Adjectives and adverbs

There's not an actual difference between nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in toki ma. The same word can be each of them, only depending on the position. So, for example, the word moku does not mean only "to eat", but also "food" (and more things! It means "drink", too!). That way, you only need to learn one word instead of a bunch of them. And if you think it is a weird thing for a language to do... English does it too! For example, you salt using salt, you can walk or go to a walk, and you can even aha somebody. In toki ma, that's simply the way most words work.

Adjectives (and determiners) always come after a noun in toki ma, unlike in English. So for example:

jan juna → young person

moku seli → warm food

seli suli → big fire

kanti ni → this song

Notice how seli is used both for warm and for fire. It means even more (related) things. In the dictionary you can find all the meanings of a word. (All? Maybe not! Sometimes you will see, for example, a word used as a verb when the dictionary do not have an entry for that. Think of a related meaning within the context and you will probably guess right!)

Compound words

As toki ma has a very small vocabulary, many concepts are translated using compound words, with a noun followed by an adjective. For example, with the word intawo, which means "room" (among other things), you can create the names of a lot of rooms:

intawo moku → dining room (literally "eating room")

intawo telo → bathroom (literally "washing room")

intawo lape → bedroom (literally "sleeping room")

intawo open → hall (literally "starting room")

Notice that it is not very different to what English does; toki ma just uses it a lot more:

jan utala → soldier (literally "fighting person")

jan umojo → doctor (literally "healing person")

jan sona → scientist or philosopher (literally "knowing person")

Actually, these compound words do not have fixed meanings, and while some can only have one meaning, others may depend on context, or they must be more than one way to represent a concept. So don't try to remember "jan sona means scientist", because that's not true: maybe in some context that means a different thing, and maybe a different compound word means scientist, too! I know it seems complicated right now, but over time you will realize that this is not only easy, but it can help you understand better what you want to say.

Stacked adjectives

You can add more than one adjective after a noun; the second adjective modifies both the noun and the first adjective, so the order matters:

jan sona juna → young scientist (juna modifies "jan sona")

jan juna sona → wise young person (sona modifies "jan juna")

Possessives

In order to form possessives, you just use a pronoun (or a proper name, as you will see in another lesson) as an adjective:

moku mi → my food

intawo si → your room

kanti ona → their song

Adverbs

Adverbs are exactly like adjectives in toki ma; the difference is that they modify verbs instead of nouns:

mi moku wiki → I am eating quickly

si tanse pona → You are dancing well

jan utala li lukin olente → the soldier is looking east

Words you have learned in this lesson

intawo, jan, lape, lukin, ni, olente, open, pona, seli, sona, suli, telo, umojo, utala, and wiki.

Exercises

Practice what you have learned with the following sentences. The answers, in the next lesson:

• toki ma to English:

  • jan lamo li kanti.

  • jan juna musi li kanti pona.

  • intawo mi li suli.

  • jan utala suli li tanse wiki.

• English to toki ma:

  • This food is warm.

  • The soldier is young.

  • A fast song.

  • This young doctor is a wise person.