packbat: A headshot of an anthro bat-eared fox - large ears, tan fur, brown dreadlocks - with a shiny textured face visor curving down from zir forehead to a rounded snout. The visor is mostly black, but has large orange-brown ovals on its surface representing zir eyes. (batfox visor)
packbat ([personal profile] packbat) wrote2024-03-06 05:16 pm
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English proficiency: fluent (derogatory)

Okay, you might or might not know the constructed language Toki Pona, but we're certainly still learning, so I think we can construct a good metaphor.

Imagine you are working at a restaurant preparing takeout for a waiting customer. Your restaurant offers little containers of hot sauce as an optional extra, and you need to ask the customer if they would like some. There's no one way to do it, but a reasonable possibility might be, "sina wile ala wile e namako pi utala uta?". Breaking it down part by part:

  1. "sina" = you - i.e. the customer.
  2. "wile" = want, and "wile ala wile" = not-want/want - i.e. how the customer might feel.
  3. "namako pi utala uta" = the mouth-fighting seasoning, i.e. the thing the customer might feel about.

This is a completely normal way to ask a binary question in Toki Pona. It has a completely normal pattern for responding: if the customer wants hot sauce, they should repeat the positive form of the verb, "wile", and if they don't, they should repeat the negative form, "wile ala". We're told that binary questions in Chinese work similarly.

If the customer replies, instead, "ale li pona", "everything is good" ... what on earth are they on about? That's extremely unhelpful! None of the words in the question say anything about whether they want hot sauce or not!

Point being, if someone asks, "hot sauce?" and we Packbats say, "no worries", we are speaking English fluently (derogatory).

We are trying to improve, though.