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

Larry Sulky wrote:
> On 4/2/06, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
>
>>I've started an auxlang. [Am i going a bit crazy? :-)]
>>
>>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.
>
>
> I think it looks swell, Herman! Are you going to put up a website or
> wiki for it?
I have a little more work to do on the vocabulary, especially the
grammatical bits (word derivation, object particles, conjunctions, and
so on), but one of these days I plan to put something up. The grammar
needs work as well. It's beginning to look a little bit like Hawaiian,
but with some obvious differences (the way that compounds are formed,
for instance, with "vata-ave" meaning "blackbird", but "ave vata"
meaning "black bird"). But I'm thinking that the Hawaiian pattern with
the head first may be a better fit for the general pattern of the
language; the ambiguity could be resolved by contrasting "ave vata"
(blackbird) with "ave di vata" (bird which [is] black). So I need to do
a little more playing around with the grammar (and possibly borrow some
more ideas from Hawaiian) before I'm ready to put it up on a web page.

> You are familiar with Toki Pona, yes? And perhaps Tunu?
>
> ---larry
>
I've heard of them, yes, but I don't recall many details. Tunu was
featured in one of the translation relays I participated in (the
infamous relay no. 6 with such memorable quotes as "all wells can indeed
be cut up into tiny pieces"). Toki Pona is a little more familiar since
I've seen it recently on the list. Kali-sise, formerly Pitakosilano, is
another lang along those lines (with a simple phonology and relatively
small list of roots).

I don't want to go so far as Toki Pona or even Kali-sise in reducing the
size of the vocabulary (currently I have somewhere around 600 basic
roots, not counting specialized technical vocabulary which I haven't yet
started on), but to some degree vocabulary reduction is one of those
inevitable design features that needs to be addressed when designing a
language to be learned as a second language. Tiki is more like Tilya
(which was inspired by Lojban) in that respect. There is still a pretty
good sized vocabulary to learn, but smaller than in natlangs because of
the way that related concepts are included in the various usages of a
single word.

The vocabulary for Tiki is derived mainly from natlangs, with extreme
mangling (as in Volapük) to fit the phonology. Dutch and Japanese are
two of the main vocabulary sources, although many of the Dutch words
could be more generally Germanic ("vata" = "black" could be remembered
by recalling Swedish "svart" as easily as Dutch "zwart"), and I've also
used words from a few other languages including English. In fact, I just
looked at the Toki Pona web site and noticed a word "jaki" with a
similar meaning to the Tiki word "jaki" ("dirty, gross, filthy" in Toki
Pona, but "disgusting, revolting" in Tiki; "dirty" is "puku"). I imagine
there are probably a few others that are similar due to borrowing from
related languages.

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