"mi moku e kasi e soweli"

Conlangs Toki Pona
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In your personal feeling, could the sentence in the title refer to the speaker eating kasi and feeding soweli?

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No. In my nasin, for feeding, you need to specify “pana e moku tawa”.

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same here

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A little discussion on the Toaq Discord server sparked some interesting thoughts that I’d like to share here. @magnap was reading @shamu’s nasin toki document hosted on GitHub and had some questions about polysemy in toki pona, which led to this post.

There is a section dedicated to transitive predicates in toki pona in nasin toki that reads:

Sometimes, we come across strange constructions in toki pona.
Things like mi tomo e waso may look confusing at first, but there are simple strategies to interpret this.

When we use the construction X li Y e Z we usually mean one of two things, depending on context:

  • The subject causes the object be Y, “X causes Z to be Y.”.
    In terms of toki pona, we can restructure this to X li pali e ni: Z li Y.
    mi pona e tomo - e.g. “We cause the room to be good.”, or “I repair the house.”
    mi tomo e waso - e.g. “We turn the bird into a house.” (Maybe it is a very big bird and we can live in its plumage!)
  • The subject applies Y to the object, “X applies Y to Z.”.
    mi luka e soweli len - e.g. “I pet the hidden dog.”, or “I hit the plush toy.”
    mi tomo e waso - e.g. “I apply the house to a bird, i.e. I put the bird into the house”
    sina telo e sina - e.g. “You wash yourselves.”, or “You spill water on yourself.”

I think this is well written as to patterns of transitivity in toki pona, but it leaves a question unanswered: interpretation of transitive moku when used under this nasin. From @magnap:

under this analysis, mi0 moku e soweli0[1] could be:

  • mi0 moku2 e soweli0 => “I eat the animal”
  • mi0 moku1 e soweli0 => "I cause: soweli0 moku1 => “I cause: the animal eats” => “I feed the animal”
  • mi0 moku0 e soweli0 => "I cause: soweli0 moku0 => “I cause: the animal is food” => “I cook the animal”
  • mi0 moku0 e soweli0 => “I apply moku0 to soweli0” => “I apply food to the animal” => “I feed the animal” (but mi0 moku0 e sike0 could be coating a ball in peanut butter for your dog to play with)

Personally, I think this is a fair analysis of moku, and makes me desire more from the semantic space of moku.

This might be hard to wrap your head around if you’re just a toki pona speaker, but @magnap is coming from an outside perspective and interpreted it in that outside perspective.

I (or @magnap as well) can add more to this if there’s questions about this context :3

  1. these numbers denote the “form” of the word, where with respect to moku, 0 is “to be food”, 1 is “to cause to be food”, and 2 is “to eat”, in English terms ↩︎

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Ah, I should choose a different example then.
Or maybe different options.

What about “I eat the kasi and turn the soweli into food.”?

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I am working on a linked post wherein I enumerate all the options that I know of and pair them up to see which ones people consider to be compatible :sweat_smile:

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I have a hard time reading mi moku e kasi e soweli as this as it requires a different transitivity on moku for each direct object. Under @mazzie / @magnap 's analysis, this is invoking two different meanings of moku simultaneously (moku0 and moku2, as in mi0 moku2 e soweli0 => “I eat the animal” & mi0 moku0 e soweli0 => "I cause: soweli0 moku0 => “I cause: the animal is food” => “I cook the animal”)

Why not something explicit talking about the change of state, like mi moku e kasi. mi ante e soweli tawa moku?

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That is precisely what I was trying to test for :blush:

Edit for a bit more context:
The question is, are words in toki pona in general (and moku specifically) just semantically very broad, or are they polysemous?

My gut feeling was that it is invalid to analyse the words in terms of different concepts from English (like “eat” versus “feed”, or “eat” versus “turn into food”).
If the underlying concept is really just a single (semantically broad) concept, then applying different subcategories to two different direct objects should be no problem.

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I can’t find a way to force a distinction between “I cause: the animal eats” from “I apply food to the animal”. Does anyone have a situation that can force a distinction like that? I suppose you can apply water to a horse to water but you can’t make it drink…
EDIT: specifically I am looking for a scenario that forces “I cause: the X eats”, because I already have a way to force “I apply food to the Y”.

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Maybe “applying food to the Y” as a previous statement can force the “I cause: the X eats” interpretation. Also using a tool to physically cause the X to eat:

mi pana e moku tawa soweli. soweli li wile ala moku. mi moku e soweli kepeken ilo lupa.

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Hmm to the point that I can distinguish the two, I don’t think this creates a distinction in my mind. I’ll drop “feeding the cat” for now and do a follow-up with a different noun/verb if I can find one.

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Another example might be:
mi luka e kasi e soweli

Can this mean i build a hand from plant material and pet the animal?

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Post is ready here, I made it a separate post because I have a bunch of sentences I am asking to have judged, and I wanted to be up-front about what I am trying to test :sweat_smile:

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That is (using my 0c1 notation from the other post for when we use a copula to turn a noun into a verb for being that noun) mi luka0c1 e kasi “I cause: the plant is a hand” and mi luka0/luka2 e soweli “I apply a/the/my hand to the animal”/“I touch the animal”, right? Very nice! I wonder if it’s possible to distinguish luka0 and luka2 :thinking: