lesson 22: very lovely cats

We’ve recently learned 󱤼 mute, which is a very useful word!

Let’s think a bit more about it. We already know how to form these phrases:

But what if we put them all together? Will we get many lovely cats or a very lovely cat?

This phrase means many lovely cats, because 󱥦 suwi describes 󱥢 soweli, and 󱤼 mute also describes 󱥢 soweli.
But I think my cat is very lovely! How do I talk about it? What if I want 󱤼 mute to describe 󱥦 suwi, instead of describing 󱥢 soweli?
This is where a new particle helps us:

Hooray! Now we can talk about a 󱥢 soweli that’s 󱥦󱤼 suwi mute!
If you like maths, you can think of it like opening a bracket, and changing the order of operations: ‘cat sweet many’ vs ‘cat (sweet many)’.

Let’s look at another example:

Again, you can think of it as ‘photo house many’ vs ‘photo (house many)’.
Of course, 󱤼 mute isn’t the only word 󱥍 pi helps out with! Let’s take a look at some other words:

‘person nice small’ vs ‘person (nice small)’.

‘knowledge war new’ vs ‘knowledge (war new)’.

Why are all the translations to English so different?!, you might ask! English mainly uses parts of speech to tell which word belongs to which other word. Many is an adjective, but very is an adverb. When parts of speech are all the same, hyphens comes to the rescue.

But in Toki Pona, nouns, verbs, and adjectives can all become one another. So they can’t help! Instead, Toki Pona uses just one particle to rebracket.