* * * * *
                                        
                  The 5,000 translations of “mama pi me mute”
                                        
I found a much better dictionary [1] for Toki Pona [2] than the one I was
using. This dictionary even includes the parts of speech, which could prove
useful if I decide to generate a grammatically correct novel of 50,000 Toki
Pona words for National Novel Generation Month [3].

As I was wrangling the new dictionary into a machine-usable format, it struck
me that I could just generate a series of translations of the Lord's Prayer
[4] (since I have a copy of it in Toki Pona) by using the different meanings
of each word. For example, the first word in the prayer, mama, has the
following meanings:

* parent
* ancestor
* creator
* originator
* caretaker
* sustainer

Since my initial translation [5] was quite limited. I set about just
translating the opening line, “mama pi mi mute o, sina lon sewi kon” using
the new dictionary, and got the following:

mama

        NOUN parent, ancestor; creator, originator; caretaker, sustainer
pi

        PARTICLE of
mi

        NOUN I, me, we, us
mute

        ADJECTIVE many, a lot, more, much, several, very
         NOUN quantity
o

        PARTICLE hey! O! (vocative or imperative)
sina

        NOUN you
lon

        PREPOSITION located at, present at, real, true, existing
sewi

        NOUN area above, highest part, something elevated
         ADJECTIVE awe-inspiring, divine, sacred, supernatural
kon

        NOUN air, breath; essence, spirit; hidden reality, unseen agent

A more “literary” literal translation would probably be “Creator of we many,
O! You existing divine air.” Or as a form of poetic English, ”Creator of us,
residing in the divine air.” Pretty cool stuff. And as it turns out, there're
enough variations in just the opening line to create enough translations to
fulfill the 50,000 word requirement [6]. I could certainly stop here and
claim success, but I may just end up playing around with this a bit more.

[1] http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/dictionary.php
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
[3] https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2019
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord's_Prayer
[5] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2019/11/01.1
[6] https://github.com/spc476/NaNoGenMo-2019/blob/master/results/mama_pi_me_mute.txt

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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