Languages evolve through many mechanisms including rebracketing, where one word splits into two or they merge, often as a result of a misunderstanding or ignorance of the origin of the words.

kepeken - to realize an ability, to manifest  an ability.

ken- potential, ability

* kepemoku - to manifest food, to farm.

* kepejan - to manifest a person, to conceive or give birth

suli, lili, seli, great, small, hot– all various ends of a scale

*janli - man sized

*okoli - eye sized

Online communities, I have recently come to believe are a mixed blessing for constructed languages.  On one hand, for the last few hundred years of constructed languages, they typically languished without any attention at all because the audience for constructed languages is so thinly spread out, it was nearly impossible to get critical mass for a new language using traditional media.

Klingon, Na’vi and toki pona probably would all have disappeared at birth without mailing lists.  At the moment only Lojban seems to have had a serious pre-internet community and even Lojban would be a shadow of it is now without the internet. So what is not to love about using the internet at the primary place to find and build a community for your or your favorite conlang?

In my roamings online since last November, I’ve decided there are some serious pitfalls.

The internet affect (or compromises) language design. Even English gain a new vocabulary and is probably on the verge of new grammatical constructions from it’s use online.  Emoticons, ALL-CAPS means shouting, /commands, the threaded discussion, replacing diacritic letters with letter followed by x, all are changes to the language to adapt it to online needs.  A designed language has goals, such as being true to a fictional culture, a certain social goal–such as cross border communication, a certain therapeutic effect, and many other whimsical goals peripheral to the needs of facilitating keyboard mediated written communications amongst strangers widely dispersed across time and place.

Civility and Fight Club. “Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low.”  All online communities run the risk of griefers, trolls, people who treat the internet like some sort of fight club.  Even discussing the internet’s level of civility is a losing battle, with camps of people imagining that it isn’t a even a problem to begin with.  Those who do see it as a problem, often have no recourse but to leave the community.  This starts a downward spiral until most online communities are fight clubs, inhabited by  only those who are looking for a fight, enjoy fighting or can’t tell the difference between discourse and fighting anymore.

Someday, there might be a social or technical solution, such as human moderation, comment voting.  In the conlang world, prospects don’t look good.

In my years of living the real world, I’ve never encountered the number fights, and nastiness that just pops up all over the place in online communities, some I’m just observing, some of it I end up on one end or the other.  Obviously, for many this is a non-issue.  They either enjoy fight club or are oblivious to it.  For me, each fight is a colossal distraction. As they say, if you can’t take the heat, stay out the kitchen.  I now choose to stay out of the online community kitchen.  I’ll use the internet for organizing in person meetups, posting my letters in a bottle to no one on my blog, but I’ve pretty much had it with participating in online communities.

Stay tuned for my next article on how to build communities for conlangs using real world resources.

If you double all the parts of a sentence, you get something like this:

C1 la C2 la S1 en S2 li V1 li  V2 e O1 e O2 Prep NP1 Prep NP2.

With great power comes great responsibility. Unfortunately, we lack  co-ordinating machinery to co-ordinate this interleaved sentence except in a few cases.  Worse, by the time you realize that your interleaved sentence looks wrong, it’s too late.

C1 la C2 la is roughly additive adverbs that apply to all verbs.

S1 en S2 are subjects that did both action.

e O1 e O2 were the target of both actions.

NP1 Prep NP2 modifies the entire sentence.

If V1 is instansitive and V2 is transitive, both objects go with the transitive verbs.

If both verbs are transitive, check to see if co-ordination can be done semantically.  If not, you’ll need to split the sentence.

mi en sina li jo li moku e ilo moku e moku linja pan.  You and held a fork and ate spaghetti.

Like most toki pona sentences, the above has many nonsense readings, which can be safely ignored.

Some prepositions don’t make sense with certain verbs.  Preps resolve to the verbs they go with, and no the others.  If a prepositional phrase could go with either, consider using multiple sentences.

Sequential Interleaving.

mi li pali li moku li lape e pali mi e moku mi.  I did my work, ate my dinner and slept.

Again, this has a nonsense alternative of “I worked and ate and slept my work and food.”, which we can safely ignore.

Mixing predicates and SVO sentences

Predicative sentences and SVO sentences probably shouldn’t be mixed unless you double check for plausible ambiguities.

mi li suli.

mi li suli li pali e sijelo sama.  ? I am big and I work out./I increase the size of and work out my body.

