olin

[Daenyth]

olin

sona pu

VERB to love, have compassion for, respect, show affection to

sona Linku pi toki Inli

love, have compassion for, respect, show affection to

sona Linku pi toki pona

olin li pilin ni: ijo li suli a tawa ijo ante li pana e pilin pona wawa

sona ku

loving⁵, love⁵, romance⁴, romantic³, compassion³, attraction², intimate², passion², beloved², loyalty², loyal¹, faithful¹, dear¹, mercy¹, darling¹, passionate¹, care¹, appreciation¹, crush¹, respect¹

sona sin

[mi2ebi]

love/respect can also be nouns la i suggest moving those to the front maybe

[Daenyth]

We should address two things specifically I think:

• misconception 1: olin is one-to-one for english "love", leading new learners to use it as "like a lot"
• misconception 2: olin is only for romantic love, when that's only one part of it

[mi2ebi]

agreed, though i can't yet think of ways to clarify those

[Daenyth]

Aside from the commentary, which we can look at later, we can help by picking specific examples that don't make much sense when you have those misconceptions

[lipamanka]

hm what if we removed "love?" Is there a downside to that, and is it perhaps worth it to do it anyway?

[janPensa]

I went to some thesaurus websites to find some words to throw into the group, hoping they give someone useful ideas.

Strongly olin-related words (IMO):

cherish, hold dear, affection, care for, love

Others I feel are less directly related, but still worth mentioning in the discussion:

doting, nurture, fondness*, closeness, devotion, fidelity, admire, respect, revere, adore, tenderness, gentleness, attachment, romantic, intimate, passion

(* note: fondness can also just mean liking something)

[Daenyth]

I could see removing love and replacing with something like "affection" maybe. But I think that love is probably one of the main ways people use the word, so it seems a bit awkward to remove

[KelseyHigham]

i think "cherish" works as a good replacement for "love"

[KelseyHigham]

affection, to cherish, respect, hold dear

[Daenyth]

affection, respect, camaraderie, deep emotional bond; intimate, romantic, fraternal, familial

[KelseyHigham]

i'm not sure about camaraderie, fraternal, familial
i feel like i can feel camaraderie with like a coworker, in a way that i wouldn't describe as olin
but if other people like it then it's probably good
and then the family words... family can involve olin but it's by no means a rule

[Daenyth]

If we leave those out then it becomes misleading because the words skew toward people interpreting it as "romance only", which isn't really right

[lipamanka]

(reminder to people that you must assign yourself to a word before commenting on it! thus far jan Deni and I are the only two to assign ourselves to olin)

[mi2ebi]

must assign yourself to a word

as a non-committee member then i assume mi ken ala toki lon ni?

[lipamanka]

actually that's more in place to make sure discussions on words don't get too many contributors from the committee, non-committee members are free to comment on as many posts as they'd like!

[mi2ebi]

too many? (we can continue this on discord to not clutter this if u want)

[lipamanka]

i think it's getting a bit cluttered, and we can fix that by getting rid of most of the nouns that can be turned into verbs. in pu, only verbs are listed. it doesn't seem like we have any which is confusing for derivation. the most recent suggestion is

affection, respect, camaraderie, deep emotional bond; intimate, romantic, fraternal, familial

we can do `to respect, to show affection for; to have a positive relationship with, e.g. platonic, romantic, fraternal, or familial relationships

the idea here is to add more structure and be more descriptive. it's a little longer but the pu definition has "show affection to" so i think it's fine. the semicolon shows that the examples are only examples of the last sense of the word.

idk how happy i am with this definition though. feedback please!

[Daenyth]

to respect, to show affection for; to have a positive emotional bond with, e.g. platonic, romantic, fraternal, or familial relationships

Slight wording tweak

[KelseyHigham]

i'd like to be inclusive of possibly-inanimate things like one's special interests, and one's culture
maybe "to have a deep appreciation of"

also pets, which i guess falls under platonic, but that's a word that makes me think of human relationships. maybe it's fine

[Daenyth]

I think that's a better fit for commentary notes. Those meanings are understandable from the suggested words above, I think

[jnpoJuwan]

to have a strong emotional bond (with), e.g. platonic, romantic or familial relationships, affection, appreciation, respect

I removed 'fraternal' just to make the definiton a bit shorter (as it already falls under familial and platonic)

[janPensa]

After thinking it over some, I'm considering something more like

to cherish, hold dear, have a strong emotional bond with someone or something; affection, appreciation, respect

I was first thinking about "to have a strong emotional bond, e.g. with family, lovers, friends, one's culture", but I think replacing all those examples with "someone or something" streamlines and broadens the definition. Having just the "strong emotional bond" thing also adds some ambiguity, but I feel that adding "to cherish, hold dear" at the start removes most of that and makes it clear.

The main reason for mentioning familial, platonic, fraternal, etc. was to make sure that people don't take olin to only mean romantic/passionate love, but I think few people are going to have that misunderstanding reading my proposed definition, especially with "or something" thrown in.

(But I'm 🚀-ing the previous proposal as well, because I'm also fine with that one if others prefer it.)

[janPensa]

Also, I'm having some doubts about how "respect" is listed in there.

On Discord there was a discussion about this with some people in favor of including "respect" (because true respect can be described as olin a lot of the time), and some having doubts of it being appropriate in a Linku definition (because it can be a misleading translation, or because olin for respect is not used a lot in practice). waso Keli mentioned the possibility to have respect in a list of "e.g." examples, which seemed like a good compromise to me at the time, but seeing as it didn't turn out that way in the past few definition proposals, I'm feeling once again that having "respect" in there like this could possibly be misleading to beginners.
(Edit: Oops, apparently I misread the "affection, appreciation, respect" in Deni and Juwan's proposals as not being part of the e.g. list. That actually solves my issue with it for the most part.)

I think having a Discord-style poll might be a good way to get a quick idea of people's opinions without people having to take time to write responses, so...

How do you feel about "respect" being in this definition?

to have a strong emotional bond (with), e.g. platonic, romantic or familial relationships, affection, appreciation, respect

👍 I prefer / lean towards keeping it.
👎 I prefer / lean towards removing it.
😄 Either way is fine / no preference.
😕 I'd look for other ways to incorporate "respect" in the definition. (Comment below if you have specific ideas.)

[jnpoJuwan]

regarding the definition above, which order do you prefer? ('respect' is in parenthesis because of the poll above):

👍 'to have a strong emotional bond (with), e.g. platonic, romantic or familial relationships, affection, appreciation, (respect)'
👎 'to have a strong emotional bond (with), e.g. affection, appreciation, (respect), platonic, romantic or familial relationships'

(I wanted to use 1️⃣ and 2️⃣ as the emojis but GitHub is stinky and doesn't allow you to use them in reactions, so please ignore the actual meanings of thumbs up and thumbs down)

[gregdan3]

copying this in from discord on the respect discussion:

the word respect, to me, feels like the weakest example of an olin on the list
it's still there enough to work in contexts other than the dictionary
i've even used it as an example for defining olin before
but this makes it a less effective teaching example, and critically, harmful as an example to stand on its own in the dictionary

put another way
there is a difference between "respect is an olin" and "olin means respect", especially as a learner engages with these definitions
and for a word to be good for a definition, both these statements need to be strongly true of it

as an example of the above where you can see more clearly what's going on: a pile of baseball cards is a kulupu, but kulupu does not mean "a pile of baseball cards"