3 ms·

>physics textbook Well, at least some people are trying : http://tenhundredwordsofscience.tumblr.com/ http://tenhundredwordsofscience.tumblr.com/

im3w1l 11y ago
That is not a textbook. That is people explaining to children what the field is about. Try translating this, from an actual textbook, to toki pona: "This section shows how depth-first search can be used to perform a topological sort of a directed acyclic graph, or a 'dag' as it is sometimes called. A topological sort of a dag G = (V,E) is a linear ordering of all its vertices such that if G contains an edge (u,v), then u appears before v in the ordering. (If the graph is not acyclic, then no linear ordering is possible.)" This one is a little insidious, because presumably you are not allowed to introduce new words into Toki Pona.
- schoen 11y ago
  Sonja might say that toki pona was designed to make texts like this difficult to express, but an extra challenge is that there are so few words that could be repurposed as technical terms. For example, the existing term wawa means 'force, power, strength, energy' (which are of course all different technical terms in physics, so if we wanted to say "change in energy is the integral of power with respect to time" or "change in energy is the integral of force with respect to distance", we're already kind of out of luck, even ignoring how toki pona doesn't clearly have a way to refer to integration or multiplication). We might try to describe the dag in this way. mi mute li lukin e ijo mute e linja mute. linja ale li kama tan ijo wan li tawa ijo ante. sike ala li lon. ('we see many objects and lines. all lines come from one object and go to another object. no round thing is present.') However, it is still ambiguous whether "wan" refers to an arbitrary node or a specific node (because toki pona has no term for "each" vs. "any"). We could try to get around this with a process-oriented approach ("choose an object"), but I've never found a clear way to say "choose". And of course a reader might interpret "sike ala li lon" as saying that the nodes aren't circular or that the edges aren't curved, as opposed to that no cycles are present in the graph structure.
  - schoen 11y ago
    As an update, I think a lot of speakers would guess the right interpretation of nasin sike li lon ala ('round paths are not present') for the cycle-free condition. We could also try to say nasin li kama tan ijo wan li tawa ijo sama la nasin ni li lon ala ('when a path comes from one object and goes to the same object, this path doesn't exist') This kind of abstraction -- referring to conditions based on hypothetical individuals -- is very rare in toki pona. (There isn't even a grammatical way to directly form relative clauses.)
    - im3w1l 11y ago
      So you would use "mi mute li lukin e ijo mute e linja mute. linja ale li kama tan ijo wan li tawa ijo ante. nasin sike li lon ala" whenever you want to say dag. In a section where dag is mentioned ten times, that would be kind of painful.
      - schoen 11y ago
        It gets even worse because there are no relative clauses! I guess you could refer to the entire dag as a "sitelen" (here 'image, picture') and then say "mi mute li lukin e sitelen ni. ona li jo e ijo mute e linja mute..." and then refer to the dag as "sitelen" on every subsequent reference. I'm definitely not going to defend toki pona's convenience or utility for talking about math. :-)
- panglott 11y ago
  What you get in Toki Pona is a series of lexicalized phrases from word compounds. In a natural language, you would get these along with the borrowings or coinages, to a greater or lesser extent based on the culture's attitude toward lexical borrowing. Toki Pona has a strong cultural bias against borrowing, and probably (perhaps somewhat like Pirahã) a strong cultural bias against discussing complex, abstract concepts precisely.

im3w1l 11y ago

That is not a textbook. That is people explaining to children what the field is about. Try translating this, from an actual textbook, to toki pona: "This section shows how depth-first search can be used to perform a topological sort of a directed acyclic graph, or a 'dag' as it is sometimes called. A topological sort of a dag G = (V,E) is a linear ordering of all its vertices such that if G contains an edge (u,v), then u appears before v in the ordering. (If the graph is not acyclic, then no linear ordering is possible.)" This one is a little insidious, because presumably you are not allowed to introduce new words into Toki Pona.

schoen 11y ago
Sonja might say that toki pona was designed to make texts like this difficult to express, but an extra challenge is that there are so few words that could be repurposed as technical terms. For example, the existing term wawa means 'force, power, strength, energy' (which are of course all different technical terms in physics, so if we wanted to say "change in energy is the integral of power with respect to time" or "change in energy is the integral of force with respect to distance", we're already kind of out of luck, even ignoring how toki pona doesn't clearly have a way to refer to integration or multiplication). We might try to describe the dag in this way. mi mute li lukin e ijo mute e linja mute. linja ale li kama tan ijo wan li tawa ijo ante. sike ala li lon. ('we see many objects and lines. all lines come from one object and go to another object. no round thing is present.') However, it is still ambiguous whether "wan" refers to an arbitrary node or a specific node (because toki pona has no term for "each" vs. "any"). We could try to get around this with a process-oriented approach ("choose an object"), but I've never found a clear way to say "choose". And of course a reader might interpret "sike ala li lon" as saying that the nodes aren't circular or that the edges aren't curved, as opposed to that no cycles are present in the graph structure.
- schoen 11y ago
  As an update, I think a lot of speakers would guess the right interpretation of nasin sike li lon ala ('round paths are not present') for the cycle-free condition. We could also try to say nasin li kama tan ijo wan li tawa ijo sama la nasin ni li lon ala ('when a path comes from one object and goes to the same object, this path doesn't exist') This kind of abstraction -- referring to conditions based on hypothetical individuals -- is very rare in toki pona. (There isn't even a grammatical way to directly form relative clauses.)
  - im3w1l 11y ago
    So you would use "mi mute li lukin e ijo mute e linja mute. linja ale li kama tan ijo wan li tawa ijo ante. nasin sike li lon ala" whenever you want to say dag. In a section where dag is mentioned ten times, that would be kind of painful.
    - schoen 11y ago
      It gets even worse because there are no relative clauses! I guess you could refer to the entire dag as a "sitelen" (here 'image, picture') and then say "mi mute li lukin e sitelen ni. ona li jo e ijo mute e linja mute..." and then refer to the dag as "sitelen" on every subsequent reference. I'm definitely not going to defend toki pona's convenience or utility for talking about math. :-)
panglott 11y ago
What you get in Toki Pona is a series of lexicalized phrases from word compounds. In a natural language, you would get these along with the borrowings or coinages, to a greater or lesser extent based on the culture's attitude toward lexical borrowing. Toki Pona has a strong cultural bias against borrowing, and probably (perhaps somewhat like Pirahã) a strong cultural bias against discussing complex, abstract concepts precisely.