? mi lon tomo mi li lape.
? I’m in my room, sleeping.

Mixing predicate and SVO sentences is outside of what wikipedia says we can do with toki pona, but I suspect people will do it anyhow.

Toki pona is an isolating language.  The 125 morphemes do not fuse, so it is somewhat like Chinese.  This makes it tricky to discuss compounding and derivational morphology because the linguistic jargon that is established almost universally assumes that words are created by solidly glomming words together.  Most derivational morphology is going on at the phrasal level in toki pona.

Compound words that include prepositions as modifiers must split or mutate in the nominative.

jaki lon nena sinpin  => jaki pi nena sinpin li tawa anpa sinpin mi. (change preps to pi)

OR jaki li tawa anpa sinpin mi lon nena sinpin. (move prep to end of sentence)

kule lon palisa luka => kule pi palisa luka

Compound words must be internally grammatical phrases as if they were stand alone.  This is analogous to chemen-de-fer in French, which retains prepositions in compound words.  Compound words in toki pona can contain modifiers, pi-phrases, and prepositional phrases.  Compound words can’t contain la, li or e phrases, i.e. no adverbials, verbs or direct objects.

Compound words can include conjunctions, but these compound words can only be use with prepositions and adverbial clauses, not in accusative!  Worse, there is no obvious transform to make it legal in the accusative.  More likely, the phrase grammar rules will be updated to disallow the accusative form of conjunctions between two head nouns, but allow conjunctions words in a pi phrase.

? soweli tawa pimeja en walo- zebra

(possibly should be soweli tawa pi kule pimeja en kule walo)

mi lukin e soweli tawa pi kule pimeja en kule walo.

Compound words that are modified by verbal phrases are not part of the language yet. I’m waiting to see how long it will take before it does.

Compound words with multiple modifiers can express themselves in multiple orders and it is the same word.

palisa noka lili - toe

palisa lili noka  - toe

Compound words have subset-anaphora. One could use “ona”, but because “ona” can agree with anything, it is more prudent to repeat the head of the compound word instead.  The sloth of the writer is paid for by the reader.

palisa noka lili mi li jo e pilin ike.  palisa li jo e kule loje.

My toes are sick.  They have a blue tinge to them.

Other imaginable variations include,

ona palisa  li jo e kule loje.  (pronoun with head word as modifier)

palisa noka li joe e kule loje.  (head plus one of the modifiers)

When you chart the frequency of words used in the corpus, you can see that the distribution is the combination of two curves, probably because function words are common and content words less so.  Some words play both roles.

Words 1-5 is the steep descent.  Words 6-36 are above the line for Zipf’s law.  I think this is because they are both content and function words.  Among them are the words we’d expect to find in a derivational morphology system:

suli- Augmentive (undivisible things),  e.g. kasa suli, tree
mute- Augmentive (divisible things) e.g. tomo mute, city.
sona- -ology, e.g. sona toki, e.g. linguistics (note that sona comes first, unlike -ology in English!)
ala- -un, e.g. kepeken ala, e.g. without (note this is a derivation on a preposition!)
lili- Diminutive (both divisible and indivisible things), e.g. jan lili, child
jan and ma are both important because they are the required head noun to loan words for countries and geographic locations.

And soon I’ll discuss the rest of the ways words can be created in toki pona (change of POS, loan words and eponyms).

The old official numbering system was, ala, wan, tu, mute, or a the limited roman style This was a roman system, e.g. W, T, TW, TT, TTW, TTT, TTTW, etc.  A ternary place value system would have been better, but just as verbose.

The official number system is a Roman style number system.  I sort of like it when written in Roman style, but only when written, and only for numbers up to about 159.   After 159, the length of the numbers starts to get unbearably long.

The don’t do math option.

This option is good up unto the point where you decide to translate anything of substance, eventually years will come up.  It’s even possible famous equations will come up, like e=mc^2.  Doubly so for non-fiction.

I recommend using wan, tu, mute when you are not in the mood for numbers. Use roman-style for numbers up to 160 or so, but when you aren’t doing math.  And for all other numbers, establish a system within your text and then uses it.  If I was going to invent a new kind of algebra, I might need to create a new notation. But once described, I’d be able to use it, using English, and no one would accuse me of re-plumbing English.  I think the situation is the same for constructed languages where the designer didn’t bother to work out the full number system.  And why should they? Each language designer designs a language for their own goals, and that is a good thing.

