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My intellectual crush on Toki Pona has kept me busy for the whole past year. Because why stop it with the linguisticksing when leaving the office, eh? As mentioned previously on this blog, I’ve been working off-hours on an analysis of its not quite so simple syntax. After three thorough revisions of the text now, I’m halfway confident that the survey contains mostly sensible analyses that are reasonably argued, and I hope intelligibly so. 😅 ...

The below discussion is outdated. For a significantly more differentiated analysis, refer to Chapter 7 of the full survey (2026-02-15). For a while now I’ve 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: 223–246; Belyaev 2023a) to Toki Pona (Lang 2014; 2021) in order to analyze its constituent structure. LFG’s 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 what’s by now grown into a whole treatise on Codeberg. And while I’ve come pretty far since I started this project during the 2024/25 Christmas break, the construction usually referred to as a “la phrase” keeps bothering me in the back of my mind. So let me explain in order to sort out my own thoughts. ...

Another local relay was held in Berlin during November 2024. This time, I had the pleasure to translate from Henrik’s ɮɛ̃̂.kɔ̌ʔ 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 Aesop’s fable The fox and the grapes. ...

Happy new year to everyone who celebrates it at this time of the year! 🎉 While “New year, new me” 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. I’ve 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 didn’t have the time or didn’t care enough to stay up to date with. On top of that, there’s 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 might’ve installed. Time to move on. ...

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. I’m also growing in my ability to understand others’ written sentences, which can be challenging, because, within the domain of content words, there are no hard part-of-speech boundaries. Think “the old man the boat” or “the horse raced past the barn fell,” except as a general feature of the language, though with arguably better ways to tell subject and object apart than in English. ...