Topicalizing and inferential la in Toki Pona: Thoughts on constituent structure
For a while now Iāve been trying to apply my knowledge of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG; Kaplan & Bresnan 1982; most recently Dalrymple 2023; for a quick overview, see e.g. Müller 2023: 223ā246; Belyaev 2023a) to Toki Pona (Lang 2014; 2021) in order to analyze its constituent structure. LFGās constraint-based approach seems like an overall useful way to describe syntactic structures, even in a totally isolating language like Toki Pona. Especially the fact that Toki Pona all but lacks morphology makes this a nice brain-teaser. You can find the working draft of whatās by now grown into a whole treatise on Codeberg. And while Iāve come pretty far since I started this project during the 2024/25 Christmas break, the construction usually referred to as a āla phraseā keeps bothering me in the back of my mind. So let me explain in order to sort out my own thoughts. ...
2nd Berlin Conlang Relay
Another local relay was held in Berlin during November 2024. This time, I had the pleasure to translate from Henrikās É®ÉĢĢ.kÉĢŹ as the last person in a circle of seven participants. Thus, I returned my torch back to Bruno, who had started the game, and who translated my Ayeri text into his Paksuta to conclude. Again, the game was run in German due to the limited, local scope. The base text was a version of Aesopās fable The fox and the grapes. ...
New year, new ⦠site
Happy new year to everyone who celebrates it at this time of the year! š While āNew year, new meā may not be exactly true, Benung. The Ayeri Language Resource is looking a little different today. This is because, after over 13 years, it was more than due for a thorough overhaul. Iāve run this site on Wordpress since 2011, however, due to its long running time, more and more clutter accumulated. Also, things I had programmed earlier, for instance, to add glossing, inevitably stopped working from changes I didnāt have the time or didnāt care enough to stay up to date with. On top of that, thereās the recent mudslinging about the popular blogging and content-management platform that bodes ill, as well as bots almost constantly trying to exploit vulnerabilities especially in plugins that I mightāve installed. Time to move on. ...
On deterring a raccoon
With my dissertation off the table, I guess I needed something new to delve into. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, during the summer, Toki Pona has struck my fancy. After about three months of casual practice, it looks like I can produce mostly grammatical sentences. Iām also growing in my ability to understand othersā written sentences, which can be challenging, because, within the domain of content words, there are no hard part-of-speech boundaries. Think āthe old man the boatā or āthe horse raced past the barn fell,ā except as a general feature of the language, though with arguably better ways to tell subject and object apart than in English. ...
Berlin Conlang Relay
A conlang relay was held in May and June 2024 by conlang enthusiasts at the Department of German Studies and Linguistics of Humboldt University of Berlin in association with a few non-Humboldtian friends, together comprising the informal Berlin Conlangers Regularsā Table. Thinking about it, the last relay I mustāve participated in was the one on the occasion of the 4th Language Creation Conference in 2011 ⦠Pesky little time-flies and their beloved arrows! ...