macrocheira

kitty cat extraordinare

soweli Sawa -- ıııᕈ 「^.^ ˍ∧ˍ \O/ a̍̍̍」 
also known as "radiotomatosauce99" on youtube
I make silly little songs sometimes and I aspire to make silly little games :)
18 year old white autistic bi therian transgender woman and/or cat
my 18+ alt account is @soweli-sawa


really neat thing about toki pona is how names are exclusively adjectives. you can only refer to what a thing is called via "object Name" format and never the name on it's own. someone named Kisun would be "jan Kisun," (meaning person Kisun), or you would refer to a place like the USA as "ma Mewika" (meaning place America, altered to fit toki pona's phonotactics). in that way, asking for someone's name includes asking them what type of thing they are as though it were a part of the name itself, the object included being called the name's "headnoun"

but there is no rule that your headnoun must be "jan". I can call myself "soweli Sawa" (roughly meaning " 'nonspecific land mammal' Sawa") to effortlessly communicate that I'm in fact some type of creature without needing to specify it unprompted.


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in reply to @macrocheira's post:

toki sina li pona mute! Especially for being, like, one day into learning. One thing here is that it's more natural to specify cat specifically with toki pona adjectives instead of by English name. How you'd do this would vary with context: "soweli suwi" might work in general, but "soweli alasa", hunting animal, would work great here - or even soweli pi alasa waso (a! sina monsuta tawa mi!!!).

yeah, it's a big theme with toki pona! it's kind of a meme in the community to respond to questions where people ask "how would you say this?" with something like "well, it depends on the context...". but it is true, when you have to be vague describing only what matters is very important.

I always interpreted "it depends on context" like "it might look like it's lacking specificity, but context makes up for that," but I suppose it also goes for "a lot of specificity often isn't necessary to begin with depending on the context it's within." that's really interesting to me, I kind of have to restructure the way I think about communicating information. that's so cool