[schoen]

One other grammatical feature borrowed from Chinese is the way of asking and answering yes-no questions.

For example:

sina wile ala wile e moku?

you want not want OBJ food?

Answer can be "mi wile" or "mi wile ala" (I want / I don't want). One can also go even more Chinese-like and drop the subject pronoun in this context.

Or:

sina kute ala kute?

you hear not hear?

Sonja did provide an alternative way of asking yes-no questions, which is making a statement and appending "anu seme?" (literally 'or what?'), kind of like German "nicht wahr?" and Portuguese "não é?", among others. I think the Chinese style is more standard and pervasive today, though.

[camdez]

Very cool. So dropping subject pronouns ("pro-drop") is formally acceptable?

[schoen]

Well, I wouldn't regard toki pona as pro-drop in general -- subject pronouns are normally required (in part because verbs don't inflect for person and number). But there is a special case for answering a yes-no question:

http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/latex/Answer...