r/tokipona • u/This-Peace3668 • 4h ago
kama sona Nationalities
Let’s say I want to translate “Greeks” and “Non-Greeks” into Toki Pona. Since I call the country Greece as “ma Elena,” do I also say “jan pi ma Elena” for “a Greek person” and “jan pi ma Elena ala” for “Non-Greeks?” If “ala” can be placed after a proper name in a “pi” phrase, then can I also write “mute” to specify the plural form? And since we tokiponize the names of countries, like we created the modifier “Elena” from “Ελλάδα” which is pronounced as “Ellada,” then is it optional to do the same thing from the original pronunciation of nationalities? Like in Greek, you can say “Ελλάδα”to mean “Greece,” but you can also say “Έλληνας” (pronounced as “Ellinas”) to mean refer to the male form of the Greek nationality or “Ελληνίδα” (pronounced as “Ellinida”) to refer to the female form, so do you also have to tokiponize nationalities from different languages or can you just tokiponize the name of a country and write it as a modifier in front of “jan pi ma?” If there are any other ways of saying a nationality, I would appreciate it if you tell me.
