My Suburban Destiny

Toki pona uses Prepositions (also called adpositions).  Some languages use inflection, or declension for the same semantic purpose.  The difference is that prepositions are detachable from the word.  Picking which to use is going to be tricky.  In one language you might use the accusative to mean motion into something, and use the locative for being in one place.  Or in English we might use the same preposition for both, eg. “He walked in the room”  Now if we have to reason by analogy using our own language, we have no strong guidance on which word to use.  At least there are only 10 choices so you will always be right at least 10% of the time.  Here is my categorization of the prepositions.

[Warning this isn't complete...I just like to publish early...edit later]

• Instrumental. kepeken ilo  — with a tool
• Locative. lon tomo — at the room
• Proximity. poka poki — along side the box
• Similarity. sama suno — like the sun
• Causation. tan pali ona – because of his work
• Dative/Indirect Object: tawa sina — to you, indirect object
• Accusative/Object: e tomo — this is shown by position in English
• Genative/Possessive: pi suno — of the sun
• Vocative: o sina — hey you!
• Nominative/Subject: tomo — shown by position in English

But, you probably won’t be able to rely 100% on analogous thinking using your own language as an analogy for toki pona–you’ll just have to see what emerges in the texts. 

• mi lukin lon nimi. I’m looking at words.
• mi lukin e nimi. I’m examining words.
• mi lukin e nimi lon lipu nimi. I’m examing words on the page.

Aside from the fact that some people think that there are only noun phrases in toki pona, I’m going to look at some compound word creation strategies

The mechanics of compound words are pretty straight forward:

• n + n  –It seems perfectly reasonable to have one noun modify another
• n + mod 

So start with a word, e.g. suweli.  It already give you some obvious context, like animals.  If that is the context, we can list all the words of the pattern suweli + [modifier], then we repeat the process with [noun] + suweli

I think we get these categories of combinations:

• simple meanings, no obvious additional interpretation – suweli mute, lots of animals
• (nearly) obvious meanings — suweli poki– box animal, turtle
• completely non-obvious meanings — suweli sewi /sewi suweli — holy animal? animal religion?  Huh?  Many of these combinations sound poetic, but I suspect if we surveyed people about what it might mean, we’d get a lot of “don’t know”s
• tricky meanings — suweli moku/moku suweli, animal food/food animal, ie. food made of animals/edible animals.  Or is it animal feed and cattle respectively?  There might be a right answer, but it is tricky, at least for me.
• undefinable meanings — suweli suweli — a true beast? kind of beasty? A real animal? Very beasty?  Beasts (plural)?  This is undefinable because there isn’t any official ruling on reduplication and there isn’t much reduplication in the current corpus of toki pona texts online.
• trivial meanings — suweli suweli — beastly beast.  This just makes a verbose language more so.

Triples and Phrases

I don’t like triples (and quadruples) as much as I like two word compound words.  The modifiers in triples can swap position:

• kala lete pimeja anpa — deep dark cold fish– deep sea fish.
• kala pimeja lete anpa — deep cold dark fish–deep sea fish
• kala anpa lete pimeja — dark cold deep fish– deep sea fish

It would be less work to get everyone to call deep sea fish “kala anpa”.

It isn’t always obvious if the pi is necessary or not

• kala pi lete pimeja — fish of the dark cold
• kala pi pimeja lete — fish of the cold dark
• kala pimeja lete — cold dark fish

Two word compound words don’t need “pi” since the modifier is obvious, although the semantic intent may be less obvious than a long string of modifiers and “pi”’s

In rapid speech, I have no idea how people are going to be able to decide where to put the “pi”. 

• Cold dark tea time of the soul — with an ‘of’
• the soul’s cold dark tea time — no ‘of’
• tenpo telo wawa pimeja lete kon – the soul’s cold dark powerful water time
• tenpo telo-wawa pimeja lete kon – soul’s cold dark time of tea

so far things make sense, so do we need some “pi”’s?

tenpo pi telo wawa pimja lete kon — soul’s cold dark (powerful water) time

Or how about something I found on the web

• telo nasa pi wawa ala– without power drunken water, week booze
• telo nasa wawa ala– powerless drunken water, week booze.  [Unless there is some popular alternative meaning for nasa wawa, I'm not sure how the "pi" helps me]
• tomo pi telo nasa — room of drunken water, [wait! double take time!]
• tomo telo nasa– weird bathroom

Sigh.  Honestly, I plan to leave out the “pi” except when I say something and do a double take.

