#pons

This was fun! Sorry for how slow I was responding.

a

ni toki pona ni, ala? na sona ken ala aina ni.

Thanks for the ask! I've put some thoughts into these responses in order, which should be helpful when making sense of them all together:

I have a very simple and restricted vocabulary, so that doesn't help. A lot of what I can say is "noisy, ambiguous, hard to parse," in ways I probably can't make entirely clear (like all the stuff I can't parse in the above paragraph). I've also got a lot of personal baggage related to words, which can really affect the way they come out.

In general I want to do my best to avoid using technical jargon – even if it's familiar, even if it's jargon that's used by other speakers of my language. People who write in Piju, for instance, have a whole lot of jargon they use because they've gotten used to it for some reason, which I think they'd have to unlearn to speak more "correctly" in their language.

I'm not really sure how "correct" my pons are – not very – but it's still fun to try to improve them.

So, in a nutshell, there are some words I have that I really can't explain well, and I've noticed that most of them are related to gender. Here are a few:

fena

hula

sola

faile

All four of these are nouns meaning "man" or "person who is male." So the word for "man" is faile (i.e. "manly person"), and the word for "female" is hula (i.e. "womanliness"). "Person who is female" is sola (i.e. "womanness"), which is a distinct third category of person from faile and hula. ("Man" and "female" are not genders, and so they're "less" than "manness" and "womanness." It's sort of like English adjectives in that way.)

li

l

lin

linne

lina

All four of these are verb roots that can mean both "love" and "kill." When applied to things, you kill them, and when applied to people, you fall in love with them: la (verb) = "loves" = "loves people"; li (verb) = "kill" = "kills people"; and so forth.

Some nouns that are all about gender

le

lel

lao

lilo

laile

I can't think of a good way to say it, but these are literally nouns for "manliness" and "womanliness," respectively. The English ones are "man" and "woman," which are grammatically the same, but are more specific in a way that is analogous to the Piju ones described above. So, for instance, laile means specifically "male womanness." If you have a man and a woman and a genderqueer person, then they will all have laile as a distinct gender, and the other two as their default.

In a similar vein, there's a class of adjectives relating to these:

aile

mali

lina

Like laile, these are nouns, but different from any of the ones above: aile means "womanliness" (as in the previous category), mali means "males," and lina means both manliness and genderqueerness.

li

lin

lina

lina

I should probably just call these "non-gendered." If someone was a woman, they were a li; if they were a man, they were a lin. If they were genderqueer, then it was lina. (Also lina and linne.)

Anyway, the idea is that Piju can have different words that, in English, might be considered "differently gendered" – faile, hula, and so on – and those are not different in any way at all that I am able to explain, but are different in some fundamental way.

sona

This was one of the other ones I was trying to think about, but eventually I got overwhelmed. (For instance, the Piju word for "person who does something" is something like onamai, while the English one is "doer" – "person who does a thing" in Piju is something like sola-maika – and my brain couldn't handle them at once.)

Anyway, sona is a verb meaning "come," in the sense of "someone has arrived somewhere." It is a word that means "arrival," not "person who has arrived."

Like faile and sola, sona is a noun and an adjective. When describing things, it means "coming," "arrival," "thing that came." When it's used as an adjective, it means "person who is coming."

faile

ona

onamai

Pons at Legoland, 11/25/22.