I tried to use Toki Pona and made this phrase:
mi lukin sona toki lon ni ike nasa toki taso ni li ala sama soweli toki
But I think it’s missing something, so I’m asking you guys to translate it so I can see if it’s understandable.
it’s missing grammar. even with HEAVY interpolation and deduction i’m guessing you’re trying to say something like “I seek language knowledge (i want to learn) in this weird bad language, but it’s not (or did you mistake this word for ale and wanted to say all?) like animal speech.” but that might be a lot of conjecture on my part
first of all you’ve messed up the order of words in phrases. in toki pona, the head of the phrase comes first, so it’s a “balloon red big” not a “big red balloon” (sike loje suli).
Second of all, you did use the word “li” there which is good, but you’re missing another very important word for SVO sentences, the particle “e”. That word makes it so that the phrase following it is the subject of the sentence, so “mi lukin e ona” means “i see them”
Thirdly, the word “lon” is kind of confusing me, which is probably because your sentence construction is not very good. but if the start of the sentence is trying to say something like “I’m learning this weird language” or “i want to learn it”, i would not use lon, i’d either say “mi kama sona e…” or “mi wile (kama) sona e…”
fourthly, animal sounds have a special word in toki pona, that being mu. yes it sounds like moo.
so the whole sentence would be something like “mi wile kama sona e toki nasa ni. taso, ni ale li sama e mu.”
also oh my god i just noticed that this thread is from 2 years ago lol, i ddn’t know lemmy is this old
It doesn’t make any sense to me.
I vocally understandingly see here vocally strange badness, but this isn’t like animal talk.
You seem to use adjectives in the wrong order. I can’t understand the first half but if the second half is supposed to be, “but this isn’t animal talk”, that should be “ni li ala toki soweli.”
Also, verbs follow in the predicate as modifiera too, so
mi lukin sona toki lon ni ike nasa toki taso ni li ala sama soweli toki
Can mean “I look for (seek) to know talk about this linguistic strange bad but this is zero equal talking mammal”
I knew it. Anyway, this is what I tried to translate:
i seek to know how to talk in that complex, unusual language that (is) not like Pig Latin
I just took words from a guide and replaced them without paying attention to the structure.
Thanks for confirming and translating. :)
i seek to know how to talk in that complex, unusual language that (is) not like Pig Latin
That’s a strange sounding sentence to me in english also. If you were trying to say: “I want to learn to speak a complex strange language, that isn’t pig latin.” It’d be something like:
mi wile kama sona e toki nasa ike. toki ni li ala "pig latin.
There is no letter “g” in toki pona and “pig” does not follow the toki pona syllabary. Also, never put “ala” in the beginning of a predicate if you don’t want to mean “zero”, “ala” is usually a modifier that shows negative or opposite, so it must go after what it modifies. Separators never are modified, they just show a sentence’s part of speech.