Clauses

In English is is pretty easy to take a long phrase and plug it into the place of a noun. 

I saw a fish. 

I saw that which you describe as an animal which swims through the water, doesn’t breath air and has shiny scales.

Toki pona has a much narrower set of valid nominals/noun-phrases.  I’ve already covered noun + modifier, and noun phrase + pi + noun modifier. 

You can use the conjuction

kala en moku — fish and food, maybe a fish sandwich

You can use a predicate, which is a noun phrase + a prepositional phrase

kala loje lon linja telo  — red fish of the river, salmon

But that is 9 syllables for what could be said with two syllables in English, and four if we used “kala loje” exclusively for salmon and some other word pair to describe red snapper with “kala uta”

What is simpler?

1. mi lukin e kala loje lon linja telo.  I see a red fish from the line of water. (I’ve got breath to spare, I’ll talk until you understand me.)
2. mi lukin e kala loje. I see a salmon.  (Hope you’ve heard this word pair before in this context, if not look at me with a puzzled look so I can explain)
3.  mi lukin e kala loje.  I see a red fish or a red snapper or a salmon (I’m not sure which, I’m not sayin’ either, but it’s one of these options, I’m being ambiguous today.)
4. mi lukin e kala (loje).  I see a fish. (I don’t really care if you understand me.  I don’t think you care what I’m saying either. Actually I might be talking about some red colored pond scum. I’m being knowingly ineffective in communication.)

3 and 4 both are simple in the sense of economy of words and not requiring an extensive knowledge of idiomatic toki pona or non-obvious compound words.  But they are both kind of hostile.  That conflicts with the “pona” part of the toki pona philosophy.

On some mailing lists, I imagine #1 would be considered ike mute, i.e. overly complex.  Unless one wants to be ineffective at communication to the point of hostility, we can either resort to using non-obvious compound words (or idiomatic noun phrases if you like), or be verbose.

Advice

Make your context clear.  Use obvious compound nouns when possible. Use non-obvious compounds in preference to circumlocutious phrases, but be sure to use them over and over so your reader can learn them.  If you don’t think your listener has heard your particular compound word before, use it in part of a verbose phrase before using it as a simple two word phrase.

What does reduplication mean in toki pona?

I’m still not sure on what the reduplication rules are in toki pona.  kala kala could be anything.  I just did a quick search on a bunch of toki pona word doubles and I found … nothing.   A few times people used “mute, mute” for emphasis.

Some words have rather different senses in their noun and modifier forms, eg.

meli meli — girly girl  (one describes behavior & style, one describes gender)

Double adjectives strike me as intensifiers, but that is just because I speak English.

suwi suwi — sweet sweet– can’t really say what this means.

ona ti li moku suwi suwi — This is sweet, sweet food.

But you could do the same with “mute”

suwi mute — very sweet

We have interjections with reduplication

a a a — (laughter)

Maybe this will be cleared up in the next official book on toki pona.

I’m still studying toki pona vocabulary.  I’m going to beat the theme of fish to death and see if I can get a list of ways to generate short noun phrases (aka compound words).

The them for the day is fish- kala. So I’m thinking, if the conversation was about fish, then the entire dictionary should shift. A palisa (stick) would be a fishing rod, palisa kala are possibly fish sticks and kala palisa are… dunno– fishing rods?

I wasn’t able to make very many interesting two word compounds. Some compound words look too much like fish + an adjective,

• kala walo- white fish
• kala lete- cold fish
• kala ike- bad fish

Some compounds sound like broad categories of fish

• kala lili- small fish, or any variety of small fish, or the category of small fish, such as the minnow
• kala kalama- noisey fish, any variety of noisy fish, the category of fish that makes audible noises, such as the dog fish.
• Some words would make for pleasant fish names:
• kala lape- sleeping fish
• kala kasi- wooden fish
• kala pana- the giving fish

But what fish, or category of fish to match them to is anyone’s guess.

