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Words to Know

Overview

You and I

The most basic Toki Pona sentence has two parts: a subject phrase and a predicate phrase.

[subject] [predicate]

For this kind of sentence, two subjects are possible

• mi - First person pronoun. I, me, my, mine, we, our, myself, ourselves
• sina - Second person pronoun. You, yours, yourself, y’all, y’all’s

So the Toki Pona sentence always looks like this:

[mi/sina] [predicate]

The English interpretation looks like this for mi:

I am [description]

I [action]

We are [description]

We [action]

And this for sina:

You are [description]

You [action]

Y’all are [description]

Y’all [action]

The words in the predicate describe the speaker or listener, or what the speaker or listener is doing. For example:

mi is the subject, and refers to the speaker. jan is the predicate, and is either an action or description of the speaker. Check under the spoiler for an explanation and interpretation!

sina is the subject, and refers to the listener. moku is the predicate, and is either an action or description of the listener.

Hello and Goodbye

In Toki Pona, there is no specific word for “hello” or for “goodbye.”

Instead, “hello” is part of the word toki. It covers every kind of greeting!

And saying “goodbye” is to describe how you’re leaving, by moving!

This is the most common way to say “goodbye” in Toki Pona.

Exercises

Try to figure out what these statements mean in English! All answers are under the spoiler. The first statement will be an in-context interpretation. The rest will be examples of what the sentence could mean, regardless of context.

All Toki Pona to English exercises will include a situation as context for the statement. Language lives in context, and Toki Pona is no exception. Knowing what is going on will help you understand the statement, and will improve your learning.

Toki Pona to English

mi

You’re about to go up to the podium on stage and give a speech. Before stepping on stage, you say to an attendent:

You’re sitting at a table in a restaurant enjoying dinner, but receive a phone call from a friend. They ask what you’re doing, and you say:

A sharply-dressed fellow has gotten home from a routine doctor’s appointment. His partner asks how he’s feeling, and he says:

You’re talking to somebody on voice chat. Of course, on voice chat, nobody knows that you’re a bear. But you need to cover your tracks, so to convince the other people you’re talking to, you say:

A small child is reaching up to the top of the counter, stretching their best to reach a pack of cookies sitting there. The kid can’t quite reach, so they sit down next to the counter and huff:

A couple come home to visit one partner’s parents, with big news about their family now being bigger! Excitedly, they say:

It’s close to bed time. You walk down the hall toward your room, pausing at your parents’ door to say:

sina

Your friend tells you a great joke. You don’t laugh, but you still found it funny, so you tell them:

You walk past your roommate’s door, seeing it barely cracked open. Wondering what they’re up to, you open the door and find they are eating your snacks! You exclaim:

A customer in a convenience store has been demanding and unreasonable with the clerk for several minutes, to the discomfort of every other customer in the store. Finally, a customer finds their courage and stands up to the person, saying:

A tall woman in a business suit is waiting at a bus station. A parent and child are standing beside her, and the child looks up at the woman and says:

Hello and Goodbye

A group of students are sitting in their seats, boredly poking at their phones or doodling in their textbooks, waiting for class to start. The teacher walks in and says to everyone:

Several friends have been playing a board game for hours. When the game ends, they sit around joking together, until one realizes it’s time for them to go home. They say:

English to Toki Pona

Takeaway

There are many given definitions and sentence interpretations. This is intended! And it comes from two different effects:

Action/Description Duality

As noted before, words in the predicate may be actions, descriptions, or both! In fact, often if something is an action, it is also a description. In English, you might say that if a person walks, they are also a walking person. Toki Pona runs with this idea. There is no difference between “doing” and “being” expressed by the grammar.

Broadness

Toki Pona words have broad meanings. mi does not refer to only yourself like “I” does. It can refer to a group including yourself like “we”, an action on yourself like “myself”, and something that belongs to you such as “mine” or “my”; all of these depend on context and place in a sentence. sina works the same way, and so do all Toki Pona words.

In short, words do not mark number! jan may talk about one person, four people, everyone in a city, and more.

Words do not mark time either! moku may talk about eating right now, eating in the near future, drinking in the distant past, becoming edible exactly a week from now, and anything else.

Broadness is part of the strength of Toki Pona. It is easier to navigate than you think! Context is everything, and understanding a sentence is much easier when you’re experiencing what it describes.

A helpful strategy for understanding a sentence with less context is to consider how reasonable it is. For example, mi moku is able to mean “we are food”, but it is more likely that mi is just the speaker, and moku is “eat”. You can use this thinking to reason about sentences in the future.

Hello and Goodbye

As in one of the examples, which is not a sentence, you can say toki on its own to mean “hello!”

Another one of the examples is a sentence, and is the most common way to say goodbye: mi tawa, “I am leaving!”

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