Comment by camdez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by camdez | Hacker News Reader

Very cool. The grammatical basics seem a lot like Chinese, with similar word order, and a couple Japanese-esque particles thrown in (li ≈ が, e ≈ を). Lacking tense, conjugation / declension, subject / verb agreement, grammatical gender, etc., I've always felt the basics of Chinese make a pretty good foundation for a simple language.

I'm curious about the decision to include the grammatical particles, and why it seemed necessary...anyone have a full enough understanding of the grammar to know why the decision was made to allow dropping the "li" particle with "mi" and "sina", but not getting rid of it in general? Chinese similarly lacks a 'to be' copula, and gets by quite well without a subject marker.

c.f.

  EN: I (am) good
  TP: mi pona
  ZH: 我好

  EN: Water is good
  TP: telo >li< pona
  ZH: 水好

Japanese explicitly demarcates the subject / topic, but seems to allow a bit more variety at the beginning of the sentence + uses that demarcation to add a connotation of emphasis or contrast with a previous topic + isn't a conlang. Anyone have a feeling for what it adds here?

I think it's to distinguish between adjectives. Perhaps telo pona means good water so "telo pona li lete" is clear that "good water is cold". I don't know I'm totally guessing here :D

Anyway, if you like these simple kind of languages, checkout http://angoslanguage.wikispaces.com/

Your interpretation is right. There's an example somewhere in one of the official tutorials that shows how moving the li can change the meaning for this reason (although "pi", which means something like "of", was also added for a similar reason: I think Sonja's example was distinguishing two ways of grouping "tomo telo nasa", where "(tomo telo) nasa" would mean "crazy bathroom" and "tomo (telo nasa)" would mean "bar, liquor store" -- so Sonja said the second case would be expressed by "tomo pi telo nasa").

Ah, that's a good point. I suppose the limited vocabulary swells the number of compounds, making for more opportunities for confusion in parsing them.

Thanks!

> Chinese similarly lacks a 'to be' copula

What? No it doesn't. 是 is the Chinese copula.

It isn't permitted in a lot of contexts where it would be used in English, but it's still the copula. Here are the examples of copula use that wikipedia gives which require 是 in Chinese:

    Mary and John are my friends.
    The Morning Star is the Evening Star.
    She was a nurse.
    Dogs are carnivorous mammals.
    I am your boss.

I'd be very surprised to see a Chinese person come out with 水好 for "water is good".

Good point. It exists but isn't necessary for applying adjectives to nouns. Mea culpa.

Agreed RE "水好" being unnatural, but it's hardly incorrect.

One other grammatical feature borrowed from Chinese is the way of asking and answering yes-no questions.

For example:

sina wile ala wile e moku?

you want not want OBJ food?

Answer can be "mi wile" or "mi wile ala" (I want / I don't want). One can also go even more Chinese-like and drop the subject pronoun in this context.

Or:

sina kute ala kute?

you hear not hear?

Sonja did provide an alternative way of asking yes-no questions, which is making a statement and appending "anu seme?" (literally 'or what?'), kind of like German "nicht wahr?" and Portuguese "não é?", among others. I think the Chinese style is more standard and pervasive today, though.

Very cool. So dropping subject pronouns ("pro-drop") is formally acceptable?

Well, I wouldn't regard toki pona as pro-drop in general -- subject pronouns are normally required (in part because verbs don't inflect for person and number). But there is a special case for answering a yes-no question:

http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/latex/Answer...

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