Some kala + [word] patterns are suggestive of something more specific than a generic fish with a modifier:

• kala anpa - bottom dwelling fish, e.g. catfish
• kala lete - cold fish, fish from the artic and polar regions
• kala mani -commercial fish
• kala moku - edible fish
• kala len - fish of clothing. Maybe it’s a fish suitable for making Icelandic folk fish-skin shoes.
• kala moli - poisonous fish
• kala sama - camouflaged fish
• kala seli - tropical fish
• kala ilo - fishing gear
• kala lipu - halibut
• kala ante- invasive fish species
• kala akesi - leviathan
• kala mute - school of fish
• kala awen - sessile fish, e.g. barnacles
• kala sewi - holy fish (holy mackerel?)
• kala kiwen - mollusks, lobsters, barnacles (again) and other fish with exoskeletons
• kala ma - lung fish, other fish that can live out of water
• kala selo - shell fish

Words like lobster, whale and oysters will take noun phrases to describe.

• kala kiwen kepken insa moku — edible mollusk
• kala kiwen pimeja — mussel
• kala kiwen loje — crab or lobster
• kala kiwen lili — barnacle (but probably not a crab or lobster)

Kala selo would subtitute well for kala kiwen and kala selo kiwen even more so, since it conveys the sense of being contained by a shell and of being hard like a rock. 

kala selo ale selo, shell fish no shell, or maybe kala selo ale poka selo, shell fish with no shell describes some sort of squid or octopus to me.

• kala loje pi linja telo — Salmon (or some other red fish of rivers)
• kala suli — big fish, whale, shark
• kala suli pi mama suweli — whale (big fish of the maternal cute animals)
• kala suli pi mama suweli moli — killer whale (big fish of the killer maternal cute animals)

Tomorrow I will take up the flip side, words that follow that pattern [noun] + kala, that is, fishy [noun].  Right now, that seems like there will be even fewer semantically clear compound words in that pattern.

Constantly reading modifiers backwards to english messes with my mind. 

Kala jan– fish of man, man fish, reminds me of a merman, but this isn’t immediately clear from the literal translation

jan kala– man of fish, fish man, follows the pattern of occupations jan + modifer

Now which one of these is the obvious choice for merman and which is the obvious choice for fisherman?

Merman could be expanded into jan pi jan en kala– person of man and fish. (Although I’m not sure if I’m using pi correctly here)

Fisherman could be expanded into jan pi kala moku– person of edible fish– emphasizing that the fisherman plans to eat what he catches.

But why use five words when we have two perfectly good alternatives?  We just need to pin a meaning on them and communicate to enough people that jan kala means fisherman and kala jan means merman. 

Now the next one make my head hurt.

kulupu kala- community of fish

kala kulupu- pescine community

Which one is a bunch of fish swimming together in a group and which one is a community that depends on fishing?  Again, we can resort to longer phrases

kulupu pi jan kala  — community of fishermen

kala kulupu jan - pescine community of people, i.e. fishing village or fisherman’s trade union

kulupu pi kala lon telo - community of fish in the water.  This just sounds verbose, but it emphasize the sense of fish as a living creature in the water and not as a food item and economic activity.  Again, I’d rather use kulupu kala for a school of fish and kala kulupu for a fishing community.

kala ilo — fish equipment.  This would be the category of all fishing gear–nets, hooks, rods, etc.

len kala — fish cloth.  A net would make sense.  Or the leather made from fish skin.

linja kala — fish line.  Fishing wire.

luka kala — fin

ma kala — land of the fish, fish land, the ocean

moku kala — food of fish, fish food. Bait

nasin kala — the way of the fish.  Sounds good, but no obvious meanings.

noka kala — fish legs– Tail of a fish?

monsi kala– fish butt– Likewise, tail of the fish?

pali kala– the work of fish– fish processing maybe?

selo kala– shell of a fish. 

tawa kala– movement of a fish, swim

telo kala– fish sauce, liquamem

waso kala– fishy bird.  Another tough one to parse.  It could either be birds that eat fish, birds that act life fish.

