Animacy

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animacy.

Animacy is a grammatical feature that expresses how alive or sentient the referent of a word is, or is viewed as.

Toki Pona does not include all of the same animacy markers as English. For example, the English third-person pronoun "it" is inanimate, while alternatives such as "they" are animate; in Toki Pona, these are all covered by ona, which does not mark animacy.

Similarly, in many speakers' usage, ijo (a generic content word often glossed as "thing") is broad enough to refer to animate and inanimate beings alike, and thus it is not objectifying to classify sentient beings as ijo.

Animacy is conceptually applied to animal words. As a result, some speakers use animacy as a qualifier for whether to describe a sound as mu, which Toki Pona: The Language of Good defines as an animal onomatopoeia.

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