Toki Pona Forums

Also, words like "lipu" and "palisa" could be represented quite well by Chinese classifier words.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ch ... lassifiers

I like the idea that a Chinese speaker could look at Toki Pona written in Chinese characters and be able to guess at the meaning, even without knowing any of the vocabulary.

Nice, but way too complex for anything but calligraphic use.

janTe wrote:
la -- 地 (comes after adverbials, just like 'la')

but it is ma

e -- 得 (comes after verbs, much like 'e')

this is ken

pi -- 的 (kinda like 'pi', except backwards; In Chinese you'd say "A 的 B", where TP would say "B pi A".)

interesting. from old japanese one could take 之 (not really pi as regroupping operator, but a genitive case)

I didn't know 得 could mean ken. Is that a Japanese usage? My Chinese knowledge is fairly rudimentary, but I haven't seen it meaning ken in Chinese.

I was aware that 地 could also mean ma, but I thought 土 would be better choice of ma for our purposes.

Then again, maybe punctuation would be better for representing structural particles after all.

janTe wrote:I didn't know 得 could mean ken. Is that a Japanese usage? My Chinese knowledge is fairly rudimentary, but I haven't seen it meaning ken in Chinese.

yes

Then again, maybe punctuation would be better for representing structural particles after all.

definitely

I just stuck this in to show (paradoxically) that I don't have to have the last word in every discussion.

If using Japanese Kanas, i purpose Katakana for tp words and Hiragana for proper adjectives.

I also liked the idea of writing without spaces. In this case, one could use Hiragana for the first syllable and Katakana for the others. But then, what about proper adjectives?

I really don't like the idea of using a different kind of symbols for li, la, o and the like.

Yes, indeed. If you leave out spaces, you have to have a unique way to mark the beginning of each word (tp speech streams are not generally uniquely analyzable). The shift to hiragana will not do it, since it might be a proper adjective -- and it might not be even if the next character is also hiragana. Having tried to read ancient texts, where spaces were not used, I can assure you that it is not easy to do. As always, of course, I say what is wrong with the Latin alphabet? On the other hand, if what you want is decoration, where the actual content of the sentences is not important or is well known, then, of course, anything goes.

I think this: if Toki Pona had originated before its writing system, it would use a syllabic or ideographic writing system. There is another good reason: I would like writing Japanese a lot.

I think thatis correct; syllabaries seem natural to tp as to Japanese. But, the history of the world being what it is, ...