Personally, if I was a toki pona fisherman, I’d start calling sharks kala kasi and for no particular reason other than it would save me a lot of syllables. If someone complained that kala kasi was idiomatic when I shouted, “o sina lukin lon kala kasi!” I’d push them out of the boat and make myself clear. “o kala kasi moku e ona!”

I’ve been tracking Toki Pona on the internet, in the last few days there have been a lot of posts about toki pona in Italian.

In other news, I updated my toki pona dictionary site. I’ve added almost all of the so-called unofficial words to the dictionary. I’ve got RSS feeds in the works, but not done enough to let the link go live.

Since the dictionary is one of the parts I of the web site I use a lot, I will probably start filling it in with as many compound words as I can find. After that comes better community contribution support.

Tuition: $7,400

Bullet Proof Jacket: $900

Gun Safety Training: $0, several year delay before starting college

Armaments: $575

Life insurance: $200

Any how, today I put my money where my mouth is and sent a check to the Brady Campaign. A good number of months after Virginia Tech and the DC snipers, I’m pissed off and radicalized.

Pro-gun comments will be deleted. I’ve heard the arguments and am convinced that the dialog is not about public policy but cultural imperialism–the drive of the rural red necks to impose their culture upon urban society through cultural legislation. The pro-gun agenda is not so much as a debate as propaganda. You can’t debate propaganda–it isn’t an assertion of fact as much as it is an assertion of cultural power. To even debate the gun culture is to give it legitimacy as a public policy instead of an irrational cultural phenomena, like religion, diet, language, dress and other things that we don’t actually expect people to agree on and don’t expect to be subject to objective reason. However the pro-gun issue leads to people dying and the rest of the cultural wars tend to stick to heated words on an editorial page.

I trust the Marines with guns. Everyone else is just a Marine wanna be.

kama means come, pona means well. So kama pona means well come or welcome.   That seems to be to be a euro-centric translation.   But if the words are sematic primatives, and if we don’t want to project our language onto toki pona, we’d translate it as, “You did a fine job of arriving” or something like that. If we were to translate from Klingon, it would from Qapla‘ to “pona la sina pini”, meaning something like, “you have finished well” or ”you will succeed”. 

Here’s some alternatives, pick depending on what you really mean:

tan seme la sina kama.  Why are you here?

pona la mi lukin e sina. It’s good to see you. (Or I see you clearly)

o sina: sina wili moku telo? Would you like something to drink?

o sina: sina li nanpa tu–a. You again, *sigh*.

I’m not sure about the vocative, I might change that. I’m also not sure if lukin takes the accusative or if it has to be used with another prepositional phrase.

The Traderspoint Creamery yogurt comes in a bottle sturdy enough to use in third world housing.  Since I’ve paid to have these heavy bottles shipped to my grocery store, I would like to get some additional use out of them.  However, the label glue is not removable.

The Clean Washington Center has a page on the challenges of washing bottles and removing their labels. Pressure applied (sticky) labels are cheaper than glued on labels, but make it impossible to get the gunk of the bottle.

Right now, the only solution I can see is either using some powerful solvent, fire,  thermonuclear charge or applying a new paper sticker over the glue, since water and soap sure aren’t going to get the glue off.

I recently discovered toki pona on account of a blog I’m subscribed to.  I started to study it imagining that for a small amount of effort, I’d be able to read and write yet another foreign language, which I would find amusing.  So far, I can read a little-little bit, got in an argument on a mailing list, got in an argument on my blog and now I’m wondering how I got off on the wrong foot here.

Religious and Grammar Wars.  Constructed languages suffer from religious wars and grammar wars in a way that natural languages don’t.  (Natural language instead suffer from real wars, but that isn’t what I’m interesting in talking about)  A constructed language, almost by definition is incomplete.  You can’t resolve questions of semantics or grammar.

An argument about the semantic intent of a natural language can be resolved by taking a survey, video taping speakers using their language in a natural setting.  Semantics in a constructed language are resolved by translating them into a natural language and then arguing that your translation is better than the next.

