Talk:Toki Pona

Reboot
I am rebooting this book's outline to become a field linguistics survey based on the methodology of Thomas E Payne, described in "Describing Morphosyntax". Payne's methodology lends itself well to collaborative writing because a language is described in a series of independent sections. Describing Morphosyntax give little consideration to phonetics, which is probably okay as while there are reports of spoken toki pona conversations, they tend to be rare and a small part of the all toki pona ever created.

toki pona is in the peculiar position of being a language that is incompletely defined, yet it has users. toki pona doesn't have a governing body like a programming language or French or Esperanto. It's creators have been fairly quiet. The language to some extent is now evolving much like a natural language.

For these various reasons, it isn't appropriate to use this book as a creative platform for extending the language or attempting to improve upon the various language specification documents created by Sonja Kisa or Brian Knight. In the re-envisioning of this book the "canon" and corpus is the published usages of toki pona. Language rules should be inferred by looking at the actual usage by as wide a number of people as possible, over as long a period as possible, the same way a field linguist would infer how tense or case works in a newly discovered language. --Matthewdeanmartin (talk) 14:07, 24 July 2010 (UTC)


 * If this book is going to be about linguistics, it should be under the linguistics category on wikibooks, and not the constructed languages one. The book here should be about learning the language like nearly every other language book on wikibooks.--Amthisguy (discuss • contribs) 15:18, 29 September 2018 (UTC)


 * All (human) languages, without exception, are incompletely defined. If this book should be added to the linguistics shelf, that's fine; but there's no way a book about toki pona doesn't belong on the constructed languages shelf. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 17:47, 29 September 2018 (UTC)


 * This book should be reverted to being primarily a language learning book, like it was before the old outline was removed. The new content about a field linguistics survey should be added to the end. The outline can go something like Introduction, Lesson 1: Phonetics, Lesson 2..., and at the end we can have a part 2 called toki pona linguistic field survey or something like that. --Amthisguy (discuss • contribs) 00:44, 30 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Sounds like a good plan, to me. It would preserve the value contained in existing material, respecting the field-linguistics idea without undermining the natural basic function of the language book. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 01:11, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

My opinion
This conlang can go suck my "linja jaki mije". KATMAKROFAN (discuss • contribs) 01:48, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Book Design
This book is so poorly designed. It is not even clear what the purpose is. It says if is about field linguistics and toki pona usage, and at the bottom there is a link to lessons for learning the language.--Amthisguy (discuss • contribs) 15:18, 29 September 2018 (UTC)


 * I think it might be a good idea to overhaul the design of the book and implement a new and better structure. ComradePenguinMonster (discuss • contribs) 08:32, 14 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Do you have an alternative design in mind? --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:37, 14 December 2020 (UTC)