This section will expand on the very rudimentary sentences we saw in §1. Specifically, it's about how you can use a subject other than just mi, tila or li.
In section 1, we learned to talk about living things (ka and kati). For things in a more general sense (objects or stuff or something), the word iku can be more useful.
Suppose you have a thing that you think is pula (good or alright or fine or pona). There are a few ways to say this in English:
(c) is a new kind of sentence: here, the thing we want to use as a subject is not mi or tila or li. Instead of saying iku pula, which only means 'a/the good thing', we take the sentence with li as its subject and add a new, third thing in front of it:
The word li is doing something similar in all these examples: when it goes right before the verb, it turns a string of words ('the good thing') into a sentence ('the thing is good').
There's also a difference. In (e), li is referring to someone or something (that isn't mi or tila), and it's left up to context to clear up who or what. In the other two examples, you could think of li as referring to the word(s) right before it instead. This will help to make sense of the end of this section.
The same thing happens in sentences with objects. Here, the word pali expresses actions like work, making, doing. It can also be used for things that you can make or do.
In short, a sentence always needs two things in it: one of the words mi/tila/li, and a word or phrase that acts like the predicate. If the subject is something other than mi/tila/li, then the word li shows up between that thing and the verb.
To say something is real, use a. When something is a, it exists or is the only such thing that exists in the universe. These are obviously the same thing: Tuki Tiki requires its speakers to live in the moment; and, in the moment that you say something, that something becomes everything you're talking about. Conversely, things that are not currently in the conversation are not considered to exist.
Since the thing that is a is the only thing, it's often conceived of as a unique whole. A related concept is tu: this word is used to say there is a high degree or amount (>1) of something.
Note that a does not need to mean 'one'. It only presents a thing as a unique, complete totality, but not necessarily as singular.
In (1), I discussed a use of the word li in sentences with non-mi/tila/li subjects. However, li is not the only word that acts this way: sometimes, mi or tila can do it too. This happens when the preceding phrase starts with mi or tila:
To add a longer subject with mi or tila, the first word is repeated. In (a), mi tu is echoed by mi; in (b), tila a is echoed by tila a.
This creates a parallel between the words mi, tila and li: each can appear as the subject on its own, and each can point back to a longer phrase that sits before it, that can be interpreted as the 'true' subject of the sentence. In the latter case, which pronoun you use depends on who is being described by the subject: is it the speaker (mi), the listener (tila) or neither of them (li)? The reason li is the most common of the three is simply that you and I are outnumbered by all the things in the world that aren't us.
| Subjects | mi (me) | tila (you) | li (neither) |
|---|---|---|---|
| used on its own | mi pula. | tila pula. | li pula. |
| used to point back | mi tu mi pula. | tila tu tila pula. | li tu li pula. ka li pula. |
Repeating li is unnecessary in *li li pula, as much as repeating mi in *mi mi pula. However, it is possible for two personal pronouns (mi, tila, li) to follow each other in certain situations:
In these sentences, mi/li is modifying muku. The next word, li, is pointing back to muku mi/muku li. Here li can follow another personal pronoun: only the first word can tell us whether the short subject is you or me or not. Sentence (f) has li as its subject, followed by li as a predicate.
Put in Toki Pona terms: the TT word li is not the same as the TP word li. Historically, our li comes from two words in Toki Pona: ni (a pronoun like 'this' or 'that') and li (a grammatical word that separates subject and predicate). Today, TT li is generally more like TP ni and ona than it is like TP li; the latter was carved up between TT mi, tila and (mostly) li based on grammatical person. This all happened after I changed Toki Pona's /n/ sound to /l/, and the TP words ni and li ended up sounding the same. This change in sound enabled a change in meaning, where the particle li became 'semanticised': it gained a bit of meaning that it didn't have before (namely, that the subject is neither the speaker nor the listener).