AlexPGP's Corner

Today was a group-forming day for the "TokiPonathon," and although technically, the event does not start until tomorrow, the kickoff takes place at 9 am London time.

Regrettably, 9 am in London is 3 am hereabouts, and while I may get up a little earlier to see what's been going on while I slept, I'm not sure I want to set the alarm for the middle of the night. Therefore, I've sort of jumped the gun and begun to wade through a Toki Pona course on Memrise. I've marched about 1/3 of the way through it, which is enough for now, methinks.

The proof (or lack thereof) will come tomorrow, when I review what I have learned.

The result will be of particular interest to me, because after a hiatus of about a year, I am consistently scoring 70-80% on recall of my Spanish and French vocabulary. That's not awful, considering I hadn't done any review at all in the interim. That said, I can't help but wonder if these results may be attributable to my previous exposure to said languages.

My experience with Toki Pona thus far has shown the language to be almost completely "alien" to my ears, both from the point of view of any similarity words have to words I already know, and in the way the words are strung together to form sentences (the particle 'li' separates subject and predicate; the particle 'e' introduces a direct object).

The most complicated sentence I've run into so far is

kulupu ni li jo e toki sin

It turns out that modifiers follow what is modified, so I'll mark these with parentheses:

(kulupu ni) li jo e (toki sin)

Recall that 'li' separates subject from predicate and 'e' introduces a direct object, so I'll mark these using a shorthand of my own:

(community this) | to-have -> (language new)

Then, rearranging terms (oops... not math, sorry) rearranging ideas, we get:

this community has a new language

Speaking the language is not hard, so at least that's not a worry.

In the end, I'm just trying to keep my cup empty.

Cheers...