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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)

#91

Post by thaumasiotes »

yongjik wrote: post #84
kaoD wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Philippines, The United States, The Great Lakes I see nothing wrong? The Philippine (Islands). The United (States). The Great (Lakes). > the poor This is a challenge for NLP but only due to the ellipsis. "the poor (people)", where "people" is elided. I don't think most native speakers realize "poor" is an adjective here. > a means of production > a number of hamsters, the number of hamsters > a shirt, but a pie…

> The Philippines, The United States, The Great Lakes The point is that they are all names for a unique entity. There are no multiple Philippines - there's only one. Yet we should say "The Philippines", while we cannot say "The Switzerland." Similarly, we aren't talking about "a particular group of united states among multiple such groups" - for example, nobody calls Germany "The United States", even if it's made of…

> why can't we say "a garment" or "a pants"? (Hmm maybe we can say "a garment"? I'm not sure.)

You must say "a garment". "A piece of garment" is not grammatical English and never has been.

(The word garment itself, regardless of how you use it, is basically obsolete in modern English, though.)

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

#92

Post by eximius »

gweinberg wrote: post #56

I'm not sure how well this works in practice. Unless you already know a horse is a wonder dog and a hippopotamus is a water horse, when someone says "river wonder dog" will you know what he means?

Others address that this is not uncommon in languages, nor is it unhelpful even if you don't know.

But for a different counterpoint, lets say we gave a specific name to everything. For example, in my new, totally not-fake language, a hippo is a klantomolarnal.

Unless you already know a hippopotamus is a klantomolarnal, when someone says klantomolarnal, will you know what he means?

So, if our options are:

1) colloquial compound words that are informative but inexact and may require context (most languages) 2) unique words for everything with no intrinsic meaning (no language) 3) compound words that uniquely describe a thing (ithkuil, lojban, basically nothing useable)

It seems clear that (1) is our only real option. Toki Pona just has a harder time because of the smaller shared vocabulary which makes things more ambiguous.

In my limited experience, context clears things up tremendously.

(incoming rusty toki pona)

o sina lukin e ni! // Look at that!

o sina lukin e telo suli soweli! // Look at that big, water mammal [hippopotamus]!

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

#93

Post by saithound »

yongjik wrote: post #84
kaoD wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Philippines, The United States, The Great Lakes I see nothing wrong? The Philippine (Islands). The United (States). The Great (Lakes). > the poor This is a challenge for NLP but only due to the ellipsis. "the poor (people)", where "people" is elided. I don't think most native speakers realize "poor" is an adjective here. > a means of production > a number of hamsters, the number of hamsters > a shirt, but a pie…

> The Philippines, The United States, The Great Lakes The point is that they are all names for a unique entity. There are no multiple Philippines - there's only one. Yet we should say "The Philippines", while we cannot say "The Switzerland." Similarly, we aren't talking about "a particular group of united states among multiple such groups" - for example, nobody calls Germany "The United States", even if it's made of…

> There are no multiple Philippines - there's only one. Yet we should say "The Philippines", while we cannot say "The Switzerland."

I think kaoD's point is that islands, states and lakes are not unique entities, so "the" does designate a particular instance of a class in these examples.

I think he might have a point: your three examples are proper nouns that happen to include "the", and they evolved from "definite article (+ attributive) + noun", where the definite article was used to pick out a particular instance of a class.

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

#94

Post by yongjik »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #91
yongjik wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Philippines, The United States, The Great Lakes The point is that they are all names for a unique entity. There are no multiple Philippines - there's only one. Yet we should say "The Philippines", while we cannot say "The Switzerland." Similarly, we aren't talking about "a particular group of united states among multiple such groups" - for example, nobody calls Germany "The United States", even if it's made of…

> why can't we say "a garment" or "a pants"? (Hmm maybe we can say "a garment"? I'm not sure.) You must say "a garment". "A piece of garment" is not grammatical English and never has been. (The word garment itself, regardless of how you use it, is basically obsolete in modern English, though.)

