mi lukin e ni: tenpo mute la sina kepeken nimi "tenpo pini la" e nimi "tenpo kama la". tawa mi la ona li mute ike lon toki pona.

mi lukin. = I saw. I see. I will see.


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mi mute lukin -> mi mute li lukin


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nimi "tomo tawa waso" li lon ilo Tatowepa lon tenpo luka wan taso... linja nimi ale li tan sina. sina wile ala kepeken nimi "tomo tawa kon" anu seme?

ken suli la sina toki "wile ala". :)

Im Prinzip la ni pona tawa mi: sina kepeken nimi "waso" pi kon "flying". (mi toki lon anu seme?) taso nimi "waso" pi kon "flying" li lon ala lipu Pu. sina wile kepeken ona la mi pana e nimi sona "Kipo" (anu nimi sona "Tepan"?). sina toki e seme? :)


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toki :)

mi kepeken nimi "waso" tan mi: tomo tawa ni li sama waso tawa lukin, li tawa sama waso. tawa mi la mi pana ala e kon sin tawa nimi "waso". tenpo ante la mi kepeken nimi "tomo tawa kon" lon kulupu ni. tenpo kama la mi ken kepeken nimi "tomo tawa sewi". sama la tomo tawa kala li ken "submarine" tawa mi.

Mit der Frage von Zeiten, muss ich weiter überlegen vor ich antworten kann.






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kala - fishy [Kipo]
kala - swimming [Tepan]

waso - flying [Kipo], [Tepan]



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P.S.: Since airplanes have rigid wings, I wouldn't say that they move like birds.


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Re: tenses.

Here's my take: Sometimes you want to make tense explicit, sometimes you don't.

e.g. from the Toki Pona book
"Toki Pona was my philosophical attempt to understand the meaning of life in 120 words."
"toki pona li tan seme? tenpo pini la mi wile sona e kon ale kepeken nimi lili."

The FAQ has advice that can be read various ways:

"If you think one translation is a lot more likely than the other, you can add only that translation. If you think it makes sense to add all the translations, then you can add all the possible translations.
[...]
We don't need to have every sentence translated in every possible ways. What is important to us is that the corpus as a whole covers all the possible ways."

One could say that mostly you can leave verb tense information out in translation, so to leave it out on tatoeba. (Which is your position I think?)

Relatedly sometimes I translate "we" as "mi", sometimes as "mi mute", sometimes as "mi tu" (though musi la I never translate "i" as "mi wan" :P ). I guess you could say in this case that they're all about equally plausible, whereas that's not the case for time.

I don't know how other languages deal with this in Tatoeba (e.g. Mandarin Chinese).

So, my approach is to slightly randomise the level of explicitness with grammatical number and tense when going EN->TP (not totally random; I mostly leave out verb tense information).

Separately, I tried for a few minutes to construct a plausible context/story/paragraph where I'd want to make tense explicit in my translation for this particular sentence. However I couldn't. The definite article in "the airplane" just makes it so implausible that there isn't already a definite tense in context. So I am going to remove tense in this case, but that doesn't make this discussion pointless in general...


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> "toki pona li tan seme? tenpo pini la mi wile sona e kon ale kepeken nimi lili."

Yes, Sonja is talking about the history of Toki Pona here, and it makes sense to make the time frames explicit in order to make it clearer what was and what is. (The first part "toki pona li tan seme?" refers to the present, the second part "mi wile sona e kon ale kepeken nimi lili" refers to the past.)

So, yes, my take is not to add those details (like "mi mute", "ona mije", ...) unless there's a good reason to do so.

(Also "mi wan" is possible, but hardly necessary. Do you use "mi wan taso", by the way?)


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( Just double-checking: by tagging the sentence as "kipo" are you claiming that it's not compatible with standard Toki Pona? )


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I'm not sure what "standard Toki Pona" is for you. If you mean "official Toki Pona", then yes, that's the idea. Why is that? As I understand it, the official Toki Pona book doesn't teach that a noun ("waso") can be transformed into an adjective (or intransitive verb) meaning "to be like ...". Also, the official dictionary treats "waso" as a noun only, so "waso" as an adjective can only mean "of a bird"/"of birds". (In the same way "tomo soweli" can't mean "an animal-like/mammal-like house" in official Toki Pona.)

Kipo's word list has "waso" as an intransitive verb for "to fly". (I do, too, btw, but Kipo was first. So I try not to use the tag "Tepan" here.)


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Ah right, noun+noun thing. Thanks :)

"tomo pi tawa waso" - "a room with the movement of birds" (imagine a gliding seagull or albatross, not a humming bird) is then more grammatically orthodox right?



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Yes, but does it help?

tomo pi tawa waso = room of bird's movement
tomo tawa waso = bird's moving room

Neither expresses "airplane" to me. Probably because "waso" doesn't mean "bird-like" to me, so "tomo pi tawa waso" isn't "room of bird-like movement", which would express "airplane" to me.


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I don't want to exhaust all of your goodwill talking about bird cars. I will think about this more myself and no doubt post some other nasa attenpt at translating 'airplane' somewhere else in the future. Until then I'll replace "tomo tawa waso" in my sentences with "tomo tawa sewi" (just for variety instead of the more popular "tomo tawa kon" - pu doesn't list "sky" in the back of the book as a definition but does in one of the chapters).

pona tawa sina.


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If I can give you a piece of advice, don't try to create sentences that sound awkward (because that's not what one is supposed to do according to the Tatoeba rules) especially not in order to "make a point" (which is also against Tatoeba rules). I've had my fair share of nasa on Tatoeba, to be honest. (I won't mention names. :) )


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