Re: Toki Pona survey

On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 22:22:38 -0400, Jeffrey Henning <jeffrey@...> wrote:
> Have any of you tried to learn Toki Pona? (http://www.tokipona.org)
>
> What do you like about it?
tenpo pini lili la mi kama sona e toki pona.
toki pona li pona tawa mi tan ni:
- ona li jo e nimi lili.  sona li pona.
- toki li pini.  tenpo mute la toki sin li pini ala.  jan li ken ala kepeken e toki sama ni.
- jan ante mute li kepeken e ona.

(I learned Toki Pona a little while ago.  I like it because 1) it's not got
too many words, and is easy to learn; 2) it's _complete_.  often new conlangs
aren't finished enough to use.  3) several other people actually use it.)

Using Toki Pona is kind of like trying to program something. You have to break
your message down into smaller pieces.  Sometimes this can be frustrating when
you can't immediately see how.  :p

> What do you dislike about it?
- I still haven't got all of the grammar down yet. But that's possibly just my fault.

- Some words can be used for multiple parts of speech, but others can't,
   and you have to learn which are which.
   For example "jan" can be a noun meaning "person" or a modifier meaning
   "human" or "personal".  But "soweli" appears to only be a noun meaning "animal".

- The "foreign word" system using proper adjectives is somewhat erratic.  Some
   tokiponizations are standard or official, like "ma Kanse" for "(country of)
   France"--the French /R/ regularly being /k/ in TP. Sometimes phonological
   exactitude like this divorces some identical words: America as a country is
   "ma Mewika", with regular /w/ for American /r/, but the Americas as a continent
   are "ma suli Amelika".  In any case, if one wanders outside the scope of official
   forms and tokiponistas' first names, it gets difficult:  if I said I went to "tomo
   Pakakin" it'd probably be impossible to decipher.  (Generally one sees tokiponistas
   resorting to using the original spelling in such situations: "tomo Burger King",
   or "jan Bob Marley" or whatever.)  Also, there doesn't appear to be an official
   list of standard tokiponizations outside of some geographical names.  You have
   to learn on your own that e.g. "Wikipedia" is "(lipu sona) Wikipesija".


	*jan Miku!
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