Toki Pona Forums

I was recently reading about the syntax of English adjectives. It appears that natural languages have characteristic orders for the adjectives by what sort of adjective they are.
ref: http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/qu ... tive-order
ref: http://english.stackexchange.com/questi ... tive-order

So when we follow in toki pona what seemed like a logically natural order dictated by pragmatics and the way the world is, may be we are just following our mother tongues syntax.

Shouldn't toki pona's adjective order, preposition order etc, be random?

Probably not, if only for practical reasons: some modifiers fit into several classes ('mute' as number and intensifier, 'lili' as number size/age and intensifier, and so on). But what that order should be is unclear. And we have also to consider the issue of deeper meanings for strings: Noun Adjective, Verb Subject, Verb Object and so on, which will surely affect these issues.

Following Sonja's reasoning for putting the noun first, it seems logically their might be some pattern that wants the most significant adjective next to the noun, and less significant on down. But I think the real issue might be decided by which words could ambiguously modify the head noun as well as the adjective before it.

How would you unambiguously say "many big birds"? My instinct is to say "waso mute suli" instead of "waso suli mute". Maybe it's still ambiguous, but "suli mute" definitely seems like it could be confused for "really big" to me.

Do we ever use 'en' in this context? "Waso suli en mute"?

If a color is added, it seems to stand on its own, and can always be separated with a pi: "waso mute suli laso" anu "waso mute suli pi kule laso". I think that makes color a good contender for last in line. Again if the mute comes last it seems like it could be mistaken as "very blue".

I'd say that waso suli mute must be big birds, because it is waso suli, and then you add mute to that.
Very big words I think should be waso pi suli mute.

Second Delphij; that is just what 'pi' is for. Where to put 'laso' is harder, but "bluely very big bird" doesn't make as much sense to me as "blue very big bird", though "very big blue bird" is clearer still and thus 'waso laso pi suli mute'. But I don't know if that reasoning holds in tp.