Let's begin with the basics: sentence structure.
toki pona, like most other languages, have 3 main blocks to its sentences:
the subject, the verb and the
object.
In basic terms, the subject
is the main thing which the sentence is about. The verb
is the action the subject does and the object is what the
action is done to (if the verb needs an object); together, the
verb and the object form the predicate.
Let's do an example in English: "a person ate a pear."
A person is doing the eating, so they are the subject;
the action is eating so that's the verb;
and the pear is what's being eaten, so it's the object!
In English, the form and order of words indicates which is
subject, verb or object.
English does them in that order, SVO.
toki pona also uses SVO
as its word order, but just that isn't enough to differentiate them. For that, toki pona
uses particles to indicate where one block ends and another begins:
Let's translate the English example into toki pona. Using the particles, "A person ate a pear" loosely becomes:
If the subject is mi or sina, however, the particle is dropped:
If the sentence is an order (imperative mood) or a request (optative mood), or you want to adress someone (vocative case), then li becomes another particle, o:
If the subject is sina, it can be dropped:
If you want to have multiple subjects, predicates or objects, you must repeat the particle that indicates it. For subjects there is another particle:
However, ambiguity can happen with multiple subjects/predicates/objects that can be avoided with better phrasing:
