Benung. The Ayeri Language Resource

Toki Pona syntax sketch

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

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. 😅

Topicalizing and inferential la in Toki Pona: Thoughts on constituent structure

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

The below discussion is outdated.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.

2nd Berlin Conlang Relay

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0100

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.

New year, new … site

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0100

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.

On deterring a raccoon

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0200

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.

Berlin Conlang Relay

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

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 Regulars’ Table. Thinking about it, the last relay I must’ve participated in was the one on the occasion of the 4th Language Creation Conference in 2011 … Pesky little time-flies and their beloved arrows!

mi lukin toki e toki pona

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

tenpo pini lili la, mi kute sin e lon pi toki pona kepeken sitelen pona ni tan jan Waputo.

time finish small TOP 1 hear again OBJ existence ATTR Toki Pona by.means.of picture good DEM from person RobWords
‘I’ve heard again about Toki Pona recently via this nice video by RobWords.’

kama la, mi kama jo e olin lili lili tawa toki ni lon lawa mi.

coming.up TOP 1 come.to have OBJ love small small toward language DEM in head 1
‘I’ve come to have a little bit of an intellectual crush on the language since.’

I’m a doctor (of philosophy) now!

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0100

I had been working on a Ph. D. in German Language for what feels like forever—more accurately, for seven years since February of 2017. As the proverb goes, “Good things come to those who wait,” so last month, the revised version of my thesis has finally been published by Language Science Press’ Advances in Historical Linguistics series.

Carsten Becker. 2024. Genusresolution bei mittelhochdeutsch beide: Eine Analyse im Rahmen der Lexical-Functional Grammar (Advances in Historical Linguistics 1). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10451456 (🔓). [Worldcat]

New text on the frontpage, and a cause for celebration

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The text on the Ayeri website’s landing page (itself an anacronism these days?) with its evocation of strange, fictitious lands where the language is supposed to be spoken has long slightly bothered me, seeing that I haven’t come up with substantial world-building for this long-running conlanging project of mine so far. Thus, I have recently—and rather ad hoc—come up with a new text that is more plain about Ayeri. Just as with the old text, I’ve tried translating it into Ayeri to give a taste right off the bat.

“Silent Night” in Ayeri

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100

In December 2022 I posted on my Mastodon account a photo from the Berlin State Library’s Unter den Linden branch featuring a pinboard on which were posted festive tags with Christmas greetings in a slew of languages spoken by library patrons.

Christmas-themed cardboard cutouts with Merry Christmas written in a variety of languages