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jansegers Aug 3, 2017

Toki Pona and linguistics

Toki Pona is a very nice conlang for linguistic queries like due to its 123 root words, one can examine the complete lexical field repartition among these.

One can examine what happens with the adding of any new root word as well...

'sin' means 'new; renew, renovate; news' while namako only means 'additional, new' in standard tp (also used for 'spices' and 'to spice' by the tp community)

'sin la' is used for 'anew, again', another sense not available to namako

#tp

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jansegers

One can also observe what happened when a root word was depreciated...

before the popularization by the jan Pije's lessons on Toki Pona, jan Sonja used 'pasila' (from Esperanto 'facila') for expressing 'easy'; but she retired the word early on, so that pona finally expressed both 'goodness' and 'easiness'...

more recently the word 'kan' (probably ultimately from Latin 'cum') expressed 'accompanied by, with' ...

now this is expressed by 'poka' (or sometimes by 'kepeken' )

#tp #kan #poka