Discuss kiki
Add topicThoughts on the word kiki by ante Enta[edit | edit source]
below is an excerpt of ante Enta's thoughts on the word kiki from the sona pona Discord server, in the #nimi forum, in the #"kiki" thread (posted with their permission):
for me the core of its semantic space is being prickly and adjacent vibes, and by extension irritation at times
it's more of a feeling/sensation on a thing instead of focusing on it's physical shape
eg a spike, it isn't automatically kiki to me, if I wanna just describe it's physical feature, I might use palisa or nena (at least ideally if i stick to my principles) but if I wanna describe a spiky surface and talk about how it feels id use kiki or pakala
kiki and pakala: maybe it's just an arbitrary thing, but the difference might be about the degree of harm it brings. pakala la the thing would actually or intends to hurt, taso kiki la it might feel ouch when you touch it but it's not as much of a deal than pakala
a durian or sandpaper that you lightly move your finger on might be kiki, but if it actually scratches you skin or activate some kind of allergic reaction it starts to be pakala instead
other than touch la, the tingle of a sour thing or a slight spicy food could be kiki tawa uta, but if it's very spicy that I can't handle la uta mi li pakala pilin
one time when I was feeling particularly annoyed and irritated my brain naturally thought that "mi pilin kiki" (maybe should be kiki pilin instead) so that's where the extension to irritation comes from I guess
the reason why my use might be weird it's because I took the space of nimi sin aki and used it with kiki when i thought they're similar enough (aki was more between kiki and jaki and i spilt it in two before assimilating it into kiki and jaki)