Q: are there any more preverbs?

As you know by now, these five preverbs are widely used:

There are four other preverbs that are worth knowing, but not everyone uses them:

You’ll see other people use them, but they’re not super necessary. Let’s go over what they mean, and how you can speak without them.

sona-preverb

These ideas can be expressed quite easily with ken-preverb or sona-verb:

This might lose a little bit of nuance, but most of the time this nuance is not super necessary.

open and pini-preverbs

You might notice we already have a preverb that means ‘to begin to …’: 󱤖 kama. But when teaching the language, many teachers didn’t give that translation for 󱤖 kama, instead talking more about the meaning ‘to become’. As a result, many Toki Pona speakers adopted 󱥇 open for this.

In reality, ‘to become’ and ‘to begin to …’ are two sides of the same coin! English uses one with adjectives, and the other with verbs:

Since in Toki Pona, verbs and adjectives can be used interchangeably, there’s no need for this distinction.

󱥐 pini can be useful on its own, but it can be easily rephrased as ‘to begin to not …’

Or simply a 󱥐 pini-verb:

lukin-preverb

As a preverb, 󱤮 lukin means the same exact thing as 󱤃 alasa:

So, what’s the difference? 󱤮 lukin-preverb comes from jan Sonja before she added the word 󱤃 alasa to Toki Pona, while 󱤃 alasa-preverb comes from community usage. Nowadays, around 15% of people use 󱤮 lukin, and 15% use both interchangeably, and the majority, 70%, only use 󱤃 alasa.¹

Why did 󱤃 alasa win out? I think it’s for two reasons:

• 󱤃 alasa has a more obvious link to “trying” than 󱤮 lukin does.
• 󱤮 lukin is already used a lot, for eyes and seeing, while 󱤃 alasa is comparatively less used — so it’s nice to give it a bigger purpose.