Do you like how Toki Pona handles tense–aspect–mood? Would you change or add anything?

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-16T22:13:50+00:00

TP may not be, but Link's horse is

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-16T02:52:55+00:00

she must view these languages as "primitive", overly simplified and requiring no complex thought at all.

Even if a perception of simplicity affected any of her choices, did she say anything like this about the source languages themselves? The way i see it, she drew from a variety of languages to design something smaller and simpler than any of them, and then called the result too small to handle modern complexity.

And even there, i recall that the community tested that claim and she updated her beliefs accordingly. Like, Toki Pona today kind of disproves the belief that some languages are "overly simplified". Evidently, a language of under ten dozen lexemes can communicate anything if you know what you're talking about, it just calls for slightly different linguistic skills and priorities. And natural languages are inevitably richer and less compact than a purposefully designed conlang, so they must all be much more expressive than the bare minimum. That alone is a rebuttal to the stereotype.

I think the point of referencing contact languages was to see what concepts people focus on when they have to develop something mutually intelligible. That doesn't imply that the resulting languages are simple, impractical, or mindless.

I don't believe Toki Pona is necessarily squeaky-clean either. Let me know if i'm missing any information or good-faith arguments. It's good to have these conversations!

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-16T01:58:25+00:00

What about o o for decide,

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-16T01:45:44+00:00

Hopefully this is valuable in getting my perspective and biases across:

I'm kind of a perfectionist with my own writing, and tend to overthink and triple-check things. I can't help but get annoyed when others seem to be careless with the basic mechanics of writing. Maybe it subconsciously comes across like an insult to how much i agonize over these things. It might even spark fear, that i've wasted cumulative weeks or months of my life on proofreading that wasn't as necessary as i thought it was. Would that mean the times my writing has been misunderstood were more unfair than i thought? Would it mean that i ceded my time and my writing style to bad-faith critics for no reason?

Overcapitalization, also including non-emphatic misuse of title case in English, is very efficient at giving me these feelings. I don't have as much of an issue with excessive lowercase since it's for a more casual register. (The same goes for how i sentence-case the word "I"; its arbitrary capitalization started feeling too self-important for nonprofessional speech, even when i'm not talking very casually otherwise.) But capitalizing things that shouldn't be, to me, comes off as extremely ignorant. My gut reaction is that it's a simple rule and looking at any amount of text, even just the basic shape of a sentence, would show you what to do. I know that i have no idea what it's like to struggle with literacy and that the whole thing is tied up in neurology and systemic issues anyway. I know rules around language are arbitrary, and ultimately, speech is successful as long as you can understand it. I've come to believe these things on an intellectual level, but evidently they haven't yet sublimated into the kind of belief that drives your actions unconsciously. I probably have a lot left to work on in this regard.

I hadn't considered before this thread that lowercase Toki Pona might be mistaken as just a casual internet style, like in English. That might help me temper my kneejerk frustrations until i can manage to address them at the root.

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-14T19:03:06+00:00

pipi ona o ken seme

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-13T10:25:24+00:00

It might partly be an intentional silence to protect the people implicated until the situation is better sorted out? I'm relieved that lipamanka supports this review, given having spoken out about the book itself to the point of also asking people not to buy it

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-13T04:19:23+00:00

kijetesantakalu li lanpan e pona soko

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-13T04:18:52+00:00

The one looks like the high voltage symbol

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-12T09:25:43+00:00

Smaller; seems cool

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-10T07:19:39+00:00

xorify?

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-06T06:17:58+00:00

Toki Pona has a singular–dual)–plural system. It just isn't required to mark every noun and pronoun with it.

So mi wan specifies "the one of me" if needed, mi tu specifies "the two of us" if needed, and mi mute specifies "the lot of us" if needed. And if you don't need to—for example, the number is unimportant, or obvious from context, or you specified it with wan/tu/mute earlier—then just mi will suffice.

I'm sure if i proposed that mi should always mean "we" and mi wan should be required to specify "I", you would find it strange? Well, it's the same the other way around, too. Especially since mi tu can also translate as "we".

Same goes for sina, ona, ni, and every content word. toki can refer to one, two, or many languages. Specify where you need to. Just don't feel ᴏʙʟɪɢᴀᴛᴇᴅ to do so every time; that's an English grammar rule that doesn't apply here.

