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.
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.
(Edit: this is NOT Tokuwin!!)
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 |
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[lang] has gone through quite the transformation! here are all 239 symbols for words in the language
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lang and toki suli are the same, btw. The language still doesn't have a name! Anyway, here's a glossed excerpt.
lapu pin ike te menije jan ante, taso ona pin ike lan te menije mi
In the opinion of other people, games are bad, but they're not bad to me!
| lapu | pin | ike | te | menije | jan | ante, | taso | ona | pin | ike | lan | te | menije | mi |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GAME | copula | BAD | preposition_marker | FROM_THE_PERSPECTIVE_OF | PEOPLE | OTHER, | contrast | 3 | copula | BAD | NOT | preposition_marker | FROM_THE_PERSPECTIVE_OF | 1 |
toki suli/[lang] is now Tokuwin! The first description of the language can be found here.
Poke as many holes (constuctive criticism), note as many interesting things, or ask as many questions as you can using the doc's comment feature.
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(The link seems to be broken and unshared)
Wrong link, oops! I edited it now, it should be here.
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Trying not to become Kokanu nanpa tu, here:
Tokuwin now has a particle pon that goes after verbs and changes their mood to be irrealis, specifically epestemic, conditional, and eventative. I like to translate it as, "with all the information provided, this SHOULD be true, but it's possible that it's not." Keep in mind sentences without pon could be both irrealis or realis, pon is just there to specify.
ona toki
She spoke.
ona toki pon
She should have spoken/probably spoke/spoke (there's a possibility she didn't).
This is different from o, which expresses wishes and commands. Up there, "she should have spoken" means "from all information available, it's likely she spoke," not "it would have been better if she had spoken."
sina moku la sina pin pona
You ate so you're fine.
sina moku la sina pin pona pon
You ate so you should be fine.
I added a few new words I'm not too proud of, (because you can use existing words to workaround the words not in the language) but deduced that they're necessary for an IAL, partly because most people are used to a term like it, (like jusi, "learn," which before was just kama ja sona) or that it's harder to workaround (like namuna, "example").
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Here's a chart for referring to things based on their consistency only in Tokuwin. So not materials, shapes, purposes, etc. This is similar to a chart I made a while ago for an old separate tokiponido.
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Oh that's such a neat chart! Love it
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Thank you! Here's some further explanation in case the chart is confusing to anyone:
What's right in between "gas" and "solid" (y axis) isn't necessarily a liquid. Look at flour, it's not a gas, but it's not a solid either. It's something in between, but not a liquid. So I put it between "solid" and "gas" on the "dry" side. Because as we all know, liquids like water are wet.
Dry means chunkier and more separated, while wet means more fluid-like and cohesive. Things that are "wet" are also more flexible. Metal is "wetter" than stone.
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I'm maybe halfway into writing Tokuwin v.5. This time around the documentation will be better thought out, and will have a section suggesting ways to use Tokuwin in art and stuff.
I made these banners for the top of the sections. (My OC is a microphone, but you can't tell because I've simplified his design so much, lol)
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I've been trying to create a wiki for Tokuwin but Miraheze's help pages are long and filled with jargon, which is not my forte.
I wish there were more helpful videos on editing in Miraheze, but alas.
Is anyone willing to help me in this endeavor? I feel like I keep making some huge obvious mistake but because I don't know anything about Miraheze I'm completely overlooking it.
Are you having trouble with anything Miraheze-specific, or with the MediaWiki engine that sites like Wikipedia also use?