* * * * *

                 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

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