User:Meuser2/Sandbox/Proto-Toki-Pona/Development of Toki Pona

As the name suggests, Proto-Toki-Pona is the parent language of Toki Pona. This page discusses the development of Toki Pona from its proto-language.

Stages of development
Toki Pona developed in 4 stages: Early Toki Pona, Classical Toki Pona, Late Toki Pona, and Modern Toki Pona. Each of these is discussed in detail below.

Early Toki Pona
The development of Early TP is the biggest stage of all. It saw the loss of all inflection bar the difference between null and n roots, and marking of the gerund on n-roots. There was thus a movement from 'X Ys Z' type structure to 'X does Ying to Z' type structure. This was used even with null roots, where nasalisation was introduced for application to the final vowel, its use marking the gerund. 3 verbs remained pure: to be/do, to go, and to be (at/in/on). These three verbs were also the ones onto which personal subject pronouns fused, culminating in the replacement of the third person pronoun. For general uses, 'to' was replaced by 'going', the former dative preposition having become the 'to' in the standard phrase. The second person pronoun was also replaced, becoming si-na 'subservient-intelligent animate'.

Sound Changes

 * To be provided once converted from original form*

Classical Toki Pona
Classical Toki Pona saw the removal of nasalisation, the reduction of diphthongs, and the merging of word final m and n. This caused the verb 'to do/to be' to become indistinguishable from the personal pronoun which had fused to it. The verbs lon and daha were, under the influence of 'to do', split from their pronominal prefixes, leaving them perfectly normal verbs bar the absence of 'e' prior to their objects. Gerunds were also degraded as a consequence of the sound changes, becoming indistinguishable from other parts of speech.

The importance of this period is due to an increase in texts written. This was thus the stage which was later adopted for use as the official language of Ma Pona, though phonetically shifted.

Sound Changes
[+nasal +vowel] > [-nasal]

[eiou] > ∅ /V_

[eiou] > ∅ /_V

a > ∅ /_a

m > n /_#

Late Toki Pona
Late Toki Pona saw its slow replacement by Mattish during the consolidation of the Kten Empire. A lack of written material in this language means linguists cannot be very sure at all of its identity. However, several hypotheses have been developed. It is a general consensus amongst linguists that final vowels were increasingly dropped in polysyllabic words.

Sound Changes
* Unknown*