Options for Digits

- Assign base words with a vague sense of quantity to specific numbers.

In fact, this is the current state of affairs.

- Colors.

A color system either reuses the electrical resistor number system, or  the colors from ROYGBIV scale are mapped to decimal digits.

- Body Parts

Papa New Guinean natives will count along an imaginary line along their body.  For example nose could be one, lips  two, chin three, etc.

- Load words

I don’t really like loan words for small vocabulary languages.  Each loan word is a new word and increases the number of words a brand new user need to memorize before getting started. (Finishing learning a language will still require memorizing 1,000s of lexemes, but that is another blog post)

- Calender names.  Days can provide numbers from 1 to 7, Months 1 to 12.  Month could support decimal if we ignore two months.

There is a perfectly good proposal to use Japanese style day names.

Options for reading off the digits and symbols

- Grammatical sentences

This encourages awkward spoken mathematical notation.  It would be better to just read off the symbols as they appear.  Trying to shoe-horn mathematical notation into a constructed language using the language’s internal grammar is like saying phone number as “first there is an 9, then there is a 7, then there is a 9, etc.”  555-234-2344 is just fine without verbs, without trying to get it to follow any rules about agreement.

- Use Calques and descriptive words for symbols.

- Decimal places are circular things. But exponents are pretty abstract.   I’m thinking the odds of finding a short-transparent compound phrase are fairly low. More over, notation should be somewhat brief to read.  So this all favors choosing non-transparent words.  If there isn’t a good short word for factorial, might as well use “kala”.  At least “kala” won’t likely be misunderstood for “fish”.  Normally “tu” would be a good verb for divide, but because it also is a digit, it would be a lousy name for an operator.

Good properties of number systems for toki pona like languages

1) Don’t use loan words. If you’re going to use loan words, why not speak Esperanto?

2) Use decimal, unless you’re just doing a number system for show.

3) Don’t re-invent the wheel. Numbers are only kind of linguistic entities and mathematical notation is not linguistic at all. Don’t bother creating a syntax and grammar for reading off mathematical notation or invent a new mathematical notation.  Unless you are doing so for show.

A free morpheme is one that can act as a stand alone word.

A compound word hard to detect because it is a semantic, not a syntactic phenomena.  You can observe someone utter blackboard, but you can’t easily tell if in their skulls they’re processing it as a board that is black, or a specific type of board that is black, namely one for writing on with chalk and might not even be black!  I suppose you could ask enough fluent speakers, but this isn’t really an available option with artificial langauges.

Toki pona has only free mophemes, except for possibly the “la”, “li”, “e” and maybe “ni”. (If those were used as free mophemes, it would be peculiar cases not representative of typcial speech)

Free morphemes will combine with other free morphemes to form new lexemes.

These multi-stem lexemes typically require memorization, but not always.  If they are somewhat obvious on first read then they are transparent. Multi-stem lexemes are interpreted by their narrow meaning first and by their generic meaning as an after thought.  In a language like toki pona which has accent on first syllable, the second free morpheme may have weakened or lost accent.   Punctuation and spelling tend to be of no help in identifying compound word, for example in English they may have no space, hyphens or a space between the stems.  Real spoken language tends to have no pauses between words, so that won’t help either.

Productive word creation through free morphemes is common to many languages.  Some languages like to include preposition-like particles, e.g. French chemin-de-fer  some don’t, English iron lung.

The toki pona multistem lexeme has this official form

[head noun] - [any number of modifiers] pi [new head noun]- [any number of modifiers] pi [etc]

The resulting multi-stem lexeme can be plugged into anywhere that a bare head noun is permissible.  AFAIK, the “chemin-de-fer”/”man-of-war” style lexeme is illegal, that is, you can’t use kepeken, tawa, lon, or other prepositions to build up a mulit-stem lexeme, but it appears that the “pi” particle can act as a neutral proposition that means “some relationship, including ‘of’, ‘in’, ‘by’, ‘for’, ‘with’”  Collapsing all relationships into “pi” actually leads to a loss of information.  A possible improvement would be

[head noun] - [any number of modifiers] pi [preposition] [new head noun]- [any number of modifiers] pi [etc]

or

The verb has the same potentialities as the noun.

[head verb] - [any number of modifiers] pi [new head verb? noun?]- [any number of modifiers] pi [etc]

What these mean are considerable more difficult to say.  That all human verb patterns can be squished into categories of mood, tense, voice, etc. make me think that either these are linguistic universals or these are just the salient factors of moving and being that makes up reality.  You have to have the machinery to describe reality to say something interesting.