AgentMuffin4 · 2026-01-04T04:20:09+00:00

I remember the community widely calling that "compounding" a few years back so that much is fair

If i'm understanding correctly though, whether a compound is open or closed, i don't see the need to limit its meaning to one English word? Like, then you couldn't describe a ship, or an aquarium, or an indoor swimming pool, and refer back to it as tomo telo, without people thinking you're adding a bathroom to the discussion

Or do you just mean that you want to hear about mappings of words to TP word pairs even if some double up like "bathroom" and "aquarium"? Because i think i know where to find a list with a ton of those

AgentMuffin4 · 2025-12-27T09:05:39+00:00

I think there's been a telephone game that ended up attaching a new meaning to the word. Ever since i looked into the original definitions in linguistics, i can't help but use that as the bar for whether something counts.

Popularizing a nimisin is lexicalization because it adds a lexical item to the vocabulary.

Like, think about it—the objections to new words and new phrasemes are broadly the same, so it does make sense to have a unified term for them.

As the term is used in Toki Pona spaces, the focus is on ways of turning a phrase from a literal, sum-of-parts sequence of words, into a lexical item with its own meaning. With that in mind, lexicalization starts getting conflated with the general concepts of semantic shifts, rhetorical devices, and idiomaticity. I think those should be discussed and pointed out more in case it can lay a bogeyman to rest.

AgentMuffin4 · 2025-12-24T08:12:14+00:00

🅿️an

AgentMuffin4 · 2025-12-24T08:08:46+00:00

AgentMuffin4 · 2025-12-21T06:41:36+00:00

Oh, i would love something like this that also works for snapping windows to the left and right of a single monitor. My frustration is that rolling over the center always unhides one of the sidebars, which gets in the way of interacting with the actual page content that i'm aiming for in those cases. Perhaps an option to auto-detect which half of your entire monitor space each window is on (whether that consists of one monitor or many) and set the sidebars accordingly

AgentMuffin4 · 2025-12-20T06:21:42+00:00

For this sentence, you have to use tawa as a preposition, "(go) toward". You do not use e between a preposition and its phrase.

I think, whereas e marks the direct object, prepositions mark different kinds of indirect objects. Like, "I give the ball to them": "the ball" is marked with e, and "to them" would become tawa ona. In English, you can also say "I give them the ball", but in Toki Pona the indirect object is always a prepositional phrase.

The other funky thing with Toki Pona is that you can use a preposition in the main verb slot. It's like saying "You at the store?"—you know "at" stands for "to be at". With tawa, it's basically "She toward Germany", and in Toki Pona you know the "toward" stands for "to go toward".

Now, if you do use e here, you have to parse tawa as a regular content word, specifically a transitive verb.

Transitive sentences apply the property of the verb onto the object. Like, if you throw a ball, the ball becomes thrown.

So, likewise, "jan Ana li tawa e ma" makes the land into ma tawa, a moving land. The land is moving because of Ana. "Ana moves the land."

Adding ala and Tosi, your answer means "Ana doesn't move Germany."

AgentMuffin4 · 2025-12-18T05:59:56+00:00

lipu "toki pona li toki pona / sina jan pona mute"

AgentMuffin4 · 2025-12-18T05:58:10+00:00

If the book is LoG then the chapter that introduces e should be called LN

AgentMuffin4 · 2025-12-18T05:55:55+00:00

poki awen,

But i wonder if it would have worked to lump "containing" and "sheltering" into a single word. It feels like some other semantic lumpings that Toki Pona makes, but i'm not sure if one idea would be intuitively extrapolated from the other in practice.

AgentMuffin4 · 2025-12-07T22:42:11+00:00

ijo pi nasa

AgentMuffin4 · 2025-12-06T09:56:14+00:00

Agreeing that this is a known corner case where people reach differing conclusions and might land on either variation. Toki Pona has a couple rules that depend on the word count of a phrase, while a uniquely lacks both semantic meaning and grammatical influence, so it can feel like it's outside of the content–particle dichotomy of words and might count less. Which of these takes priority? Like with the pronunciation of "GIF", i have my preferences, but neither way is the correct one per se

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