Thanks for the correction. Should have sticked to a piece of furniture... :/

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

#95

Post by schoen »

yongjik wrote: post #94
thaumasiotes wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why can't we say "a garment" or "a pants"? (Hmm maybe we can say "a garment"? I'm not sure.) You must say "a garment". "A piece of garment" is not grammatical English and never has been. (The word garment itself, regardless of how you use it, is basically obsolete in modern English, though.)

Thanks for the correction. Should have sticked to a piece of furniture... :/

It would work as "a piece of cloth".

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

#96

Post by kaoD »

yongjik wrote: post #84
kaoD wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Philippines, The United States, The Great Lakes I see nothing wrong? The Philippine (Islands). The United (States). The Great (Lakes). > the poor This is a challenge for NLP but only due to the ellipsis. "the poor (people)", where "people" is elided. I don't think most native speakers realize "poor" is an adjective here. > a means of production > a number of hamsters, the number of hamsters > a shirt, but a pie…

> The Philippines, The United States, The Great Lakes The point is that they are all names for a unique entity. There are no multiple Philippines - there's only one. Yet we should say "The Philippines", while we cannot say "The Switzerland." Similarly, we aren't talking about "a particular group of united states among multiple such groups" - for example, nobody calls Germany "The United States", even if it's made of…

> The Philippines, The United States, The Great Lakes

See saithound's reply.

> it's not a definite group of people

Yes it is. It's a specific subset of people (the poor) that can be picked apart from the rest (the non-poor).

> E.g., "I met those refugees on the road, so I asked the poor [refugees] a few questions."

Again, I see nothing weird with this (?)

You seem to have a problem with ellipsis (and yes, that's hard!) not articles.

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

#97

Post by kaoD »

schoen wrote: post #95
yongjik wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the correction. Should have sticked to a piece of furniture... :/

It would work as "a piece of cloth".

But that would still have nothing to do with "a piece of cloth" vs "the piece of cloth" which is still a meaningful difference :/

I'm more confused now.

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

#98

Post by schoen »

coliveira wrote: post #88

Everyone should spend at least some time learning about ancient languages, such as Latin and Greek. If you do, you'll understand that all languages were originally like that, with very few words. The profusion of vocabulary we have nowadays were formed from a small kernel that was enriched with numerous suffixes, prefixes, and the combination of two or more words. For example, as we are closer to Latin, it is useful…

I've spent some time doing that, as well as learning Toki Pona, and it doesn't seem to me that they're very similar. Latin and Greek have attested vocabularies of thousands of words, many of which have a super-specific meaning and aren't analyzable as compounds. Just one example is that they both have words for specific plant and animal species, which Toki Pona doesn't.

I agree that learning ancient languages and prefixes produces amazing results for our understanding of modern languages that are related to them and is a great idea. :-)

I especially don't think that ancient language speakers felt that, just because they had productive prefixes like our re- or un-, they could always describe concepts with combinations of a few existing morphemes instead of inventing new ones or borrowing them from other languages. Also, even the ancient language speakers didn't understand the etymology or structure of their own languages very well; some borrowings and compounds were already opaque to them!

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

#99

Post by swiley »

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…

Quoting is a kind of escape in any language.

Even in programming languages you could use string literals to make the same pedantic arguments about the grammar.

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

#100

Post by schoen »

schoen wrote: post #47
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…

It's interesting to me that you focus on the 'high' meaning of sewi, because I've always focused on the 'religious' or 'divine' meaning. So I would hear "lawa sewi" as something like 'religious head' or 'religious leader'. Probably my first parse of "soweli pi lawa sewi" would be 'the rabbi's cat' or something, rather than a giraffe. Or I would imagine an animal whose head is similar to some concept or representation…

sina (anu jan ante) li pali ala pali e sitelen sin ni tan toki mi?

https://www.reddit.com/r/mi_lon/comments/fpjomk/soweli_pi_la...

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