toki!
mi jan Misali.
ni li sitelen tawa nanpa tu lon kulupu pi sitelen tawa ni: sina ken kama sona e toki
pona.
sitelen tawa ni li jo e sona pi nimi “e”.
this is the second video in a twelve-part series about toki pona. in the previous lesson,
we learned about the verb-marking particle “li”, and we also went over some basic
fundamental vocabulary.
just as a refresher, let’s try one example sentence with last episode’s vocab.
what does “jan pona ona li lape” mean?
[pause]
right, that’s something like “her friend is sleeping”, with some room for interpretation
with the pronoun and the tense.
oh, also, this is probably a good time to talk about how to use this series.
many of you will just be watching these casually as they’re uploaded, which is totally fine.
just passively absorbing content from these videos will still serve as a good introduction
to the language, even if you’re not actively studying or anything.
however, this series is mainly intended as a serious way to learn toki pona, to the point
of being able to use the language fluently.
each episode will assume you’ve learned the content from previous ones.
if you want, you can study between episodes, or take notes as you go to have in front of
you.
in general, toki pona is pretty simple, and it shouldn’t take much effort to learn the
amount of content in each episode, especially compared to other languages.
but if your goal is to seriously learn the language, it will take just a tiny bit more
effort than watching the videos alone back to back.
anyway, in this episode, we’re going to learn how to talk about objects.
oh, yeah, well, that too.
but I meant in the grammatical sense!
so as you hopefully remember from last time, one of the most basic concepts of toki pona
is that you can use the particle “li” to separate subjects from their verbs.
this allows us to say things like “jan li moku”, or “the person eats.”
but what if you want to specify what it is that you’re eating?
well, that’s where our new friend “e” comes in!
“e” functions very similarly to li, but instead of marking verbs, it marks the direct
objects of sentences.
for example, you can say something like “jan li moku e telo.”
“moku” can be used for drinking as well as eating, since they’re the same thing.
“telo” can refer to any liquid, but when used without adjectives it’s common for
it to just mean water, since water is the prototypical liquid.
specifying an object like this is the best way to make it clear that you’re using “moku”
as a verb to mean “eat” instead of “be food”.
while “mi moku” could mean either “I eat” or “I am food”, “mi moku e moku”
specifically means “I eat food”, completely unambiguously.
it’s pretty common for verbs in toki pona to have slightly different meanings depending
on if they have an object or not, and it’s something we’ll see more of later on.
you could also use “ijo”, a very general noun which means “thing” or “object”,
to say “mi moku e ijo” for “I eat something”.
now that we have these two particles, li and e, we can create a very basic outline for
a typical toki pona sentence.
first you have the subject of the sentence, then the particle “li” (except in the
special case with mi or sina), then the verb, then the particle “e”, then the object.
it’s really important to understand this structure, because pretty much any toki pona
sentence can be read and understood using this formula, even as we add more grammatical
features later down the line.
“subject li verb e object”.
this is the heart of toki pona grammar.
even though the word order in this language is very strict, you always have the subject
before the verb and the verb before the object, you still need these grammatical particles
to mark where each part begins, because otherwise it would be super unclear how you’re supposed
to parse something like, say, “jan moku telo”.
as we learned in the previous lesson, toki pona uses modifiers like adjectives to express
many concepts that would be a single word in most languages.
remember, modifiers come after the words they’re describing.
it’s “toki pona”, not “pona toki”.
using li and e properly helps clarify the difference between the different parts of
your sentence and single noun or verb phrases.
take a verb like lukin, which means “look at” or “see”.
just from lukin at this definition here, how do you think you’d say something like, “I
look at the object”, or “I see something”?
[pause]
that’s right, it’s “mi lukin e ijo”!
there’s one other very important thing with how to use “e”.
for some verbs, like lukin, it’s pretty intuitive what the object of the verb would
be: it’s the thing that the subject sees.
however, for a lot of verbs, it’s not as clear.
for example, “pona”, which as a verb means “be good”, doesn’t really make sense
as something you could use with an object.
however, a sentence like “ona li pona e ijo” is still perfectly valid in toki pona!
it’s just using pona in a different way from its other “be good” meaning.
literally, you could translate this as something like “they good a thing”.
and in fact, you might already have an intuition for what “gooding” something might mean.
go on, take a guess, what does this new use of “pona” mean here?
yes, it means “make something good”, “cause something to become good”, or “improve
something”.
in general, when you use a noun or adjective as a verb with an object, this is the default
interpretation of what it means.
it’s somewhat similar to the -ify suffix in English.
