nasin toki pi nimi “tan”

jan Api

Hey. I’ve noticed multiple usages of the word “tan” and I wanted to know which ones are canonical, conventional or ike in your opinion:

tan [REASON] e.g. mi wile tawa ma Elopa tan ni: mi wile lukin ma tomo Pali.
tan [PLACE] e.g. ona li kama tan tomo ona.
tan [PERSON] i.e. to indicate the name of an author of a document. e.g. nimi lipu, tan jan Api.

I have some questions:

Would you use case 1 to express “because of somebody” as in “I learnt Toki Pona because of my friend” in the sense of “I learnt Toki Pona because she inspired me to do so, but it is not clear whether I learnt it from her or not” e.g. mi kama sona e toki pona tan jan pona mi.
Would you use case 2 to express “from” as in “I am writing this letter from Spain” e.g. mi sitelen e lipu ni tan ma Epanja. I see lon as a better fit for this use case but I want to know your opinion.
Would you use case 3 to express “from somebody” as in “I learnt Toki Pona from my friend” e.g. mi kama sona e toki pona tan jan pona mi. Upon rereading this, my first understanding of this expression is “I learnt Toki Pona for my friend”, i.e. use case 1. What do you think?

If you know of any other usages that I haven’t mentioned here, please let me know.

soweli Masi

Case 1 la yes.
Case 2 la no.
Case 3 la yes, but your understanding of it leading to the question isn’t, because “for” is more accurately described with tawa.
I don’t think it’s useful to consider tan to have multiple separate usages in this manner. There is a general semantic space to tan that makes up its broad usage, and I think it’s better to understand the vibe and general gist of it. I think there’s some lessons you can check in the kama sona category that might explain tan better than I can, haha.

jan Api

soweli Masi Hey thanks your for prompt reply.

Hehehe. I am taking descriptively here when using the term ‘usage’ in terms of how it is used by speakers in observable textual evidence. This was not a kama sona question, but it’s okay.

Your answer is interesting. As for case 2, I’ve actually seen it being described as such materials like this to express “from” [PLACE] e.g. mi tan ma Mewika.

soweli Masi

Oh, my bad. I’ll put it back to the proper category.

janLapate

I think the problem with case 2 is that “I’m writing this from” is an English idiom. A lot of other languages would say "in.' So, I would say lon in that example. But I think it would be correct to say “mi pana e lipu ni tan ma Epanja.”