Re: Tu ta pasa Tiki, he mo vuhu so ka sina

Jim Henry wrote:
> On 4/2/06, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
>
>
>>The good news is I don't intend it to be an auxlang for this world. But
>>maybe some other world (a parallel Earth) could use it.
>
> .....
>
>>(vaguely specified) design goals. But the design requirements of an
>>auxlang make for an interesting challenge in language design, so I'm
>>thinking of it as an auxlang for a fictional Earth.
>
>
> Have you any definite ideas about the conhistory of this world
> and how its international language movement(s) differ from ours?
The only thing definite is that Volapük (or something very much like it)
exists. I've tentatively identified the author of Tiki as Dr. Maurice
Magritte (doto Magaliti Molisi), who may turn out to be related to the
Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte (but that could just be a
coincidence). Either Esperanto doesn't (yet) exist, or for some reason
Dr. Magritte was unfamiliar with it. My idea is that he started out as a
supporter of Volapük, but couldn't help tinkering around with it, until
it occurred to him that he could design his own international language
that would be easier to use. It's not surprising that he was familiar
with Dutch (the Flemish variety at least), and he could easily have
found out enough about the other European languages, but the interesting
questions are how he learned about Japanese, and how the Hawaiian
grammar managed to attract his attention.

>>The verb and its objects: All arguments of a verb are called "objects"
>>("le oje") in Tiki grammar. The o-object (patient) is like a direct
>>object in English, although it may be used without an overt subject. The
>>subject is generally marked with an e-object (agent or cause). There are
>>also other kinds of objects, like the de-object (source) and the
>>to-object (destination).
>
>
> This looks spiffy; I'd like to see more.
I'm thinking that the general structure of a sentence could be described
as head-first, subject / predicate (or more generally topic / comment),
with the main verb always at the head of the predicate, and the subject
optional. The normal word order would be SVO.

Unlike Esperanto, pairs of antonyms are not derived from the same root.
So for instance, Tiki has the pairs hudu / malu (good / bad), hiku /
taka (short / tall), hulu / nivu (old / new). But in other ways, Tiki
keeps the basic vocabulary size down by building words from roots, like
daga + midi (day + middle = noon, midday), hana + telu (go + back =
return), and with derivational prefixes (diki = thick, sa diki =
thickness; kini = child, hi kini = boy, se kini = girl).

Names are assimilated, although they may include syllable-final /n/ and
possibly some clusters, if this turns out to be necessary. Names are
placed after a descriptive noun which gives the general category of
meaning: languages with "pasa", countries with "kuni", cities with
"site", and so on.

pasa Agala (Angala) = English,
kuni Agala (Angala) = England,
pasa Palasa (Palansa) = French,
kuni Palasa (Palansa) = France,
site Pali = Paris,
isa Pali = Parisian
site Lodono (Londono) = London
ise Lodono (Londono) = Londoner
povi Minesota = Minnesota
ise Minesota = Minnesotan [mIn@"so:?n=]

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