proposal: nimi lists in toki pona

2023-11-06T16:15:03Z

We have been struck with a sudden inspiration.

In the past - for example, while writing and editing our guide "naming yourself in toki pona" - we've thought of nouns for speakers as a static thing: if someone's head noun is 'kulupu', then you call them 'kulupu', end of story. And it's important that we understand and conform to the nomenclature of the subject we're discussing.

...but in the style of lipu pu, "Toki Pona: The Language of Good", the first official Toki Pona book, words can be more fluid that that. jan Sonja might say "meli li lili" to talk about a woman being little, even though that meli is definitely also a jan. Provided there is no misgendering or other deliberate misidentifying going on, there doesn't seem to be anything hostile about that.

So, you know how, in resources like pronouns.page, there will be lists of words that can be marked with hearts or thumbs-up or thumbs-down or other such indicators of mood?

What if tokiponists did that for words about them? Like, if we add this to our profile:

sina toki e mi la, mi olin e nimi ni:

kulupu

poki

tonsi

...nimi ni li pona:

ijo

jan

meli

nasa

tomo

...nimi ni li musi:

kijetesantakalu

...nimi ni li ike:

mani

mije

pakala (mi ken pakala! taso, kon mi li kon pakala ala. nimi "pakala Pakapa" li ike a!)

sewi

...would that be clearly understood? Would people know that they can say statements like "meli ni li kulupu Pakapa" and be polite and accurate?

I think it would be good if this is something they could check as needed. Obviously, most speakers would simply grab "kulupu" or "poki" off the top and use one of those, which works fantastically and requires very little memorization ... but I think it's good to have, and good to have thought about in case people ask, "mi wile ala wile kepeken nimi 'meli' lon sina?"

wile. mi meli tonsi. mi tonsi meli. pona, pona.

comments

The PA "Seduction Community" Dialogue - Another Response

2009-08-13T03:40:45Z

Day before yesterday, Jerry "Tycho" Holkins commented on his fascination with the deeply disturbing "seduction community", and Mike "Gabe" Krahulik stepped in to play devil's advocate.

I completely see where both of these people are coming from, here. But in this particular case, Tycho is very straightforwardly correct, and Gabe's instinctive fairmindness is misplaced. And normally I wouldn't be so confident staking out my spot in this minefield, but I happen to have an advantage: just last month, a completely unrelated community which I have been involved in discussed this question, and the conclusions of the discussion are pretty clear.

The seduction community, or pick-up artist community, or whatever it's called, explicitly treats sexual relations between persons as a game in which the player - singular - seeks to win against opposition. This attributes an explicit status imbalance in which only the man is an actor (cf. Bark/Bite, "Do You Tell a Football What Time the Superbowl Starts?") and in which sexual congress raises the status of the man and lowers that of the woman. It's sexist, offensive, and wrong.

End of line.

P.S. Obviously, two days being an eternity in the wonderful world of cyberspace, I have been preceded in remarking on this discussion - goblinpaladin, pandagon's Amanda Marcotte.

P.P.S. If there are people reading this is frustrated in their desire to find sexual partners, recall that people are complicated. Anyone offering shortcuts is lying.

comments

The Packbats' Weblog

proposal: nimi lists in toki pona

The PA "Seduction Community" Dialogue - Another Response