Questions of grammar, likewise is less resolvable than in a natural language.  Linguists have been trying to reduce speech to transformational rules, sentence diagrams and phrase rules since forever.  While it is possible to reduce a language to a machine validatable language, not unlike an algebraic equation or a C++ program, you generally can’t do the same for natural languages.  Even MS Word can’t figure out if your English sentence are grammatical.  This suggests to me that a language, constructed or not, once it is spoke can be expected to be used in ways that are not neatly machine parsable.  And without a system of proving grammatical correctness, the arguments continue. 

Is there anyone who can say what is right and wrong?  Maybe Zamenhoff’s ghosts, Marc Okrand or Jan Sonja?

Intellectual Property & Control. A constructed language is something of an artistic work.  However, it’s already been tested in court with Tolkien’s constructed language isn’t something you can’t easily stop people from speaking in, writing about, writing in, etc.  Similarly, programming languages don’t seem to be protected–companies create competing compilers for the same language without fear of reprisals and some companies even give the specifications of their languages to standards bodies.  Inventors of programming language know they can’t dictate the grammar, so they turn it over to a neutral party that will promote consistency, which may or may not be followed.  Nonbinding standards have a way of being like that.

Given that a language inventor can’t control the language or how it is used, the language inventor is the arbiter only to the extent that they are famous, have time to adjudicate questions, and still are alive and can invest the marketing effort to sell the community on the idea of one form of consistency over another.

Lack of Expert Models. In most cultures people start writing at a college level somewhere between high school and college, about 10-15 years worth of reading and writing.  Learning a language can take anywhere from a few to ten years before one achieves a level of competence that is indistinguishable from natives.  A constructed language is no different.  From inception, it will be a decade before there are natural models to study.  Until then, we are all speaking, reading and parsing clumsy, broken toki pona, [those with extremely high opinions of their linguistic talent excluded, of course].  Alas, a whole decade to wait before the first Nobel prize for literature written in toki pona will be awarded.

So what to do? I don’t know about you, but I’m going to try to shift from a criterion of correctness to a criterion of beauty, consistency with the gestalt of the original design and euphony– all of which are criterion that no one expects one to the next to agree upon.  If, after reading and writing a large quantity of toki pona, I come to hear in my mind the euphony of “mi lukin lon e ilo” as compared to “mi lukin lon ilo”, then the former is what I will use.  The brain’s sense of euphony trumps arguments based on machine parsable grammars.

So I’m making a Toki Pona web site.  Will I finish? Well, I sort of have.  I’m hoping each feature I publish will be small and done when it hits the internet.  So far here’s my ambitions plans:

Toki Pona Search
Search the web for toki pona related stuff using toki pona.  DONE.

Toki Pona Dictionary
Look up words in English or Toki Pona.  Not original, but necessary for some future things I want to do.  DONE.

Let the community add new compound words. DONE.  Mostly.  I want people to be able to edit what they’ve contributed before.

Let the community vote on translations and compound words.  DONE. Mostly.   The voting mechanism needs authentication to prevent double voting and other bad behavior.

Toki Pona Community listings. -started
I’m envisioning a community as an event or club, which in turn is just a series of events.  I want to be able to support online and in person events, but I don’t want to re-invent Meetup.com, so I’m probably going to make a link list to Google Calendars.  The irc community appears to be mostly dead because people don’t show up at the same time.  A centralized place for announcing events would help, especially if it was self managing and integrated with existing calendaring applications.

Toki Pona Shopping. –thought about
I’ve no delusions about the commercial potential of a website that has tools for using a constructed language. If I get a commission or two from selling linguistics books via amazon or a T-shirt or two, that’s would be a nice way to off set the cost of the domain name.  I even have the tokipona.biz domain name– a sure fire way to make lots of mani mani, a a a! 

Toki Pona Contest. – thought about
And what I am most excited about today is contests.  I have the glimmering of an idea for a contest similar to NaNoWriMo, except it would be a contrived reason to translate Toki Pona for 30 days.  Unlike a mailing list, where it is too easy to get engrossed with discussions about grammar in English, a translation a day community site would be a safe place to spout doubtful and probably poorly formed sentences while working towards mastering college level Toki Pona.  After writing a translation, you would in theory be able to see how other people translated the same text and through pattern recognition and example learn what the community thinks is a likely valid translation.

And it’s all gotta have RSS feeds.  I won’t rest until there is an RSS feed for every feature I implement.