Hi there! I’m trying to make a tokiponido that’s as small as possible, while still working as a usable language. The grammar should be easy to pick up, flexible and mostly unambiguous, and it should be a neutral language anyone can learn.
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The language doesn’t have a name yet, nor finished grammar. Here is where I mess around with the vocabulary and grammar designs. If you have any ideas, you’re free to respond.
Yo! I changed the title because I also wanted to talk about another new tokiponido I’m working on.
It also doesn’t have a name (I might refer to is as toki suli), however, it’s kind of like the opposite of my other tokiponido. I’m trying to see if adding words, changing the grammar, changing etymologies and adding & removing rules will make toki pona fit for IAL status. A bit like Kokanu, but more informal.
I’ve already tried this before with a conlang called Toki Pawole, but it had many flaws and I got into the habit of releasing languages without testing or finishing them first.
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toki suli
This website is really versatile I must say. I can do this, or this, or even
this
Right now, I wanna create a number system. I think base 10 is boring, but I’m gonna have to do it for the purposes of the IAL. I’m thinking of having 10 digits, with ala for 0, and a particle that means “times 10 to the power of.” Toki Pawole had separate words for the numbers 100, 1K, 1M, 1B and 1T, but I think this makes it so that there are less niche number words around. (Pretend nin is the aforementioned particle).
3 nin 5
300000
I haven’t done anything with wan and tu, except for say, shrink their semantic space a bit. Any digit word will be able to mean “[word]plicate,” like how tu means “duplicate.” tu as a content word also refers to dividers (like walls and such). With wan, I took its meaning of piece away and made a new word with it, kita.
Let me know what you think!
toki suli
The current draft of toki suli has free word order and no li dropping whatsoever, though I might change the latter in the future. i becomes the new subject marker, (which I am just now realizing kinda sounds like Spanish “y.”)
You drop i at the beginning of sentences, to help the 87% of languages that don’t put anything before the subject most of the time. (SOV and SVO languages.) I originally wanted against this because I didn’t want toki suli to have a “canon word order,” but I think it’ll be fine.
toki pona’s prepositions can sometimes be a bit vague as to wether they’re actually being prepositions, verbs or modifiers, so for toki suli, I decided to add a preposition marker, te.
I originally wanted to have strictly prepositional versions of words, but I thought that would expand the lexicon too greatly, and I also didn’t want to have 2 different words for kepeken “use,” and kepeken “using.”
I draw in exchange for food.
e sitelen i mi li pali te esun moku.
This also allows there to be cool new experimental prepositions that come from content word meanings, like these:
utala - conflict
in opposition to
kijen - basically toki pona alasa
in order to
into - area, room, land, place
in the place of, instead of
lmk what you think!
toki suli
Here’s how to say numbers in toki suli! (So far, remember, the language is still in development!)
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ala | wan | tu | san | naje | lima | tatun | piku | lapan | isa |
To say numbers, you just say the digits in order from most significant to least significant.
| 10 | 21 | 42 | 333 | 8187 | 580 | 29 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| wan ala | tu wan | naje tu | san san san | lapan wan lapan piku | lima lapan ala | tu isa |
You can also use nin to mean “times 10 to the power of,” so you don’t have to say a bunch of ala’s.
lapan wan nin san
81000 (much faster than lapan wan ala ala ala)
jan naje nin lapan li lukin e sitelen sina
400000000 people see your video.
Math and other types of numbers (negative, fractions, etc.) coming soon!
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some of these numbers are pretty familiar (existing toki pona words?)
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Yes! ala, wan, tu, and san come from existing toki pona words.
I made the other words on my own, though. After seeing them, I found out naje looks a bit like neja, a rare toki pona nimisin.
neja comes from Finnish, however, and naje comes from the merging of words for 5 from a few Bantu languages. Coincidence!
lima was in Kokanu, which I took influence from, but I had no idea it was already in preexisting experimental number systems.
| Number | Number | Source Languages | Source Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | naje | Multiple | Zulu '-ne' four, from Proto Bantu *-nàì 'four' |
| 5 | lima | Proto-Austronesian | *lima 'five' |
| 6 | tatun | Proto-Semitic | *šidṯatum 'six' |
| 7 | piku | Hawaiian | hiku 'seven' |
| 8 | lapan | Malay | lapan, alternate form of delapan 'eight' |
| 9 | isa | Swahili | sisa 'nine', from Arabic |