Nothing corresponds to "lon tenpo lili". I would remove it.

Also, this sentence is not a question.

-> mi ken ala ken toki tawa sina taso?
-> mi ken toki tawa sina taso anu seme?


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@inkepa ?


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"tenpo lili" li weka. pona.

"could I" to me is more of a request than asking about the possibility ("Could you pass me the salt?" should not IMO be translated as a question but as a request). It feels to me more pona to translate it as a request.


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Why not "o toki tawa mi." at this point? Or "o kute"? They all mean the same thing after all? I find these deliberate deviations rather confusing. I add my own alternative translation.


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To me a word-for-word translation is actively misleading in this case.

edit: that's wording it too strongly maybe. I would say that it's inappropriate from my point of view.


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Yes, "misleading" is misleading here. ;)

For example, I would expect to find a sentence like "mi wile toki tawa sina taso" next to a sentence like "I want to talk only to you". In fact, if that sentence existed, your "mi wile toki tawa sina" would be a candidate for being un-linked and re-linked to "I want to talk only to you", in order to avoid that someone translated your "mi wile toki tawa sina taso" as "I want to talk only to you", which puts "I want to talk only to you" and "Can I speak to you in private" next to each other. That's the kind of misleading that I'm trying to avoid here, and what this is all about for me, having had my experiences with list.


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I understand that you have corpus-level coherency problems that you're trying to keep in mind. I understand it's schlechtnachbarlich to pollute indirect translations with Toki-Pona-isms, and I don't do so wilfully.

However, that doesn't change the fact that in my opinion the best translation of this question into Toki Pona is not as a question but a request.

https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentenc...rom=und&to=und

"Could you pass the salt?" has as an indirect translation of "Pass me the salt, please." (via Japanese, which also doesn't have it asked as a question), and I'm 100% ok with that. [I'm also very grateful for seeing the idiomatic German translation of 'in private' as 'unter vier Augen' in the list of translations for this sentence :) ]

[ There's I think a secondary issue of how to less ambiguously translate "in private" in your concerns I think? If you want to reinforce it in that direction, I would suggest 'mi wile toki tawa sina lon poka ala pi jan/kute ante' (anu 'lon tomo pi kute tu tu taso' :P ). ]



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(/ pona tawa sina :) )


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Maybe this is a bad example, because it's actually a good one. What I mean is that maybe it is a good and pona style to express a request always as a request, and never as a question, since we have already abandoned the concept of "please".

If that were to be the case (and that's still an "if" to me), it should be tagged as a "pona but not in Pu" or something similar, in my opinion. It shouldn't be a general rule of thumb that sentences can be translated fuzzily in general. (My slogan of the day would be: "2 + 2 is not 4. It's still 2 + 2.")

[ To me, "tawa sina taso" or "lon poka pi sina taso" or "lon poka pi jan ante ala" is not the issue. ]

pona tawa sina.


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