I really do not want to see the Rejistanian Word of the Day being considered not safe for work. And since I found out that there are very quick ways to get fired (and that my significant other and me even once got someone fired by something he said and I posted to QDB), I will just say that this is what people do when they love each other very much to encourage the stork to come. The word is on a rather high end of formality. More like ‘having intercourse’ than like any four-letter words.
Example: Vexivalumu’het mi’mesuvisko kidhi’het’ny ykal xamie’tan avutu’het’ra iran asty’het’jet xuvsu.
(police 3S-report occurance some intercourse car-LOC moving year-TEMP each.)
Every year the police reports a few incidents of sex in a moving car.
I declare this SFW because I read a joke relating to an incident like that in a book of jokes which was not especially marked as explicit material.
And on a completely unrelated topic: I tried to explain to someone recently why Esperanto is so easy and again used the example of ‘Unabsteigbarkeit’ to illustrate how Esperanto often uses affixes to create new words. However since the person was USAmerican, I translated the example as ‘unrelegatability’. This did not translate well. He did not get it and only later I realized that top leagues in the USA do not have a relegation/promotion system. So here is a question to my readers, especially those who are American. Can you give me a good example I can use which can completely be understood even without having seen it before by looking at the stem and its affixes?
BTW: Even though Esperanto was an influence for rejistanian, it has less ways to use affixes to change meanings. For example ‘place for’ has to be said as its own word. Unabsteigbarkeit however can still be one word even in Rejistanian: ehasalan’ta’tan. And now I wonder how a language like Toki Pona could express that? 
I should not bash Toki Pona too much, but I do think that its simplicity is deceptive. It lacks the mechanisms to create words like Unabsteigbarkeit and instead has to form very intransparent constructions. I think the Toki Pona speakers traded one form of complexity for another one and while that might be a useful tradeoff to them, it looks disadventageous to me.
Personally I think that the choice of a future of a new global language lies between Esperanto and English, rather than an untried project.
Your readers may be interested the following video http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670
A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.esperanto.net
Mi paroletas esperante kaj la rejistaniha ne estas lingvo por la mondo. La rejistaniha nur estas artefarita lingvo por mi kaj por artefaritan landon ĉe la ludo NationStates. Mi ne volas ke cxiam lernas la rejistaniha, mi nur volas havi kaj krei belaĵon kaj montri ĝin en mia blogo. Mi kredas ke Esperante estas bonan ideon por mondlingvo.
Deductability in toki pona. jan mute li pana e mani tawa jan lawa tan ni: jan li wile e pali pi jan lawa li wile e pali pi jan utala e ijo mute ante. jan li pana e mani tawa jan lawa la mani ni li suli ni: suli li tan suli pi mani sina. kipisi pi mani ni li ala tawa jan lawa.
(many people give money to the government because they want government services, military and many other things. When people give money to the government, this money is of this magnitude– the magnitude is caused by the magnitude of money you have. A part of this money is not for the government)
toki pona is more aggressively analytic than any language I’ve come across possibly including Chinese. Chinese, English and Swedish do most of the work they need to do without compound words, inflection, agglutination and are not all that worse for it. toki pona just gone even further to demonstrate that you don’t need inflection, etc. to express things, periphrasis and phrases can do a lot.
I do agree entirely that toki pona promises simplicity, but in fact, any language with enough machinery to express most things is in fact a work of massive complexity, regardless to the language specification. We aren’t really speaking by spec, but speaking according to how our brains work, than that stays equally complex no matter what language we are speaking.
Except mu. The language of mu has only 1 word, mu and it is indeed simple and suitable for communicating with all cows of the entire planet.
I speak no Toki Pona. I just looked at how things are constructed in it.
I am not dislike Toki Pona because it is analytic. That is a good goal for a language. I do dislike it because I think labelling it as simple is not really right since the complexity seeps in as soon as you want to talk about something more than the weather. It is just that you have to learn compounds, not vocabulary.
If Toki Pona was labelled as a language which had analytic complexity, fine, but so, I feel… that it is near [unintentional] deception. It is a nice experiment though.
Mu had me laughing out loud.
BTW: Can you translate ‘Unabsteigbarkeit’ (the property/ability of a sports club not to get relegated [ever]) into Toki Pona?
D’oh! I did a google search for Unabsteigbarkeit and google thought I misspelled it and suggested “Did you mean: Absetzbarkeit”! (Obviously I don’t know a bit of German) Lemme try again:
permanently deregulated sports teams: jan mute li musi e musi sijelo. jan ni li pali e kulupu musi li musi e wan tawa ante. musi ni li suli sama esun. tempo mute la jan lawa wile lawa e kulupu ni. taso jan mute pi kulupu musi li wile ala e ni. jan lawa li pilin sama la tempo ale la kulupu ni li kama anpa ala wawa pi jan lawa.
many people play bodily sports. these people create playing communities (teams) and play one against another. These games are big/important like business. Often the government wants to lead/control these teams. But people of these teams don’t want this. If the government feels the same, then these teams will never come under the power of the government.
