Mod: Pls. tag for later automatic flagchange --> Toki Pona
http://tatoeba.org/eng/faq#new-language (Point #3)

Alternative:
jan kulupu li seme?
Who is this group of people?

In a normal language, the pronoun system is complete enough to mean something and can stand on its own. ona works reasonably for anaphora (referring to what was just recently spoken), but works poorly in stand alone situations.

Ok. Thanks. So, in a given context my first translation would be right?

Yes, in the right context, especially face to face communication with a mostly known topic, it would be fine. ona as a pronoun fails most when used as an anaphora because it can co-ordinate with *anything*, which puts a greater burden on the reader to do some mind reading.

Ah, good. My first thought was that this can become the problem of Toki Pona understanding. But as I see: It could be solved. :D

jan kulupu -> kulupu jan ?
jan kulupu -> ona mute ?

jan kulupu vs kulupu jan, they are equally good.
jan kulupu vs ona mute. I don't know how tatoeba expects us to deal with narrow vs wide meanings, e.g. I have a Samovar. vs I have a boiler. A Samovar isn't just a hot water boiler, which is why it's normally translated with a loan word. If we don't care at all about translations being narrow or wide, then "ni li seme?" and "ona li seme?" are fine. If we are trying to convey the same amount of info as the English, then we need more. (I wouldn't know about the other languages listed)

"Who are they?" conveys, animacy and a plural number. "ona mute" is just many (potentially) previously mentioned things, maybe inanimate, maybe not.

mi pilin e ni:

jan kulupu = A man of the group.
kulupu jan = A group of men.

ona = he/she/it/they
ona wan = he/she/it
ona mute = they, and can not mean anything else.

sina pilin e seme?


> If we are trying to convey the same amount of info as the English, then we need more.
> I have a Samovar. vs I have a boiler.

mi pilin e ni: poki Losi pi telo seli en poki seli li sama tawa jan pi toki pona.

Dear janmato, "toki pona li toki pona". The chief idea of Toki Pona is to liberate human thoughs of unneeded details. Life is muche simplier than it seems to be. These are two examples that complex English sentences li kama pona kepeken toki pona:
http://tatoeba.org/rus/sentences/show/1895791 -> http://tatoeba.org/rus/sentences/show/1896722

http://tatoeba.org/rus/sentences/show/1913719 -> http://tatoeba.org/rus/sentences/show/1913701

pronouns are far less useful in toki pona than in other languages because as a reader, I can't figure out what they co-ordinate with-- modifying with gender or number helps in some cases, but modifying the head noun is even more useful (e.g. meli en mije li pali. ona mije li pali mute). Most people write toki pona like they write their native tongue, with pronouns that they suspect are more useful than they are. (See, I used 'they' to refer to pronouns, which works because 'pronoun' was plural-- the other 'they' co-ordinated because 'suspect' is a narrowly defined verb meaning something done by animate beings-- but the verbs in tp cover huge ranges of possible meaning. In toki pona, it wouldn't normally be marked as plural, and would be able to co-ordinate with anything I've said since I started writing.) It's like "Joe and Jack were fighting. He hit him, then he went to the hospital. He didn't like it. But he was proud of himself." It's perfectly valid English, but it's an unintelligible story- I can't match a single pronoun to it's antecedent.

I suppose the matter could be resolved experimentally. If a persons was prompted to respond to a question in an environment with several possible answers-- if they could just figure out that you wanted the answer "Oh, that's the Smiths", then we'd have what the simplest construction is. Someone might philosophically feel that, "We'll, in the end it's all just stuff", but they wouldn't be able to follow a cake recipe that called for "doing stuff with some stuff and some other stuff and more stuff."

In a souvenir store, ordering a poki seli would be met with confusion if there is more than one thing that falls in the category of warm containers.

I've no gripes with the simple style, but it will make the toki pona more likely to not be understood.

In your linked examples, the one about Tom has only 1 antecedent and had just been mentioned. The 2nd has no pronouns at all.

Sorry for the long comment. kin la mi sitelen mute kepeken Inli kin.

Let me cut in, though I feel myself quite out of place. I'm an absolute beginner in Toki Pona (just started it two days ago), but I might be able to tell you something helpful.

First, we don't always need to convey the same amount of information when we translated here, as far as I understand. Of course we try to be as loyal to the original as possible, but when we can't be faithful without being too unnatural, we take the naturalness.

Here's a simple example: http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/2273295
In my mother tongue, Japanese, we almost always distinguish between an older brother (兄, ani) and a younger brother (弟, otōto). We do have a word 兄弟 (kyōdai), which means both older and younger brothers, but we rarely use this word in a situation like this. So I added two translations.

Secondly, one of the biggest problems I feel with the sentences in Tatoeba is that the sentences show up without any context. I often find a sentence whose meaning would, if I tried to translate it into natural Japanese, become too broad to be intelligible by itself. I simply ignore these kinds of sentences and translate longer ones instead.

In the case of this Toki Pona sentence, it might be better to think up longer examples that illustrate how the language works. For example, "Three strange men were walking back and forth in front of my house. I asked my husband, 'Who are they?'" I believe "ona li seme?" is the good phrase to use in this situation, and it's perfectly understandable. We could then make some other examples where other translations are appropriate. This must be much more productive than listing lots of possible translations of a short sentence.

Well "onla li seme?" was the first translation I put in. So I'll rechange it to that (most simple) sentence again. Toki Pona is simple (pona = simple). ;)

seme -> jan seme

Duplicates of this sentence have been deleted:
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