kepeken e: Difference between revisions

[[kepeken e]] is athe site of contention in debatesa debate about toki pona grammar. It is a "corner case" whose interpretation is uncertain: everyone agrees that it is /possible/ to follow the [[preposition]] [[kepeken]] with the [[transitivizing]] [[particle]] [[e]], but it is not clear what such a construction means, nor whether it should be used. After 2020, the appearance of transitive [[prepositional phrases]] (that is, prepositional phrases that act as the [[predicate]] of a sentence and that take an [[object]] introduced by [[e]]) made this problem more complex. However, as of 2023 these constructions are still relatively uncommon, and the whole problem of whether [[e]] should follow [[kepeken]] remains of minor interest for those who are not specialists in the study of [[toki pona]] grammar.

Unfortunately, the theoretical purity of this transformation breaks down in practice. In certain cases, it is not clear whether the The [[Glossary#ordinary values|]] of toki pona words do not allow for this degree of freedom, so the meaning of the last sentence is completely ambiguous:

It is not clear whether this is tale of big bad wolf or of lycanthropy, since in the first case the word is interpreted as a modifier applied to the object, and the second as a noun into which the subject is transformed. This confusion is called the ''monsutatesu'', the "monsuta test", since it is most clear with the word ''monsuta''. However, ''monsuta'' is not the only word that behaves this way. Many prepositions are similarly ambiguous, particularly when used transitively.