See Part 2… it’s somewhere, someday.

Some of these are URL patterns.  Right now I’m too lazy to turn them into hyperlinks.  List generated by searching for toki pona words (which often are not words in any natural language).  You can search these sites at lukin. (but I probably should change the name to alisa or something like that)

http://www.roboart.it
http://blankkor.blogspot.com/
lvogel.free.fr/tokipona
http://kenny.hugi.is/tungumal/articles.php?page=view&contentId=4702809
http://kalama.rpod.ru/
http://ingakess.livejournal.com/40990.html
http://ru.wikibooks.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0
http://ca.wikibooks.org/wiki/Toki_pona
http://en.tokipona.org
http://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/Toki_pona
http://aiki.pbworks.com/English+to+TP+dictionary
http://www.sinleb.com/tokipona/index.php
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.culture.language.tokipona
http://www.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?f=85&t=8360&start=30&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&sid=cff309540e3a09162fa03c7bd6b3ea54
http://forvo.com/languages/x-tp/
http://dedalvs.com/relay/previous/lcc2results/2x.html
http://forums.tokipona.org
http://sites.google.com/site/tokiponadave
http://tokipona.wikia.com
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
http://alelipona.blogspot.com/
http://forvo.com/word/mi_toki_ala_e_toki_pona/
http://weblog.masukomi.org/2007/01/13/why-you-should-learn-toki-pona
http://anadder.com/toki_pona
http://twitter.com/tokipona
http://tokipl.wikidot.com
http://tokilili.shoutem.com/
http://lltpblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.conlang.info/relay14/ring_d.html
http://www.osun.org/Toki+pona-pdf.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
http://www.tokipona.org/*
http://tokipona.wikia.com/wiki/lipu_lawa/*
http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/*
http://*.tokipona.bravehost.com/
http://tokipona.bravehost.com/
http://www.omniglot.com/babel/tokipona.htm
http://community.livejournal.com/tokipona/
http://tokipona.wikia.com
http://yohs.livejournal.com/
http://inamidst.com/services/tokipana
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tokipona.htm
http://www.tokipona.info/
http://pokipitokipona.free.fr/
http://pokipitokipona.free.fr/
http://alinome.net/tokipona/*
http://elzr.com/tokipona/*
http://www.freewebs.com/silverwings_88/*
http://bellsouthpwp.net/j/i/jimhenry1973/conlang/tokipona/*
http://dedalvs.free.fr/relay/results/2x.html
http://www.conlang.info/relay14/toki_pona_2.html
http://vinokaareva.livejournal.com/
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Toki_Pona/*
http://achiral.blogspot.com/2007/03/toki-pona.html
http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokipono
www.tobareinne.com/misc/llengua/tokipona/hangul-Vkbd.html
www.theiling.de/schrift/tokipona.html
www.langmaker.com/db/Toki_Pona
www.geocities.com/stephentoddpope/tokiponabible.html
http://ru.wikibooks.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0
http://toki-pona.narod.ru/
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
www.langue-internationale.org/tokipona.htm
http://vicerveza.homeunix.net/~viric/tokipona/
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
http://www.hugi.is/tungumal/articles.php?page=view&contentId=4702809
http://atto.tau.ac.il/~oyd11/tau/yerev/tp.html
http://slawistykalodzka.sns.pl/Numer4/ren/esej8.html
http://ju.qihoo.com/1343415.html
http://asemaen.site.voila.fr/tokipona/
http://bknight0.myweb.uga.edu/toki/text/zompist.html
http://bknight0.myweb.uga.edu/toki/
http://bknight0.myweb.uga.edu/toki/text/zompist.html
http://ixite.ru/toki_pona/
http://www.wessisc.co.uk/tokipona/
http://www.marketturns.info/article2140205.htm
http://forums.ryzom.com/forum/showthread.php?t=21940
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
http://www.deadlybrain.org/projects/tokipona/
http://www.pineight.com/tokipona/
http://geocities.com/yohsweb/
http://tokilili.tumblr.com/
http://home.claranet.de/tokipona
http://www.geocities.com/yves_prudhomme/toki_pona/
http://www.freewebs.com/tokipona/
http://janjosa.tumblr.com/
http://www.flashcardexchange.com/flashcards/view/407419
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligosynthetic
http://www.deadlybrain.org/projects/tokipona/solfege.php
http://public.kubsu.ru/atem/tokipona
http://www.encyclopedian.com/to/Toki-Pona-language.html
http://www.lingvisto.org/tokipona/
http://forfikulo.front.ru/tp.html
http://www.futurologisch.nl/?p=38
http://www.esperanto.fi/fejo/esperhe/tp/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tokipona/
http://bknight0.myweb.uga.edu/toki/about/
http://dedalvs.free.fr/relay/results/2x.html
http://tokipona.blahus.cz/
http://www.freewebs.com/silverwings_88/
http://www.tokipona.bravehost.com/
http://www.geocities.com/stephentoddpope/tokiponahome
http://www.geocities.com/girlinside123/toki.html
http://anadder.com/toki_pona
http://bknight0.myweb.uga.edu/toki/ [extract linked pages]
http://inamidst.com/services/tokipana [extract linked pages]
http://del.icio.us/tag/toki-pona?setcount=100 [extract linked pages]
http://del.icio.us/tag/tokipona?setcount=100 [extract linked pages]
http://bellsouthpwp.net/j/i/jimhenry1973/conlang/tokipona/tokipona.htm [extract linked pages]
http://danielmacouin.chez-alice.fr/langues_artificielles/toki_pona/toki_pona_accueil.htm [extract linked pages]
http://www.tokipona.org/lipupijanante.html [extract linked pages]

