It's like leaving out units of measure. We sometimes omit them, but we practically never lose track of when it makes sense to or have to consciously think about it.
One day we show up with the top up.
We're inside and he comes in to tell his parents my car has "a cover or shield"
I don't know why but we all love this.
Probably writers get this more easily. I think they are trained and edited constantly to avoid unnecessary fluff, and identify what is pointful atmospheric detail and what it pointless detail.
Does the story actually change depending on what drink dad enjoyed with his morning paper? Maybe if it was spiked, or if it was a pointed aspect of his character that he drank chocolate which others find childish, and he knows it and doesn't care. So it could, but in 99% of scenes I don't think it does matter, it only matters that it's a common thing that people do, and a common setting prop. If the language were not English and the standard way to say "morning coffee" was something else instead of specifically coffee, the scenes and stories all function exactly the same.
Yes I understand that. Vietnamese works a bit like this although with a far less limited vocabulary.
I was asking about the specific case where it does matter. How complicated is it to differentiate between these two similar drinks when the difference is important?
I would imagine that in a system like this, you end up adding only the particular extra detail that matters at the time, and so you almost never say quite the same thing as what we mean by "coffee".
Instead it would be just "drink" most of the time (and for all I know maybe even that is too specific and it's really just "liquid" or "liquid food", but anyway...)
And then when you come in from shovelling snow, your partner has "hot drink" ready for you, because "hot" is the extra property that matters.
And when you get up in the morning, you want "invogorating drink" to get going, because "invogorating" is the extra detail that matters. (setting aside that I bet "invogorating" is NOT one of the precious few 120 available words, but there will be something like active or up or positive or fast)
And rarely bother trying to express all the of the bag of properties that "coffee" conveys.
And if you DO once in a while, maybe that is not so different from English anyway.
"a steaming hot mug of black coffee" is a lot of syllables, and we would say all of that in English if we happened to want to express all of those facets, so maybe it's not all that different?
liquid of no sleep
I shall now never be able to think of coffee and also not immediately think of this discussion and that particular phrase. Thanks. :)If Toki Pona was used as an actual language in an everyday setting in a community, it would quickly get set, established terms and phrases for things, and essentially expand the vocabulary.
Latin vs English, Italian, French, etc.
And a good thought experiment—if one spoke Latin only, how would modern concepts or words be constructed as Latin and not one of its descendants.
"Reginald Foster, a former plumber’s apprentice from Milwaukee who, in four decades as an official Latinist of the Vatican, dreamed in Latin, cursed in Latin, banked in Latin and ultimately tweeted in Latin, died on Friday at a nursing home in Milwaukee. He was LXXXI. "
https://web.archive.org/web/20201227172007/https://www.nytim...
This has all been observed before and is inevitable. You want them to call it “telo pi lape ala” but that’s shit so they’ll call it tala or lapela or something. That will then become the word for it.
For example in Tok Pisin helicopter is called "mixmaster bilong Jesus Christ" (Jesus Christ's food blender) or piano: bigpela bokis he got whitepela teeth hegot blackpela teeth sappos you hittim him he cry out (big box with white and black keys that cries out when you hit it)
Emi fulup gud dei, yumi 2 fela, tekim sol-water 1-eye fela, put im long postofis letahol blong praya-fela pasta-man, tel im:
"Sky islan twinky-twink planty-fela ia!"
This is from Ken Campbell, the UK's greatest populariser of what he called "wol wontok". https://ianlouisharris.com/tag/piotr-baumann/
It's a Ken Dodd joke, in pidgin. Original:
Tok pisin was my first language, left with the babysitter when growing up.
The more those objects got in daily lives, the more incentives was to find proper words.
The point of my comment was to find an example of a _natural_ language where people came up with ways to refer to new objects by using simple vocabulary (As opposed to a conlang like toki pona)
I want to know how/where the word for plane came from? balus
But also remember the tok pisin is a recent language, created from the colonisation efforts so it's not strange to find that modern words will have a translatation. Helicopters and piano's were around at the time.
The thing with pidgins is that when they start out, they are everybody's foreign language and are used as lingua franca. Generally people have their own native language where they may or may not have words for a given concept but then when they talk with other people from another language group they may or may not be able to just sneak in such a word and be understood. That's why sometimes long turn of phrases are used to describe stuff; not because the speaker doesn't have a word but because the speaker and the listener don't have a common word.
But a language with 200 words necessarily becomes verbose I suppose
Green or black liquid?
Looking it up, it seems like there are only five words for colors:
pimeja (black), walo (white), loje (red), jelo (yellow), and laso (blue and green)
In Toki Pona, the translation for "Would you like coffee or tea?" would be:
"sina wile e kafe anu telo nasa?"
Here's a breakdown:
"sina" = you
"wile" = want/need
"e" = direct object marker
"kafe" = coffee (borrowed word)
"anu" = or
"telo nasa" = literally "intoxicating liquid", often used to mean "tea" or "alcohol" (there's no specific word for "tea" in Toki Pona, but in some contexts, "telo nasa" can be used to mean tea)
It's worth noting that because Toki Pona has such a limited vocabulary, some words and concepts may be represented differently than in other languages.
Loje laso walo = mauve I guess.