Saturday 22 September 2007

Last lesson and first gripes

Having completed a first pass of all the lessons, I feel I can now explain some of the initial criticisms I have of Toki Pona. The lessons were an excellent introduction to the language, but they left a few unanswered questions. The three main areas where I have some criticisms are:

1) The pronunciation guide says that the first syllable of a word is always stressed. As an English speaker this should not be too much of a problem, but the stress does seem too far forward on many 3-syllable words. Some examples where I would prefer to stress the middle syllable are: akesi, kalama, kulupu, sitelen. All these words sound unnatural to me when the first syllable is stressed.

2) The rules for when to use li seemed simple enough: with all subjects except mi and sina. However I was not expecting the addition of mute to require the use of li. I was expecting mi mute, sina mute to follow the same rule as mi, sina. This makes the rules for when to use li seem a bit arbitrary to me.

3) The very small lexicon in Toki Pona means that there is a heavy reliance on context, and lots of room for ambiguity. At times the potential for ambiguity seems a little too much. Some words seems to cover a very wide number of concepts, and it would be good if there were some way to add additional words to clarify which concept is meant. For example, what kind of kala (fish), what kind of soweli (land mammal)? There are many different kinds of each.

On this note, I have decided to look through the thematic word lists next, to see how Toki Pona words can be combined to express more concepts. After that I will try to cement my knowledge of the 118 words, before revisiting the lessons at a slower pace, focusing more on the grammar this time.

5 comments:

buscador de ítacas said...

1) Well, that's subjective. :-) What's unnatural there? I myself find nothing disgusting in those words. The whole language was originally made up according to the taste and will of one person who didn't propose it as an IAL nor defined its "naturality" as the same of the languages she toke the TP words from.

2) In fact, some people say there's no reason for those distinctions on when to use _li_ or not, and it has been sometimes proposed to simply generalise the use of the _li_ marker. It's one of the proposals made by some people on the TP mailing list when the language creator (_jan Sonja_ in TP) recently asked for opinions about language changes before the first official grammar book appears.

3) There is a larger set of already used expressions than those appearing on the official TP website. There are at least some Wikija articles and the Yahoo messages (from where a larger vocabulary including several-word expressions is periodically updated)

buscador de ítacas said...

she took*

Matthew said...

Modifiers to pronouns are somewhat rare in use, so the word following "mi" or "sina" is usually a verb, although probably a dozen modifiers *could* make sense after mi or sina.

Indeed, there are trade off for using a "semantic primes" language. It is easy to get going, but coining the "right" noun phrase can get tricky.

I too wish the cannonical sources had a more developed vocabulary of idioms & compound words.

idojc said...

Thanks for comments. These are not meant as strong criticisms, just my initial impressions on some points that stood out. I don't find any words in TP disgusting, in fact I really appreciate the simple phonology. It's just that to me kaLAma sounds more natural than KAlama, that's all. I hope no-one is offended by any of my "criticisms" posted in this blog.

Anonymous said...

Keep up the good work.