“They goodify a thing.”
and this is a general grammatical feature.
you can say “mi ike e ijo” for “I make something bad”, “mi jan e ijo” for “I
turn something into a person”, and so on.
but remember, this interpretation is only there because of the presence of the object
in the sentence.
without the object, these examples would have the normal “is” meaning of those words.
that’s about it for grammar for this episode.
we’ll be going over a few more complicated examples, but as long as you remember li,
e, and modifiers coming after what they’re describing, you have everything you need to
parse them.
okay, let’s learn some new vocab.
we went over the three main pronouns in toki pona last time, but here’s another one:
“ni” means “this”, or “that”.
it can be both a noun and an adjective, and, like all toki pona words, can be singular
or plural.
and on the topic of plurality, while toki pona doesn’t have a basic grammatical way
to show plural nouns, the word mute means “a lot” or “many”.
this word also has a function in toki pona’s numbering system, but I don’t think we’re
ready for that just yet.
okay, so using these words, how would you say “that person sees a lot of food”?
[pause]
right, it’s “jan ni li lukin e moku mute.”
with li and e, we can easily determine what words in a sentence are doing, even in a longer
one like this.
you can see how in the object phrase, “e moku mute”, each new word adds a little
more information about what it is that this person sees.
oh, right, and since modifiers like mute aren’t exclusively adjectives, you can say the slightly
different sentence “jan ni li lukin mute e moku”, where mute is modifying the verb
lukin instead of the noun moku, so this sentence means something like “that person looks
at food a lot”.
anyway, “pali” is a basic verb that means “do” or “make”.
that’s “make” as in “create”, by the way, not “make” as in “cause”.
remember, that sense of the word “make” is already handled by the particle “e”!
and “sona” means to know or understand.
here’s a good pair of adjectives to express a lot of concepts.
“suli” means “big”, or “important”.
and “lili” means small.
and one last word for this episode:
musi means fun, or game!
now we can try combining these to make more complicated ideas!
how could you say “worker” or “maker”?
[pause]
yeah, “jan pali”! literally “a doing person”.
okay, what about “a snack.”
[pause]
that’s right, you could say “moku lili.”
what is a snack if not “little food”?
alright, what about a lake?
[pause]
yeah, you could say “telo suli”, or big water.
remember, these are just examples, not set phrases.
telo suli could mean lake, ocean, sea, or just a large beverage.
there are also plenty of other valid ways to say all of these things!
the translations we just went over just happen to be good ways to say them using the vocabulary
you already have.
okay, now here’s a phrase that is a bit more set in stone among toki pona users.
what do you think the sentence “ona li pona lukin” would mean?
remember, without e there, lukin is modifying pona.
[pause]
yeah!
literally, it’s something like “they are visually good”.
in toki pona, “pona lukin” is the common way to say pretty, or beautiful.
okay, now that you fully understand all the content for this episode, let’s try a few
more full sentences to wrap up.
what does “sona toki li musi” mean?
[pause]
literally, it’s talk-knowledge is fun.
you could translate more liberally as “the knowledge of languages is fun”, or even
“linguistics is fun”!
okay, what would “sina suli e musi” mean?
[pause]
right, something like “you made the fun greater”, “you increased the fun”, “you
expand the game”, or “you emphasize playfulness”.
this concept is easier to express in toki pona than in English!
now let’s do some English sentences.
How would you say “many people see something large”?
[pause]
yeah, it’s “jan mute li lukin e ijo suli.”
last one.
"how do you say 'I love you'?"
[pause]
if you said “mi olin e sina”, w- wow, really?
this is so sudden, I didn’t know you thought of me that way.
listen, we don’t know each other that well, we’re only two episodes into this educational
series, so I’m not sure if-
well, that’s everything for this lesson. isn’t it great how versatile everything
in this language is, even at this very early level?
there’s another ten lessons to go from here, but if you understand everything from just
these first two, you already have a really solid foundation for learning the rest of
the language.
see you next time!
mi tawa!