When Xu Jie came across a book introducing Esperanto while browsing in his university library years ago, he had no idea of the exciting journey that lay ahead.
Use Mandarin grammar, but drop the counting words.
Seems like Mandarin is kinda already dropping a lot of counting words, opting for just 个 a lot (though I'm still fairly new and still see lots of other counting words in the training material). I'm fine with that if it's separating out counting from 'number of' type constructs. But yeah, sometimes those counting words seem redundant.
Use a regular pronunciation/spelling system ...
Yeah, I really like this about toki pona, which I've also been tinkering with in parallel (and esperanto). I like that toki pona allows p, t, and k to sound more like b, d, and g too.
Everything else, yeah, I agree. I wondered why toki pona didn't have more particle words like Mandarin though since it uses li, e, pi, etc. Might as well have something like "...吗?" and 的. And I really like the pluralization of pronouns with 们 (and how all pronouns are at least voiced with the same sound) so I wondered what toki pona would like with those.
Regarding adding words not part of the core, i'm sure you could morph loan words from english to be more regular in this language, kinda like how both toki pona and esperanto do to varying degrees (or other natural languages like Mandarin itself does, at least for proper nouns) (edit, oops, i guess you did say if you can spell these loan words in this language which covers this).
Seems like Mandarin is kinda already dropping a lot of counting words, opting for just 个 a lot (though I'm still fairly new and still see lots of other counting words in the training material). I'm fine with that if it's separating out counting from 'number of' type constructs. But yeah, sometimes those counting words seem redundant.
Yeah, I really like this about toki pona, which I've also been tinkering with in parallel (and esperanto). I like that toki pona allows p, t, and k to sound more like b, d, and g too.
Everything else, yeah, I agree. I wondered why toki pona didn't have more particle words like Mandarin though since it uses li, e, pi, etc. Might as well have something like "...吗?" and 的. And I really like the pluralization of pronouns with 们 (and how all pronouns are at least voiced with the same sound) so I wondered what toki pona would like with those.
Regarding adding words not part of the core, i'm sure you could morph loan words from english to be more regular in this language, kinda like how both toki pona and esperanto do to varying degrees (or other natural languages like Mandarin itself does, at least for proper nouns) (edit, oops, i guess you did say if you can spell these loan words in this language which covers this).