Successful may be a strong word for a language phenomena that often has less than a dozen half fluent speakers.  But still, it’s an interesting question.

By looking at the frequency of keyword search, frequency of tagging on del.icio.us and the frequency of keywords in Googles newspaper articles, I’ve learned a few interestingthings.

An Interesting, Reasonably Easy Product

A constructed language will fail if it doesn’t have something to attract the professional linguists and hard core hobbyists.  ’nuf said.  Just want to make sure no one thinks I’m saying toki pona is succeeding solely because of superior marketing. (That would be Esperanto… just kidding!)

(as for easiness and the success of Klingon and Lojban, see below)

Internet Supernodes and Bellweathers

Ms. Kisa is a talented internet networker and had a significant community of friends on livejournal before toki pona was invented.  It is no accident that in Russia, where livejournal is the social networking tool of choice, toki pona may even be better known and adopted than in North America.

From network theory, we know that many networks have supernodes, i.e. the person that knows everyone.   The classic example is Kevin Bacon, although there are more important supernode than Kevin Bacon in movie casts networks.

A personal demonstration of this was when I was talking to an acquaintance at the local UU Church about this crazy language I was studying.  And the other guy says, “Yeah, I know Sonja from the board game geeks website.”

The take away is that if you want your language or your favorite language, invest time into making lots of friends and acquaintances.  Sonja links in the livejournal, boardgamegeek, meetup, wikipedia, esperanto and other social networking forums were key to it’s success.

Traditional Media Drives Constructed Language Adoption.

Google says the first traditional media article for toki pona was about 2006.  Ms. Kisa’s language got a ton of attention in 2007, when interest peaked.     2007 was also peak time for del.icio.us bookmaking and most important of all: articles in the Google news archive.

My personal theory was that Wikipedia trying to delete the article for lack of published material was the spark for the publicity push and the subsequent wave of popularity.  So in a way, Wikipedia motivated people to make something significant and ironically, ultimately when they voted an article as needing deletion for irrelevance was turning the wheels to make it relevant.

Another significant component of toki pona’s success is it’s international recognition.  I attribute part of that to Ms. Kisa investing the time to keep the article up on Wikipedia.  Once an article it will eventually get translated in to many language, toki pona is up to 41 languages.  I found this in wikipedia, I suspect this means toki pona, I don’t really know:

โทคิโพนา

Can you think of a better way to get your language definition translated into 41 languages?

Lessons from Lojban.

While researching the comparative popularity of constructed languages, excluding Esperanto and Klingon* (see below), Lojban is the most popular constructed language.  It has two books and an annual face to face conference.  This is something the toki pona community lacks.  Lojban as a language also has a bureaucracy behind it, not unlike the KLI.

Interestingly, traditional media has been important for Lojban, too with strong correlations with between delicious book marking and the # of articles per month/year in the google news archive.

Difficult Constructed Languages

A difficult constructed language needs to bring something interesting to the table and more importantly be interesting to talk about.   Also, by article, bookmark and search word counting, we might find out that a language is successful in the sense of attracting attention, but we’d know nothing about how successful it was in creating a community of people trying to use the language, instead of just talking about it.