Why do you bring the government into it? Oh, wait, you are American*: Relegation != Regulation. A team has Unabsteigbarkeit if it escapes relegation year after year.
* Please do not see this as an attempt to invoce the dumb American stereotype. American sports just tend not to have promotion and relegation.
Relegation, the transference of teams from a superior to inferior division– first time I’ve ever seen the word. In the US baseball has special legislation protecting it from anti-monopoly law, hence my 2nd error. I didn’t make the rules, I just live here.
Sports and politics aside, hyper-technical jargon can and is often dealt with lexically by taking a word and assigning it a more specific word. If there was a hypothetical conlang user that need to express this, they would say something long and round about expressing the concept, and then extract the head noun for subsequent reference.
kulupu ni li weka tan anpa wawa tan ante kulupu suli. This team is free from reduction in power (status) from change in larger groupings (division).
Thank you! It was mainly morbid curiosity which made me ask. I am amazed by how well you speak Toki Pona and how good you can translate things into its iti’tan asav (the mental state it requires)!
I do know how things can be shortened. My natlang does it often enough with its insane compounds requiring gallons of word-glue.
Rejistanian does that as well. Once you established that you are talking about the Heven mje’het sekhika rejistaniha (the rejistanian first soccer league), you can just say heven’het or even heven ([the] league) later.
BTW: commenting on your blog is impossible. It tells me that I have to accept the commenting policy (which 404s) even though I did.
@Matt: I tried to comment on your blog as well, and had the comment swatted away. I’m saving it in a text file. If you want it, send me an e-mail, and I’ll e-mail it to you.
To answer your sports question, the concept of relegation is completely foreign to American sports. Personally, I don’t think it should be. I think a relegation system would be quite useful for sports like baseball, especially. In baseball, teams play 162 games, and only eight teams get to the playoffs. Often by the time a team has played 60 games, they know for certain that they’re not going to make the playoffs. That leaves them with essentially 102 meaningless games. Furthermore, since so few teams make the playoffs, certain build up a culture of futility. Players feel like they have nothing to play for, and fans don’t go out to support the team. If, say, the worst team in each division were relegated (or if that’s too many, the worst team in each league), that would: (a) give the teams with bad records something to play for at the end of the season, and (b) give a real sense of accomplishment to those teams that are simply playing in the major leagues. Plus, it would give small market cities a chance to see major league baseball. It would make the minor leagues profitable.
However, I don’t think a system like this will ever come into existence—not even in MLS. American sports are tied heavily to funding and advertising, and for a professional franchise to be relegated would be catastrophic.
As for a word that Americans will understand… Well, I’m not sure. Words can be built up of affixes, but after one uses them, they tend to be stored as chunks. Perhaps something like the coinage on The Simpsons “Dinosaur-bone-digging-up-trip”.
I know about relegation and its effect on teams’ finances. Seeing that my parents support a perenial ‘league 1.5′ team, I however see that they do it. I guess after a while, it just becomes something to take into account and to budget for. Kinda like a 15% inflation rate: companies would go chapter 11 when inflation rate changed, but in other areas of the world they manage just fine.
“Dinosaur-bone-digging-up-trip” is a concatination. It is exactly not what I look for. I mean something which has one stem and which has a meaning which can be deducted from this stem and the affixes.
I would imagine you could replace “relegate” with another verb – unpredictability, unsustainability, intolerability, inoperability, etc – and have it work, but in light of David’s point about mental storage, and to make the comparison to “unrelegatability” (incidentally, -ate verbs can drop that suffix, so “unrelegability”, like “aggregability” or “interrogability”, and in fact “inoperability” that I just mentioned, so it’s yet another usage competition, like the choice between un- and in-) apt, I suppose you’d want it to be new to your interlocutor. While “inoperability” is new to me, despite having produced it, it’s not as striking because “inoperable” is a perfectly familiar. So, reaching for a verb not usually found with -able… fisk. 2000-odd hits on Google for “fiskable”, 7 for “fiskability”, and none for “unfiskability”. But I suppose it’s quite likely you’ll find people who don’t know the verb “fisk”. So, new verb… persecute. 2000-odd hits again for “persecutable”, 7 again again for “persecutability”, and none for either “unpersecutability” or “impersecutability” (8 for “unpersecutable” and none for “impersecutable”, incidentally, so I guess it’s just me that feels like it needs that prefix). And I find meanings are readily apparent; I first thought of it in the sense of social persecution (of minorities e.g.), but the hits for “unpersecutable” seem to refer to legal persecution.
Thanks for your thoughtful words! 0 hits were not even required, just that it is uncommon but its stem and affixes are not. Persecute, for example, I suspect is a word which I could not ask a random person on the street and get a correct definition. “Intolerability” sounds like a good one though.
An idea I had was disadvantageously but this has this weird shift in pronunciation.