"mi moku e kasi e soweli"

Conlangs Toki Pona
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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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