It may be hard to think about things in toki pona without hardening semantics a little towards its "wordly definition" (the direct correlation of a toki pona word with that of another language's words).
You may be familiar with calcifications of multiple words (think "tomo tawa" being calcified as "car"), and in a similar way, even singular words can become hardened in meaning due to "learning from the dictionary" and literal word-by-word translation: lupa forever meaning "door" even when it makes no sense.
Sidetangent: This is why I have fallen in love with lipamanka's semantics dictionary, it genuinely tells you what the word is about, gets you to think about what you feel it means, and without explicitly linking it to words in other languages.
Here I'm going to think about several ways that i could describe a hypothetical door attached to a hypothetical house in various conditions, without mindlessly resorting to using "lupa", which you'll find defined on
lipu Linku as "door".
- i believe the hole created by the door being open (the entrance, doorhole) is the most lupa thing about it, it's a hole to enter and exit the house through.
- the door itself could be sinpin if it's closed and explicitly blocking the path
- or maybe it's a part of the house's selo if there's no need to open it. so it semantically merges with the sinpin around it to become just one big wall that's part of the entire exterior.
- the door itself could be an ijo open/pini if what matters is that it's open or closed.
- if the door were to be destroyed or torn off, the door itself becomes more of a lipu/kiwen, and the doorhole it used to be in remains lupa.
- if i need to point out there's an entrance into the house that happens to be a door, the door and its potential doorway hole might best be described as a lupa even if it was closed and locked, because it's about its role as a hole (entrance) into the house.
- if the door is made of glass, in the context of light it would be lupa because it's a window, so it's a hole for light
- even when closed and thus not a hole to move through, it would be a lupa (in the context of light)
- but in the context of me trying to get in, it would not be a lupa to me, because what matters is that i can't go through
- if it won't budge (locked, jammed, pakala), it's currently being awen. after being unlocked then it ken tawa/open/pini if it's not already opened. the act of unlocking or locking is often integrated into the act of opening and closing, so it's only awen when it being locked is necessary to mention.
- ...or maybe i can see it some other, different way in a different unfamiliar context. it depends, really.
Exercise for the reader: Look up
"lupa" on the aforementioned semantics dictionary, then click through to the
the lupa essay and read it, then philosophise privately about lupa for several minutes.