Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

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> bus,

Maybe "tomo tawa kulupu" 'group travel space'

> train,

Maybe "tomo tawa linja" 'long stringy travel space' (or alternately "tomo tawa pi kiwen linja tu" 'travel space of two stringy solids')

> airplane,

I've previously used "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space'

> elevator,

Maybe "tomo tawa anpa" 'downward travel space'

> shipping container,

Maybe "tomo tawa esun" 'commercial travel space'

> bobsled...

Maybe "tomo tawa pi telo lete kiwen" 'hard cold water's travel space'

I'll also add that there's been some debate between "tomo tawa" 'travel building, travel space' and "ilo tawa" 'travel tool' for vehicles. I would certainly regard a bicycle as an ilo tawa because you don't enter inside of it. (A problem with "tomo tawa" is that "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space' is arguably ambiguous between an airport and an airplane!)

Although toki pona is super-bad for any kind of precision, you can often figure out how to express more than you might first think. :-)

> A problem with "tomo tawa" is that "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space' is arguably ambiguous between an airport and an airplane!

That's the problem with all of these—they're all ambiguous. Which is fine if the person you're talking to knows which you mean, but when you're talking about something new, you have no way of actually making clear what you mean. It seems like the best you can do is reinvent agglutinative languages, badly.

> agglutinative

?!

Do you really mean that?

All languages have compound lexemes. And all languages can use description to disambiguate.

The balance in toki pona is at a dramatically different point to English, which has a relatively large functional vocabulary. But it isn't a difference in kind. And most conlangs, in my experience, rely more on compounds than English.

The "Badly" at the end seems to drop your comment from curious bafflement to prejudice. Why would it be bad?

> Why would it be bad?

Because agglutinative languages have much more sophisticated systems and morphemes for expressing complicated ideas. This reads more like Mark Twain's satire about German (https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html).

Those languages also have more than 123 words. Sophistication implies complexity, and Toki Pona was designed to be simple, even to a fault.

In Chinese, an airport is a "airplane field" and a airplane is a compound of the word for "wood" and "table.

What? An airplane is 飞机，where 飞 = flying and 机 = machine

I think the confusion is because of simplified vs. traditional characters. 机 is made from 木 (wood) and 几 (table) radicals, and in Japanese it really does mean desk/table. But in Chinese it's the simplified form of 機 (machine). The 几 is just a substitute for some more complicated strokes, and 木 is just for the sound.

Even then the character by itself doesn't mean "airplane", you need to pair it with 飞.

Maybe airport could be written as "tomo pi tawa kon"?

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