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Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

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Re: Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

#71

Post by mrob »

schoen wrote: post #48
_abattoir wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of Toki Pona sounds like English anyway: wan: one tu: two meli: female, from Tok Pisin mewi, from "Mary" (as in, the Virgin) lukin: looking ale: all en: and ike: icky jaki: yucky insa: inside jelo: yellow kalama: clamor kama: come ken: can kule: color lape: sleepy lawa: law linja: line lili: little lupa: loop mani: money mu: moo musi: amusing/music nanpa: number nimi: name open: open pilin: feeling sama: same se…

The only one of these that I think doesn't work is lupa, which is a hole or opening, which doesn't necessarily have that much in common with a loop. I guess they could both be circular, but lupa applies to any kind of opening, circular or not.

Same origin as loophole (hole in a wall), which can also be any shape?

Re: Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

#73

Post by jan_Inkepa »

chrisshroba wrote: post #70
jan_Inkepa wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure! Talking about daily life works pretty well (general chit chat - asking people how they’re feeling, what they’ve been doing, assuming you know something about their lives already there won’t be many ambiguities). online, I often share pictures as I go (they give points of reference). So I can say “mi pali e pan suwi” (i made sweet bread) and show a picture of a cake; my friend could say “ni li pona ala pona?” (i…

Thank you very much for this write-up! This sounds like a lot of fun, maybe I'll spend some of my quarantine time looking into it. Any recommended resources for learning?

My pleasure!

The best place to learn is from the official Toki Pona book by Sonja herself:

http://tokipona.org

If that's too much of an investment, the next best thing is the course "o kama sona e toki pona" by jan Pije:

http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/okamasona.php

There are active discords, subreddits, telegram chats, facebook groups, etc. - probably the handiest list is in the sidebar of /r/tokipona:

https://www.reddit.com/r/tokipona/

There are a bunch of different communities/resources - I learned a lot from the "ma pona pi toki pona" discord, which is probably the best community for learning Toki Pona (people are generally friendly and generous with sharing knowledge). There's also a lot of music written in Toki Pona on youtube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2eg_FknCSeoWL6tFBKOn... (some of them are decent!), which is nice for passive consumption.

And, as I mentioned elsewhere the meme reddit mi_lon https://www.reddit.com/r/mi_lon/ is pretty good as well.

Re: Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

#74

Post by fbreton »

iaabtpbtpnn wrote: post #68
Complexicate wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ogden's Basic English [1] with 850 words [2] and a simplified grammar was an attempt at making an international auxiliary language from English. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English [2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Basic_English_word_l...

I have long wondered whether it would be possible to identify the most basic, core words of English, and construct a dictionary such that all definitions eventually reduce to those words. That way, a speaker of a foreign language could learn the meanings of the core words by translation into their native language, and then the process of learning a new word would be: look it up in the dictionary, and if there are any…

This exists : https://learnthesewordsfirst.com/ is a "multi layer dictionary". There are 360 base words, the very first ones are explained with images, then each word is defined using the previous ones. Then there's a list of 2000 more words defined using only base words. The last layer is a full dictionary whose definitions use only these 360+2000 words.

Re: Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

#75

Post by kaoD »

canjobear wrote: post #59
thaumasiotes wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> imagine explaining the word "the" to someone whose native language doesn't have an article Much like "turn out", there are many different ways in which "the" might be used. But as contrasted with "a" ("explain it to someone who doesn't have articles"), it's not that bad -- "the" is used to mark noun phrases that are already present in the conversational context, and "a" is used to introduce new noun phrases into th…

> "the" is used to mark noun phrases that are already present in the conversational context, and "a" is used to introduce new noun phrases into the conversational context. > (Compare "there's some guy outside scaring customers away" with "there are some guys outside scaring customers away", then consider that a would only be permissible in the first one.) This rule is OK but it fails for the following case: A man you…

> any attempt to give simple rules for this part of English grammar will fail, and will not generalize to other languages with articles

Can you elaborate? (Genuinely interested: I like languages, don't know much about NLP).

