Talk:Parts of speech

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and all that

Should this page be converted to a discussion of how Toki Pona words can be nouns, verbs, whatever? Perhaps that information is part of content word: it has to do with the semantics and possible interpretations of a sentence. JPeton (talk) 15:16, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

if it gets discussed, it should be discussed in content word. I don't like describing it as nouns and verbs tho, because it makes it look like those are the actual parts of speech, but we don't analyse it like that. how it should be talked about is that content words can be *translated* into English as nouns and verbs, but they are not really that in Toki Pona, because there is no different between them. SnpoSuwan (talk) 15:49, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Numbers

This discussion is unresolved. Please reply to help reach a consensus or address the topic. Remove this template when resolved. (See all)

should numbers be removed from the classification of parts of speech. they are not found in kala kala's original analysis and they can simply be analysed the same as content words, as they don't have any special grammar. SnpoSuwan (talk) 16:30, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Arguably they do have their own grammar, as they add rather than multiplying, and it's nonstandard to use ordinal nanpa with non-number words. Several number systems seem to define further grammatical constraints that must be understood before any attempt at interpreting semantics.

Also, like prepositions and preverbs, there's a significant jump between number and regular-content-word senses (like "all" and "exactly 100") that makes it useful to split these definitions how pu's dictionary section does it. They aren't semantically interchangeable like the "noun", "adjective", "verb" labels used there. With that in mind, it seems most useful to give number words a distinct label. Menasewi (talk) 18:10, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

pu talks about (complex) numbers as particles. (Of course it also talks about mu that way...) Jan Ke Tami (talk) 00:22, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

Any objection to considering them a class of semiparticles? Menasewi (talk) 13:44, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

My sense of semiparticles is that they're just the miscellaneous words that aren't quite particles but have some special case in the syntax. They're extremely heterogeneous already. Adding numbers to that group really makes it almost meaningless beyond signaling that the word has special rules in the syntax but also has some semantic space. If that's really what it is, then what's the justification (besides tradition) for not making prepositions and preverbs semiparticles? They're content words that also have a special syntactic role... I think that numbers really are their own category, frankly, since they share a certain logic. Perhaps that makes them a well-defined subset of the semiparticles, but then so must the prepositions and preverbs be. JPeton (talk) 05:53, 30 January 2024 (UTC)