what does ‘pi’ mean in toki pona?

the answer to the question

‘pi’ is used to regroup words together. the first word after ‘pi’ is like an adjective, and the second is like an adverb. for instance, “jan nasa mute” would mean, “many strange people.” however, “jan pi nasa mute” means “very strange person/people.”

if you are describing a word with something you are using like a noun, then the second word after pi is like an adjective applied to that noun. for instance, “tomo soweli pona” is a “good animal building.” but a “tomo pi soweli pona” is a “building of good animals.”

it is ungrammatical to have only one word after ‘pi,’ and if it wasn’t, there is no obvious distinction it would make. a “jan soweli” may equally be a pet owner or a furry, and having ‘pi’ after that doesn’t change this fact. despite being grammatical, even a “jan pi soweli mute” might have a lot of pets, may be very enthusiastic about being a furry, or they might be a chimera. even if you define ‘pi’ to mean ‘of’ this remains ambiguous. “person of animal” could mean any of those things. a ‘pi’ followed by a single word would be redundant.

what’s the deal with ‘pi’?

when I started speaking toki pona about 8 years ago, the language was different. the way it was spoken was a bit less homogenous, and there was a dearth of people who spoke the language fluently. there were many prominent people who spoke the language in a way that would now be considered quite controversial. a lot of toki pona at this time was awkward and difficult to understand, even contemporarily.

there are honestly many details I do not know about the early history of toki pona (and much of it occurred on a now-defunct forum), but as I understand it, before the release of lipu pu, mama Sonja continued to revise the language at the same time it was spoken by a small community of speakers. the language as it was originally conceived was different and less well-defined in several ways. I think that lipu pu is best understood as her finalization of her design for toki pona, and it’s a design I like and agree mostly with (as a base I personally extend with some light, uncontroversial, but technically non-pu grammatical features, as well as nimi majuna and nimi sin).

lipu pu, as one might expect, heavily influenced the way toki pona was spoken, and many non-pu features fell out of use over time (such as ‘pi en’). toki pona has more of what you could consider an actual speaking community as opposed to before, and the way it is spoken resembles lipu pu much more than the writings of jan Kipo (John Clifford), for instance.

lipu pu defined (either as a redefinition or clarification) the function of ‘pi’ as being the purely grammatical function of regrouping words. additionally, it defined ‘en’ as a purely grammatical particle as well. it is a subject marker that is elided except when there are multiple subjects.

I think the mechanism by which pu influenced how people spoke was quite prescriptive¹, even though it was, perhaps, naively or disingenuously presented as description. but I don’t think that the toki pona community, at that point, had that much to actually describe. there were not nearly as many people speaking the language fluently and comprehensibly with each other. toki pona being the sort of conlang that it was at the time, I think it was good that certain ways of speaking were prescribed.

in any case, despite material describing the grammar of toki pona being far more nuanced, both ‘pi’ and ‘en’ are listed in dictionaries (including the dictionary of lipu pu) as ‘of’ and ‘and.’ and although their functions are similar, this tends to be a point of confusion. their function (as defined in lipu pu and now-common usage) harmonizes with and is more similar to ‘li’ and ‘e,’ but they are conceptualized by many inexperienced and some experienced speakers as being ‘of’ and ‘and’ (which are entirely different classes of words, the latter of which is only debatably occupied by toki pona’s ‘anu’²) only with some pedantic caveats.

for some reason, ‘en’ remains mostly uncontroversial, but ‘pi’ is often a subject of debate³. despite apparently accepting that ‘pi’ does not mean ‘of’, many still argue that one should be able to stick single words after pi, despite this actually clarifying nothing. because they are imagining that sticking an “of” there makes it a noun and not an adjective or verb. but toki pona does not make this distinction they are imagining it to make. is a “person of eating” all that different than an “eating person”?

I just think that it’s a very poorly conceived criticism of the language. there is a reason that ‘pi’ is defined that way! I think it might be one of my favorite things about the language, and I’m not just being contrarian.

the toki pona of the past, with its exponentially smaller community of speakers, was intensely grammatically unrigorous. to more precisely define the meaning of syntactic constructs, in my view, was a boon to the oft-criticized comprehensibility and syntactic legibility of the language.