Klingon, et al

Tracking the popularity of franchise derived languages, e.g. Qenya, Tlingan, Na’vi are going to be hindered by people searching for information about Elves and Klingons, and Na’vi and don’t necessarily care about the language.  So I’m going to have to note that this is an area in fake languages that fake linguists will have to do more research to make any conclusions.  Please sent all grant checks for me to work on this to my work address.

Thank you.

Tlingans dispense with all human-like formalities. After all they are aliens.  They don’t say hello, they say “What do you want?” They don’t say “Can I help you find anything today?” They say “Buy or die!”

It has been speculated that “polite talk” is one of the universals of human language.  So if a constructed language lacks the machinery for politeness, it isn’t a human language.

I came to this conclusion after running into a troll on the toki pona IRC channel.  I tried to say to the troll, “I understand you.” This has has multiple readings, because after all this is toki pona.  It can also mean, “I will improve you” or “I will teach you” and probably five more things.  The troll thought he’d been put in the one down position socially and started to get angry.  This persisted after I tried to say, well “mi sona e sina = I understand you”.  The troll thought I was correcting him and putting him in the one down position again.

I was working on saying, “Relax, sorry, I’m just shooting the breeze”, which in toki pona requires a circumlocution of several pages.  There is an abbreviated style of toki pona, but that isn’t the point, the point is that both abbreviated and wordy forms are ambiguous.  A common style for reducing ambiguity is to repeat the message over and over in various formats until at least 3 or 4 of them will likely be parsed the same way by the interlocutor.  My point is that when you are at the point of fisticuffs, you need to convey messages of low polysemy, i.e. diplomacy.

Before I could click send, the troll was already cursing me in several languages and trying to teach me proper toki pona (and get out of the one-down position).  I was already fed up with trolls and was left wondering, “Why me?”

Special note on politeness and “dropping unnecessary words”

This is “bald on-record” speech.  It is used in human languages for emergencies, commands in work situations, when the speaker doesn’t care about how the hearer feels, etc.  Examples from wikipedia: “Watch out!” “Gimme the hammer!” “Get back to cleaning the latrines!”

Lexical Polite Speech

The words, please, thank-you, mister, mrs, are pure polite speech.  Toki pona is in the awkward position of being a language of few words, so if a word was left out, then either a new word has to be added, a meaning assigned to an existing word, or new idioms, and finally grammaticalization

Idioms in toki pona are short noun phrases and verb given a first among equals meaning by the language designers fiat.  With out an official idiom, any noun or verb phrase you can think of is likely to contain many alternative meanings, most unintelligible, some polite and some insulting!

I think grammaticalization is the best hope for adding polite speech to toki pona because it already has 123 words, up about half a dozen since first publication.

Grammaticalization of Polite Speech.

You can’t talk about grammaticalization of polite speech without talking about Japanese.  Pronouns vary by politeness, so do verbs, etc.  Indo-european languages do as well, especially with respect to the two forms of “you”.

I’m not sure the language community has a lot of wiggle room here, the basic sentence structure is well established, and converting non-clitics to clitics (or content words to function words) is a language designers prerogative. The community has been been turning some words into prepositions, but so far we don’t have any wholesale grammaticalizations, or clitics that have any community acceptance.   Just as a crazy example, an idea to have three different vocatives for subordinates, equals and superiors would never catch on unless the language designer added it to the canon.  (That’s just an example, I’m not sure what grammaticalizations would get the most bang-for-the-particle)

Special note on “pona”/”mi tawa”

Pona means “good”.  I think it’s short for “li pona” or “ale li pona”.  Its an idiom for hello.  I really do no think it is a stand along replacement for any other polite phrases.  Besides, “pona” also is a valid intransitive imperative to “Improve!” which isn’t very polite.

“mi tawa” doesn’t translate very well either.  In English this is rude, “I’m out of here”.  In English, Icelandic, Russian the cultural equivalent is  ”until we meet again”

“tenpo kama la mi tu li lukin e sama”.  We’ll meet again.

