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 circle-like stuff, especially in a more abstract sense, it lets you describe things that work like cycles, that are continuous or repeating. Perhaps you could say 'tiki?' to ask someone to repeat what they just said, with a meaning close 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.
This blueprint of head+modifier(s) lets us make many expressions. We can use a word without modifiers (a), or we can give more details by modifying it (b-d).
Each word is stressed on the first syllable. In a longer phrase, I often put heavier stress on the second word: ka li, iku mi, ka muku mi - but the opposite (iku 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 thing acts as the subject, and can only be one of three words: mi, tila, or li. The second thing is an expression (either 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 do a lot of things in Tuki Tiki. We already saw it modifying another word in ka li. There are multiple ways to represent li in English, notably demonstratives ('this, that'; TP ni) and third-person pronouns ('he, she, they, it'; TP ona).
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 ka muku mi, it behaves more 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. In (3), I show 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.
(Also, in §4, we will learn about adding objects to a sentence. When that happens, it gets easier to talk about eating (tila muku i iku), rather than being food.)
The last two translations above are shared between muku and its TP source word moku. The remaining English translations, 'sweet' and 'tasty', have nothing to do with this ambiguity, but are due to muku's expansion into other meanings. To a Tuki Tiki speaker, food, tastiness, and sweetness are one single idea, too broad to be captured by any one English word. In a way, you are calling someone food when you call them sweet, or you're at least comparing them to food (like 'sweet as honey'). Tuki Tiki takes common associations like this and turns them up a notch.
new words: