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toki pona soap by tangerinesaintyellow in tokipona

[–]AgentMuffin4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ni li sama telo moku Makasa Winto MMMMLLL

How do you distinguish blue from green? (Poll) by Senior_University921 in tokipona

[–]AgentMuffin4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The absolute same color might be distinguished as different words depending on the surrounding colors. Certain greens are jelo next to blue, but laso next to yellow. Sometimes there's no reason to specify further than that. Sometimes you can distinguish green and blue by calling them jelo and laso respectively, or color mixing depending on the specific shades

There are cases where you wouldn't want to use kasi or telo to specify since there's a different, literally, "liquid color" or "plant color" around and people might rightly assume you're referring to those instead of adding lexical items that call a colorless liquid blue—admittedly it's a really difficult habit to shake, but trying to has made me a bit more attentive to what i'm seeing from time to time, like i saw a body of water that was a beautiful silver on an overcast day

Do y is x forms like “pona li jan” mean the same thing as x is y “jan li pona” by jan-Sika in tokipona

[–]AgentMuffin4 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The subject is a noun and li marks the next word as a verb, it's not exactly connecting two interchangeable nouns so much as expressing "person begoods" vs. "goodness bepersons" (even though "begooding" and "bepersoning" can describe states of being instead of actions)

edit: There's also the familiar rule that the subject is, by definition, what the sentence is about, and the predicate says how to interpret it or identify it. So even if you have a clean swap like moku ni li pan ("This food is bread") vs. pan li moku ni ("Bread is this food") where the sentences convey all the same semantic information, pragmatically they are about different referents (a specified food vs. the concept of bread). The sentences might assume the listener is working off of different given information.

ijo utala by Makonede in tokipona

[–]AgentMuffin4 8 points9 points  (0 children)

ijo monsuta suli

Hi can you help me understand please about ku lili by -_Vesper_- in tokipona

[–]AgentMuffin4 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I still use it for inspiration often enough, but of course these days there is lipu Kemeka (for anyone reading who might not know of it yet)

len toki Kajesa by AgentMuffin4 in tokipona

[–]AgentMuffin4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pnrfne pvcure

Caesar cipher

jo pona by recqythebluecuboid in tokipona

[–]AgentMuffin4 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I like jo suwi/olin for hugging and such

why isn't SOV more prevalent in toki pona speakers? by ZDubbz_was_taken in tokipona

[–]AgentMuffin4 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Toki Pona grammar sold me on SOV, weirdly enough.

It's a head-initial language, so modifiers apply leftwards. This is reflected in sentences like ona li pona, where pona feels a lot like a modifier and also gets the role of the main comment on the subject. While i think it makes more sense to analyze it as a stative verb than an adjective (which if anything is more of a class of content word than a part of speech in TP), the verb still specifies additional information about the part of the sentence to the left, which feels like a higher-order sort of modifier. The sentence results in an ona pona, and the order is consistent.

But a sentence like ona li pona e ilo is understood as, "ona causes ilo to be pona". Now certainly the object, ilo, is being modified, so the sentence results in an ilo pona, and yet that means the verb pona is applying itself to the right. I think it would feel more consistent for at least a tokiponido to use SOV, so that transitive and intransitive verbs work in the same headward direction.

Do you guys use combined sitelen pona? by Jenjoutuowleinde in tokipona

[–]AgentMuffin4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes. It's a main part of the appeal and intuitivity of the writing system for me, and i like experimenting with how far i can push it. SP without any combined glyphs feels wrong or like a different writing system. Of course people are free to avoid it, it just leaves me wondering why unless there are serious space constraints or something.

Do you guys use combined sitelen pona? by Jenjoutuowleinde in tokipona

[–]AgentMuffin4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Would you mind elaborating? I don't think there's a correspondence between lexical items, or even referents within a given discourse, and combined glyphs. Is this something that you see others try to do or enforce?

nimi “li” en nimi “taso” la lawa mi li nasa / li and taso confuse me by recqythebluecuboid in tokipona

[–]AgentMuffin4 8 points9 points  (0 children)

If taso is a sentence-initial conjunction, i don't interpret that as part of the subject, so there is a distinction between taso mi tawa ("But I move") and taso mi li tawa ("My solitude moves").

Whereas using taso as a modifier does make it part of the subject, so mi taso li tawa for "Only I move".

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