Toki Pona's
word order is
subject–verb–object. Toki Pona is
head-initial: a noun or verb is followed by its
modifiers. Some words are
grammatical particles, while the others are
content words with
lexical meanings. The content words do not fall into most traditional
parts of speech; they may be used as nouns, verbs, modifiers, or
interjections. A content word's position in a sentence and
phrase determines its role, allowing the limited number of words to serve many purposes. Thus, the word means "to eat" in the verb position following , but means "food" (that which is eaten) in a noun position, and might mean "edible" (of or relating to eating) as an adjective. Toki Pona has more complicated sentence structures as well. There are
closed classes of content words that can act as
preverbs and
prepositions in specific parts of a sentence. Preverbs are
catenative and are inserted between and the main verb.
Prepositional phrases follow the
objects. The particle ends a phrase or
clause that comes before the
subject to add additional context.
Sentence structures A sentence may be an interjection,
statement,
wish/
command, or
question. For example, interjections such as , , , , , , , , etc. can stand alone as a sentence. Full sentences all follow the subject–predicate order with an optional phrase at the beginning. In statements, the word precedes the predicate unless the subject is or . The
marker comes before direct objects. More and markers can present more predicates and direct objects respectively.
Vocative phrases come before the main sentence and are marked with at the end of the phrase, after the addressee. In commands, as a second-person subject may be dropped, and the word comes before the verb. This allows commands to treat a vocative phrase as the subject. The word can also replace , or come after the subjects or , to express wishes. There are two ways to form
yes–no questions in Toki Pona. One method is to use the
A-not-A construction, "verb verb", in which comes in between a duplicated verb, auxiliary verb, or other
predicates. Another way is to put the
question tag () after the phrase being inquired about. Just putting a
question mark at the end of a sentence does not form a question grammatically.
Non-polar questions are formed by replacing the unknown information with the
interrogative word .
Pronouns Toki Pona has four basic pronouns: (first person), (second person), (third person), and (
demonstrative). As with content words in general, number and
gender are not obligatorily marked, but can be specified with additional modifiers to the pronouns.
Nouns With such a small vocabulary, Toki Pona relies heavily on
noun phrases, where a noun is modified by a following word, to make more complex meanings. A typical example is combining (
person) with (
fight) to make (
fighter, soldier, warrior). Nouns do not
decline according to number; can mean
person, people, humanity, somebody depending on context. Adding , , or as needed specifies
singular,
dual, or
plural, respectively. Toki Pona does not use isolated
proper nouns; instead, they must modify a preceding noun. For this reason, they may be called "proper adjectives" or simply "proper words" instead of "proper nouns". For example, names of people and places are used as modifiers of the common word for "person" and "place", e.g. () or ().
Modifiers Phrases in Toki Pona are
head-initial; modifiers always come after the word that they modify. Therefore, (), can be a
fighting animal, whereas (), can mean
animal war. When a second modifier is added to a phrase, for example , it modifies all that comes before it, so might mean
many good people, with both (
good) and (
many) modifying (
person). The particle is placed before two or more modifiers to group them into another phrase that functions as a unit to modify the head: In , as a unit means
much goodness, to together mean
very good person. modifies , and as a whole modifies .
Demonstratives, numerals, and
possessive pronouns come after the head like other modifiers.
Verbs Toki Pona does not inflect verbs according to person, tense, mood, or voice, as the language features no
inflection whatsoever. Person is indicated by the subject of the verb; time is indicated through context or by a temporal adverb in the sentence. Prepositions can be used in the predicate in place of a regular verb. This expresses the verb and preposition senses in one. For example, means "to go toward" in this case. ==Vocabulary==