Some Possible Toki pona Phrases- Honorifics

jan pona o … O friend!  Too familiar for a stranger.  Doesn’t express “my good man!” any more either.

jan sama o … O my equal!  Useful.  Depends on your real culture as to if you’d use this or not.

jan sewi o … O God!  Well, this also means “higher person”, but “jan sewi” is an idiom for “God” so, among alternative meaning for “jan sewi”, “God” is first among equals.  The “jan sewi” phrase is completely useless for conversation now– you just can’t call your interlocutor “jan sewi”

jan pi ma tomo 0 … o man of the city! o citizen!

Softening Requests.

ala la sina ken la pana e pan tawa mi?  If it is nothing, can you hand me the pancakes?

Thanks.

mi pana e pona tawa sina X.  This has been attested since 2005.   I give to you the good for your X. (which you just gave).

mi pilin e pona tawa sina tan pana sina.

Apology.

mi pilin ike tawa sina.

Accept apology.

mi li kama jo e pilin sina.

Excuse.

pilin ike mi la o sona e ni: mi pakala tan lape mute. I feel bad, I want you to know that I made a mistake because I slept to late.  Sorry I’m late, I overslept.

Accepting Excuses

mi li lukin ala e pakala sina.  I don’t see your mistakes.

*not* mi li sona ala e pakala sina. I don’t know of your mistakes.  This also reads as “I don’t understand your mistakes.”:

Ignoring a Faux Pas

ni la sina pakala ala.

ni la mi lukin ala.  I didn’t see it.

Calling “Uncle”!  (giving in, primarily out of respect for rank)

pona kin la mi pali e ona. (unwilling)

…. (hmm how to say, “I’d be glad to do that”)

Some words are rated R.  Many words take a phrase to build up and after you built it, you can’t find a place to plug it on account of not having subordinate clauses.  Generating multi-word verbs is still a black art.

I - mi

you (singular) - sina

he - ona

we - mi, mi mute, mi ale

you (plural)- sina, sina mute, sina ale, sina suli (in the indo-european sense of honorific-you)

they- ona mute

this- ni

that - ni ante

here - ma ni, ni

there - ni ante (?)

who - seme, jan seme

what - seme, ijo seme

where -seme, ma seme

when- seme, tenpo seme

how- seme, kepeken seme

not - ale, ali

all - ala

many- mute

some - ale mute

few- lili,  nanpa lili

other- ante

one - wan

two - tu

three - tu wan

four - tu tu

five - luka, tu tu wan

big - suli, mute

long - linja mute (?)

wide - mute, lipu mute

thick - mute

heavy - mute

small - lili

short - lili

narrow - lili

thin - linja lili

woman - meli

man (adult male) - meji

Man (human being) - jan

child - jan lili

wife - meli

husband - meji

mother - jan mam meli

father - jan mama meji

animal- soweli, akesi

fish - kala, li kala, li pali kala, li pali e kali

bird - waso

dog - soweli

louse - pipi, pipi lili, pipi lili pi linja lawa

snake - akesi linja

worm - akesi linja pi ko ma

tree - kasi suli

forest - kasi suli pi nanpa mute

stick - palisa, li wan lon lipu (like glue)

fruit - kili, li pana e kili

seed - unpa pi pan kasi, li pana e kasi sin

leaf - lipu kasi, li pana e lipu kasi

root - noka kasi, li alisa anpa kasi suli

bark - selo pi kasi suli, li toki sama soweli pi tomo jan

flower- ilo unpa pi kasi kule, li pana e ilo unpa pi kasi kuli

grass - kasi linja laso jelo, ijo nasa pi kasi lipu nasa

rope- linja, li kama jo kepeken linja

skin- selo, selo jan, li weka e selo soweli

meat - moku pi soweli moli

blood - telo loje, telo loje pi sijelo insa

bone - kiwen pi sitelen insa, li unpa

fat (n.) - moku pi wawa mute, ilo poka pi sijelo insa

egg - poki walo

horn- ilo utala pi lawa akesi

tail - linja monsi

feather- ilo tawa pi sijelo walo

hair - linja, linja lawa

head- lawa

ear- kute

eye- oko, li lukin

nose- nena sinpin, li pilin kepeken nena sinpin (to touch/feel with the nose)

mouth- uta, uta lawa, uta sinpin,  li pilin kepeken uta sinpin

tooth- kiwen pi uta lawa, kiwen walo pi uta lawa

tongue- ilo toki pi uta lawa

fingernail- ilo kepeken ala pi luka jan

foot - noka, pini noka

leg - noka

knee- noka insa, li utala kepeken noka insa

hand- pini luka, li pana

wing - luka walo, li pali kepeken sona ala (to wing it)

belly- sijelo insa

guts- ilo jaki pi sijelo insa

neck- anpa  lawa,  li unpa kepeken uta lon anpa lawa  (to neck)

back- monsi, monsi sewi,  li pana e mani tawa esun (to back an enterprise)

breast- neni, neni meli, sinpin pi sijelo meji

heart- insa, ilo tawa pi telo loje pi sijelo insa

liver- ilo pi kepeken sona ala pi sijelo insa

drink- li moku (verb), telo (noun)

eat- li moku

bite- li moku

suck- moku kin e kon, moku kin e telo

spit- li pana e telo tan uta (?)

