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Lexicalization: Difference between revisions
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{{lipu pu|en}} presents a car as an example against lexicalization. To a passenger, a car might be {{tp|tomo tawa}} ("moving room")<ref group="
“What is a car?” Lang mused recently via phone from her home in Toronto.
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Because Toki Pona's vocabulary is so small, there are only so many phrases of convenient length to go around. In other words, Toki Pona has limited space for lexicalized compounds.
Let's estimate that there are about 120 [[content word]]s<ref group="
If enough head–[[modifier]] phrases were reserved in this way, modifiers would become much less useful. For example, you could not translate "red ball" as {{tp|sike loje}}, because that would refer to a fixed, more specific concept.
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Every phrase lexicalized is another thing for everyone to memorize.
Much of Toki Pona's popularity and charme comes from its small lexicon. There are only 134 commonly accepted words [[
If Toki Pona were more eager to lexicalize, that count would almost certainly enter the thousands. This would make the language far more difficult to learn, while costing it the appeal of its simplicity. The phrases would also be quite arbitrarily assigned, creating even more rote memorization.
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==Notes==
<references group="
==References==
<references/>
{{General}}
[[Category:Philosophy]]
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