly more verbose than "say that S", which it mirrors exactly?)
Noun phrases often need to be repeated to force co-ordination.
mi toki e sona ni: sona li pana e nanpa wawa tawa jan. I'm talking how knowledge of numbers give us power.
mi pona e ilo ni: kulupu sona li jo e ilo jan. I'm repair the schools robot. (ok, it's a bad example because it doesn't *have* to co-ordinate in this sentence)

No POS masquerades as another POS, but some words may function in the home function of a POS not its own. Indeed, in tp, most words can and a goodly number do.[/quote]
janKipo
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Re: POS - first pass

Post by janKipo »

But the example given is of a DO in the subject slot, not of a NP complement. Still, you won't be using these objectionable forms and I doubt that many other will either, so its legitimacy is moot. It has been great fun (and considerable information) arguing with you. Maybe another point will come along for a new exchange.
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jan Ote
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Re: POS - first pass

Post by jan Ote »

janKipo wrote:
janMato wrote:
a! mi kama sona. mi sona e kasi loje sama ni. ona li soweli tomo e mi. (little prince)
Oof! maybe 'soweli tomo mi' but I basically don't get it.
Oh, no! The syntax is correct. It was the Flower who tamed the Little Prince:
"Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world . . ."

"I am beginning to understand," said the little prince. "There is a flower . . . I think that she has tamed me..."
...li soweli tomo e ... = to tame, domesticate
In the beginning of the chapter:
"mi ken ala musi e sina. mi soweli tomo ala."
 "I cannot play with you," the fox said. "I am not tamed."
... and so on, all chapter about 'taming'. Context makes meaning.
janKipo
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Re: POS - first pass

Post by janKipo »

Thanks. Yes, context is all. And I still have trouble recognizing -- let alone interpreting -- nouns as vt. How, for example to distinguish those that mean "cause to be" from those that mean "apply to".And, of course, is this a real (in tp terms) difference?
janMato
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Re: POS - first pass

Post by janMato »

Re: noun as verb meaning "cause to become"

I would have said
sina kama kama soweli tomo e mi. I don't like this too much either because unmarked complements make the most sense with prep phrases and it awkward look to parse this as a prep phrase with a modal and a direct object.
you - (modal) prep phrase - come to/become - house animal - DO - me.
janKipo
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Re: POS - first pass

Post by janKipo »

But 'kama kama soweli tomo' is a VP complement to a modal, which VP is again a VP complement to a modal. The second VP is a noun +modifier. No prepositions involved. I am not sure quite what to make of the first 'kama', apparently meaning "cause to" or some such, but then that seems to require a DO of what is caused, not a complement. 'kama soweli e DO' is enough for cause to become, the vt from the vi "become". This all needs some work, apparently.
Last edited by janKipo on Tue Aug 17, 2010 1:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
janMato
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Re: POS - first pass

Post by janMato »

D'oh! mi pakala.

the classic word list says "tan" and "pana" have something to do with "cause" I have no idea where I got the idea that "li kama X" mean "to cause to X"

So it would be

mi pana kama soweli tomo e soweli nasa.
I cause (to bring about/summon) domesticated animal the wild animal.

Now the problem is that soweli tomo is post verb, pre "e", which I haven't figured out if this is legit, reasonable or what.
janKipo
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Re: POS - first pass

Post by janKipo »

'soweli tomo' is a verb phrase, which happens to consist of a noun phrase (mutter, mutter!) meaning "be a domestic beast", just as it would be ijn a simple pointing at a cat: 'ni li soweli tomo.'
Remotely relevant, I now thing that 'x li N e DO' just means "x makes 'DO li N' true" and then the separation between "cause to be" and "apply to" comes out in the ambiguity of 'y li N' : "y is an N" and 'y is Nish'; 'ona li telo' might be "it is water" or it might be "it is wet", for example. The noun use and the modifier use,
Sorting out the causatives here is a muddle that I haven't got much of a grip yet:
'tan' means "source, cause" as a noun, "original, causal" maybe as modifier. So, to be totally confusing, 'x is the cause of y' might be either 'x li tan (pi) y' or 'y li tan x' (definitely no 'pi'). That means that 'tan' is not aa good word to use about causes, except in fixed expressions like 'tan ni'.
I'm not sure about 'pana' as a causal notion; it does move something along, but this seem really physical for the most part. It might make sense to say, say, 'jan sewi li pana e lon tawa jan' but 'ona li pana e ni: jan mute li utala' doesn't seem right (possbly as granting a wish?)
'kama' gets involved in "cause" because it somehow gets the "cause to be true" sense when transitive, but that doesn't fit in well with other modals (and, indeed, 'kama' is strange there anyhow). But 'ona kama e ni: jan mute li utala' seems OK. All very subjective.
majika
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Re: POS - first pass

Post by majika »

hey guys,

I ended up on this thread while trying to understand "mi lon luka mi e telo pona" on Toki Pona Dave's site (http://sites.google.com/site/tokiponadave/).

I found myself struggling with the concept of "lon luka mi" as (apparently) a transitive verb, describing the action that "mi" was doing to the "telo pona". This doesn't make much sense to me, given what I learnt about "lon" from Lesson 6 (http://bknight0.myweb.uga.edu/toki/lesson/lesson6.html).

The only use of "lon" with "e" that I could see was "mi lon e sina", meaning something along the lines of "I bring you into existence".

Given that "X li lon e Y" means that X brings Y into existence, it seems natural to me that a construction like "X li lon Z e Y" would see Z as an adverb to the verb "to bring into existence".

So going back to "mi lon [luka mi] e telo pona": this seems to parse as "I bring [in a my-handly manner] the good/clean water into existence". You can see why this left me scratching my head somewhat.. ;)

I've since fathomed that "mi lon luka mi e telo pona" was written to mean something like "I place my hands where the clean water is / I wash my hands". For the reasons explained above, I believe that this is an error.

The lessons give the example "mi telo e luka mi" for "I wash my hands". Given that, I can't see what's wrong with "mi telo e luka mi kepeken telo pona".
janKipo
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Re: POS - first pass

Post by janKipo »

Actually, it means "I put good water on my hands/arms". Dave may have meant to say "I put my hands in good water," which is "mi lon telo pona e lukin mi". This is a perfectly normal construction, but tends to be a confusing one, so nobody but Dave and I use it regularly. The usual form would unfold the central complex to "mi lon e telo pona lon lukin mi" The point is that 'lon' is a Preposition, meaning "at", like 'tawa' and 'tan', and thus can have a noun phrase following it that is not an object (i.e., doesn't require 'e'). And it has this feature in all positions. So, in an intransitive verb slot, it means "be true" or "be present" In the latter case, without its noun complement it means either "be here" (Roll call: 'jan Siwawi?' 'lon') or "exist" (be present in the world generally). With the complement it means "be at" the named place. Then, like many intransitive verbs, it can be made transitive in a causative sense: Subj causes DO to [whatever the verb is. in this case "be present (at NP, if provided)]. So the whole is "I cause good water to be present at my arms" (presumably by moving the water, not the arms). If the point is just washing, your sentence would do as well but be less flashy.
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