vomit- li pana e moku tan uta (?)

blow- li pana e kon tan uta (?), li unpa e palisa meji kepeken uta sinpin

breathe- li moku e kon

laugh- li a a a, li toki e a a a,

see- li lukin

hear- li kute

know- li sona

think- li sona

smell- li sona e kon

fear- li pilin wili ala ???

sleep- li lape

live- li lon, li ali (but even though “li ali” is/was in the cannon, if find in hard to read)

die- li moli, intransitive

kill- li moli e (somthing), transitive

fight- utala

hunt- alasa

hit- ??

cut- li weka

split- li tu

stab- li pakala kepeken palisa

scratch- li pana e linja kepeken ilo

dig- li uta, li pali e uta, li pana e uta

swim- li tawa lon telo

fly (v.)- li tawa kepeken ilo waso

walk- li tawa

come- li kama

lie- li kama e sijelo lon ma

sit- li kama e monsi lon ma

stand- li kama ala (not go anwhere), ??? (stand on two feet)

turn- ??

fall- ??

give- li pana

hold- li jo

squeeze- li jo kin kepeken luka

rub- ??

wash- li telo

wipe- li telo kepeken len

pull- ??

push- ??

throw- li weka

tie - li kama awen kepeken linja

sew- li pali kepeken linja len, li kama awen kepeken linja len,

count- li toki e nanpa

say- li toki

sing- li toki musi

play- li musi

float- li tawa sewi telo

flow- li tawa, li tawa sama telo

freeze- li lete, li lete pini

swell- li pona e sijelo

sun- suno

moon- mun

star- suno pi ma ante

water- telo

rain- telo pi sewi laso, telo lili pi suli laso, telo oko pi jan sewi, telo jaki pi jan sewi

river- telo linja

lake- telo pi ma uta, telo tawa ala pi ma uta

sea- telo mute, telo suli

salt- ijo walo pi telo suli

stone- kiwen, li kiwen

sand- kiwen lili lili

dust- kiwen jaki lili lili

earth- ma, ma suli

cloud- kon, kon telo, kon telo walo

fog- kon telo pi kule mun

sky- suli laso

wind- kon, kon tawa

snow- kiwen telo pi suli laso, kiwen pi telo jelo pi jan suli

ice- kiwen telo

smoke- kon pimeja, li moku e palisi moli

fire - seli, li seli

ashes- ilo pi kule mun pi seli moli

burn- li pakala kepeken seli

road- nasin, linja tawa

mountain- ma neni

red- loje

green- laso jelo / jelo laso

yellow- jelo

white- walo

black- pimeja

night- tenpo pimeja, tenpo pi suno ala, tenpo mun

day- tenpo suno

year- tenpo pi suno sike

warm- li seli

cold- lape

full- ???

new- sin

old- sin ala

good- pona

bad- ike

rotten- moku kepeken akesi mute lili lili

dirty- jaki

straight- ???,  unpa ante

round- sike

sharp- sama ilo sin pi kama tu

dull- sama ilo pakala pi kama tu

smooth- sama lipu

wet- kepeken telo lon selo

dry- li jo ala e telo

correct- pona, li pona

near- lon ni

far- lon ni ala

right-  luka ante (if you can’t tell anyhow), poka mi/poka sina (e.g. if in a car), nasin pi jan mani

left- luka ante  (if you can’t tell anyhow), poka mi/poka sina (e.g. if in a car), nasin pi jan pali

at- lon (but varies depending on grammatical construction)

in- lon (but varies depending on grammatical construction)

with- kepeken (but varies depending on grammatical construction)

and- en (but varies depending on grammatical construction)

if- la  (but varies depending on grammatical construction)

because- tan  (but varies depending on grammatical construction)

name- nimi, nimi ilo, nimi jan, nimi toki, etc.