GP's explanation was just wrong, but articles are pretty well defined, easy to explain, and generalize well to other languages.

- "The" (definite article) marks a noun that refers to a particular instance of the class designated by that noun, distinctly recognizable from other instances.

- "A" (indefinite article) marks a noun that refers to a generic instance of the class that isn't explicitly recognizable among other instances.

Re: Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

#76

Post by iaabtpbtpnn »

fbreton wrote: post #74
iaabtpbtpnn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have long wondered whether it would be possible to identify the most basic, core words of English, and construct a dictionary such that all definitions eventually reduce to those words. That way, a speaker of a foreign language could learn the meanings of the core words by translation into their native language, and then the process of learning a new word would be: look it up in the dictionary, and if there are any…

This exists : https://learnthesewordsfirst.com/ is a "multi layer dictionary". There are 360 base words, the very first ones are explained with images, then each word is defined using the previous ones. Then there's a list of 2000 more words defined using only base words. The last layer is a full dictionary whose definitions use only these 360+2000 words.

Very cool, thanks for sharing! I knew I couldn't have been the only person to think of this. :)

Re: Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

#77

Post by qwerty456127 »

elldoubleyew wrote: post #9

In high school I was the founder of our (small) Esperanto Club. I gave Esperanto lessons each week at our club meeting designed as a one year course, usually by the end of the year if someone attended each week and did moderate self study outside of class they could communicate in Esperanto really well. We even had one international student who really struggled with english that after a few months of attending our cl…

I bloody wish there were good modern Esperanto courses. I've found a Michel Thomas method Esperanto course once but it was incomplete. I would really love to buy a complete one (even for a price higher than what other languages cost). Intuition suggests I'm not the only one interested although there probably are not too many. This means the demand, albeit humble, certainly is higher than the offer. You might consider running a croudsourcing campaign and making some good modern Esperanto resources if you really feel interested in teaching people Esperanto.

Re: Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

#78

Post by anamexis »

jhbadger wrote: post #57
kazinator wrote: post #12

> In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-watcher. In Latin, microscope is also "small-watcher", namely, microscopium .

When I studied German I was initially amused that the German word for television was "Fernseher" (far seer). How quaint! Until I stopped and thought for a moment what "television" literally means -- tele from Greek meaning "far", plus Latin "vision".

Ditto the Polish word for car, samochód, which translates literally to “self go,” and then.. automobile

Re: Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

#79

Post by yongjik »

kaoD wrote: post #75
canjobear wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "the" is used to mark noun phrases that are already present in the conversational context, and "a" is used to introduce new noun phrases into the conversational context. > (Compare "there's some guy outside scaring customers away" with "there are some guys outside scaring customers away", then consider that a would only be permissible in the first one.) This rule is OK but it fails for the following case: A man you…

> any attempt to give simple rules for this part of English grammar will fail, and will not generalize to other languages with articles Can you elaborate? (Genuinely interested: I like languages, don't know much about NLP). GP's explanation was just wrong, but articles are pretty well defined, easy to explain, and generalize well to other languages. - "The" (definite article) marks a noun that refers to a particular…

Consider:

The Philippines

The United States

The Great Lakes

the poor

a means of production

a number of hamsters

the number of hamsters

a shirt, but a piece of garment, and a pair of pants

A lion chased him. (a particular lion)

A lion is a ferocious beast. (lions in general)

Re: Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)

#80

Post by spapas82 »

godelski wrote: post #62
kazinator wrote: post #12

> In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-watcher. In Latin, microscope is also "small-watcher", namely, microscopium .

In English "microscope" is "micro-scope", namely small-view. I find it funny that many don't understand that this is how languages work, until they learn other languages. Especially with English, which is a bastardization of a lot of other languages. For example, if you learn French basically anything that is fancy in English is just the normal term in French (e.g. "house" -> "mansion" or "famous person" -> "celebrit…

Actually microscope (like most similar words eg telescope, periscope, endoscope etc) is borrowed from greek: μικροσκόπιο, which is generated from μικρό + σκοπέω meaning small + look at.
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