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Re:How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language... by schoen on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @11:04PM (#14200129)
> bus,

Maybe "tomo tawa kulupu" 'group travel space'

> train,

Maybe "tomo tawa linja" 'long stringy travel space' (or alternately "tomo tawa pi kiwen linja tu" 'travel space of two stringy solids')

> airplane,

I've previously used "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space'

> elevator,

Maybe "tomo tawa anpa" 'downward travel space'

> shipping container,

Maybe "tomo tawa esun" 'commercial travel space'

> bobsled...

Maybe "tomo tawa pi telo lete kiwen" 'hard cold water's travel space'

I'll also add that there's been some debate between "tomo tawa" 'travel building, travel space' and "ilo tawa" 'travel tool' for vehicles. I would certainly regard a bicycle as an ilo tawa because you don't enter inside of it. (A problem with "tomo tawa" is that "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space' is arguably ambiguous between an airport and an airplane!)

Although toki pona is super-bad for any kind of precision, you can often figure out how to express more than you might first think. :-)

Re:How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language... by mcphage on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @11:35PM (#14200237)
> A problem with "tomo tawa" is that "tomo tawa kon" 'air travel space' is arguably ambiguous between an airport and an airplane!

That's the problem with all of these—they're all ambiguous. Which is fine if the person you're talking to knows which you mean, but when you're talking about something new, you have no way of actually making clear what you mean. It seems like the best you can do is reinvent agglutinative languages, badly.

Re:How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language... by sago on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @11:43PM (#14200276)
> agglutinative

?!

Do you really mean that?

All languages have compound lexemes. And all languages can use description to disambiguate.

The balance in toki pona is at a dramatically different point to English, which has a relatively large functional vocabulary. But it isn't a difference in kind. And most conlangs, in my experience, rely more on compounds than English.

The "Badly" at the end seems to drop your comment from curious bafflement to prejudice. Why would it be bad?

Re:How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language... by mcphage on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @12:01AM (#14200343)
> Why would it be bad?

Because agglutinative languages have much more sophisticated systems and morphemes for expressing complicated ideas. This reads more like Mark Twain's satire about German (https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html).

Re:How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language... by khedoros1 on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @01:53AM (#14200761)
Those languages also have more than 123 words. Sophistication implies complexity, and Toki Pona was designed to be simple, even to a fault.
Re:How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language... by robjan on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @03:00AM (#14201024)
In Chinese, an airport is a "airplane field" and a airplane is a compound of the word for "wood" and "table.
Re:How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language... by godarderik on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @03:08AM (#14201050)
What? An airplane is 飞机,where 飞 = flying and 机 = machine
Re:How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language... by mrob on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @06:35AM (#14201937)
I think the confusion is because of simplified vs. traditional characters. 机 is made from 木 (wood) and 几 (table) radicals, and in Japanese it really does mean desk/table. But in Chinese it's the simplified form of 機 (machine). The 几 is just a substitute for some more complicated strokes, and 木 is just for the sound.
Re:How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language... by Gigablah on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @06:43AM (#14201962)
Even then the character by itself doesn't mean "airplane", you need to pair it with 飞.
Re:How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language... by dbrgn on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @02:57AM (#14201013)
Maybe airport could be written as "tomo pi tawa kon"?