Here I will talk about the basics of Tuki Tiki grammar. By the end, hopefully you will be able to make and understand phrases and very simple sentences.
tuki is the word for speech, speaking, talking, language, communicating, and expressing your thoughts. Just like in Toki Pona, you can simply say 'tuki!' as a way of greeting/beginning a conversation.
tiki has to do with circles and cycles; it lets you describe things that work that are continuous or repeating, or repetition itself. Perhaps you could say 'tiki?' to ask someone to repeat what they just said, similar to 'again'.
The name of this language is simply these two words put together.
When we put words together in this way, it's always the first word that is considered the head, while every next word is a modifier of it. Here, tuki is the head and tiki is modifying it: the speech is circular or repetitive.
With this blueprint of head+modifier(s), you can already describe many things. Here are a few descriptions of moving life forms (ka) and non-moving life forms (kati):
The word kati can also be used for things that come from plants, like leaves and paper, or things that resemble those things; hence kati muku can conceivably mean 'candy wrapper'. The food word muku will be explained in (3) below.
Each word is stressed on the first syllable. In a longer phrase, I often put heavier stress on the second word: ka muku, muku mi, ka muku mi - but the opposite (muku mi) is not incorrect. Stress can vary, especially when a phrase has more than one modifier.
The simplest sentence in Tuki Tiki has two things in it. The first acts as the subject, and can only be one of three words: mi, tila, or li. The second thing is a a word or a phrase that acts as the verb/predicate.
mi is the word that refers to the speaker: think of it like English 'I' and 'me', but also like 'we' and 'us'. A group the speaker belongs to can also be mi. tila is the word that refers to the addressee (the listener, spoken-to person) like English 'you' (both singular 'thou' and plural 'y'all').
The word li can mean anything that isn't mi or tila. There are multiple ways to represent li in English, notably with demonstratives ('this, that'; TP ni) and third-person pronouns ('he, she, they, it'; TP ona).
To add another person or thing to the sentence, you can put the word i after the verb. This word introduces the grammatical object, usually the thing that the verb is happening to:
Parts of speech are fuzzy in Tuki Tiki: most words could be thought of as nouns in one context, as adjectives in another, and as verbs in another. A word is interpreted as a verb if it appears in a verby place. Thus, tuki can be translated as 'speech/language' or as 'speak/talk': in li tuki (2c), it behaves like an English verb because it goes after the word that behaves like the subject of the sentence. Sometimes, a word in the verb-y spot can still be interpreted in a number of ways. We will look at muku as an example.
The word muku can be about eating, food, tastiness, sweetness, and things or people that are food-like by being pleasant or sweet in a metaphorical sense. Below are a couple of possible translations of the sentence tila muku.
Presented in this way, the amount of interpretations can seem overwhelming or hard to deal with. While you'll encounter this (a lot) more in Tuki Tiki than in Toki Pona, the problem still looks (a little) worse than it really is: maybe you could theoretically want to call someone food, but, practically, how often do you need/want to? Don't answer that.
An easier way to talk about eating is to specify what is being eaten. That means using an object:
Compared to Toki Pona, our muku corresponds mostly to two words: moku ('food, eating') and suwi ('sweet, cute'). To a Tuki Tiki speaker, food, tastiness and sweetness are one big idea, too big for any one English word. In their mind, you are calling someone food when you call them sweet, or you're at least comparing them to food (like in 'sweet as honey'). Tuki Tiki takes such commonly associated ideas and squishes them together, to create an abundance of possible readings. All interpretation is guesswork, even if some guesses are more likely than others.