lipu-sona/pages/sitelen_pona.md

% sitelen pona description and examples
% /dev/urandom
% 2020-06-11

## sitelen pona

"sitelen pona" ("simple writing" or "good writing") is a logographic writing
system designed for toki pona by its creator, Sonja Lang. 

> %info%
> The part of the official book describing sitelen pona was published with a
> non-commercial [CC-BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) 
> license. Hence, it's easily available online in other courses,
> such as [jan Pije's page](http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/hieroglyphs.php) 
> on the system, which describes it almost exactly the same as the official
> book.
>

### logographic systems

In a logographic system, **each character generally represents one word** (or
sometimes even a phrase). The most commonly known example of a logographic
system are the Han characters, used in Chinese and (in addition to their own
writing systems) Japanese and Korean.

> %info%
> Logographic systems are well-suited for languages in which words have little
> to no inflection (change very little, if not at all, based on grammar), and
> the grammar is instead based around putting existing words together (such a
> language is called "isolating"). Chinese languages fit that idea really well,
> as does toki pona.
>

But since toki pona's basic dictionary only uses **120 words** (plus a few
community additions), a logographic system for toki pona also becomes
**significantly easier to learn** and use than that of Chinese, which requires
knowing at least 1500 characters to achieve fluency. In addition, most
characters in sitelen pona visually represent the words they mean -- for
example, "lawa", meaning "head", is literally a symbol of a head with a cap on.
"nanpa", meaning "number", is based on the "\#" number sign, and so on. (To some
extent, the same is true for a number of Han characters as well.)

### sitelen pona chart

![table of sitelen pona characters](/sitelen_pona.gif)

> This table shows all the sitelen pona characters used for the 120 official
> words, the important words in the second official book ("nimi ku suli"), as
> well as some characters commonly used for additional words ("nimi sin") and
> alternative representations ("nasin lukin ante"). Some of the alternate
> characters are my original designs -- these are indicated with a small red
> triangle in the bottom-right corner.

Much like the Latin alphabet, it is written left-to-right and top-to-bottom.
Each toki pona word is written using its character, without extra spaces between
words.

An adjective character can be put inside or over/under a noun character to
represent a noun phrase. Such a character is generally called a "composite
character".

> %info%
> You might notice that toki pona's "logo", used on the cover of the official
> book and on most websites to represent it (including this one), is, in fact, sitelen pona's
> composite character for "toki pona", with the "pona" symbol written inside the
> "toki" symbol.

Unofficial words are written inside a cartouche (a rounded shape that
surrounds all the characters), with characters for words that start with their
first letters. For an example, in the page linked at the beginning (and used in
the official book), "ma Kanata" is written as "ma [kasi alasa nasin awen telo
a]". (In some fonts, the cartouche may be replaced with parentheses or brackets
between the characters.)

### sitelen pona as commonly used

> %info%
> The information in this part is not part of the official design of sitelen
> pona. It is based entirely on how sitelen pona is used by the toki pona
> community.

Sentences are separated either with a dot or with a space. All other punctuation
(commas, colons, etc.) is either omitted or written as their corresponding
characters (since in practically all cases, their presence or absence doesn't
change the meaning of a sentence).

Words added by the toki pona community usually have their own separate
characters and are not written as unofficial words.

Since the question mark is used as the character for "seme", question sentences
may be ended with a period (or a smaller question mark) instead.

Some people use composite characters within cartouches to write entire syllables
in a single space. For example, [this
tweet](https://twitter.com/qvarie/status/1291755067851251712) shows the
unofficial word "Nijon" ("Japan") written as three characters: "nena-ilo",
"jan-oko" and "nena".

Others use a different system: they put a single dot after a character inside a
cartouche to mean the word's first syllable and two dots (typically in a
colon-like formation) to mean the entire word's pronunciation. So, for example, "jan Mawijo" can
be express as "jan \[mama·wile·jo·\]" and "jan Kilili" can be "jan \[kili:lipu·\]" or "jan \[kili·lili:\]".

It's worth noting that in both of these systems, the final "n" sound is treated
as a syllable on its own. For example, the word "nanpa" is broken down into
"na", "n" and "pa".

### Examples

Here's some basic text written in sitelen pona. 

![wan ni pi lipu ni li sitelen kepeken sitelen pona. sina ken ala ken sona e ni.
/ toki pona li jo e nimi pi mute lili. tan ni nasin sitelen ni li ken: sitelen
wan li toki e nimi wan. sitelen ale li lukin sama kon
ona.](/sitelen_pona_example.png)

[Translation](answers.html#sp)

For some other texts written in sitelen pona, including a page that tries to
teach someone to read it without using any other writing system, check out the
website ["tomo pi sitelen pona"](https://davidar.github.io/tp/) by jan Tepu.

### Fonts

The text above is displayed using a font called "linja pimeja". However, for
displaying sitelen pona text online, there is a ton of other options. Here are
the most common ones.

 * A font called "[linja pona](musilili.net/linja-pona/)" is characteristic for
   its basic design and support for tons and tons of different composite
   characters. It is the most popular option.

 * "[sitelen pona pona](https://jackhumbert.github.io/sitelen-pona-pona/)" is a
   font that features some characters way different from regular sitelen pona,
   but looks very nice on different font sizes and doesn't require any
   modification to toki pona text in order to look good. In particular, this is
   my favorite font.

> %info%
> Some pages on this website may offer an ability to toggle between Latin and
> sitelen pona displays. The latter option will use the "sitelen pona pona"
> font, since it works best with unmodified toki pona texts and falls back
> nicely in texts that use non-pu, unofficial or outright non-toki-pona
> words in them.
>

 * "[linja suwi](https://linjasuwi.ap5.dev/)" is a recently-designed font by
   alienpirate5. It features nicely-drawn characters and lots of
   community-created words.

 * I have also designed a font for sitelen pona, called "[insa pi supa
 lape](supalape.html)". It is based on the font "Bedstead"(hence the name) and
uses the same algorithm to convert small bitmaps of different characters into a
fully-functional vector font.

#### Examples of different fonts

>
> sitelen ni li sitelen kepeken sitelen pona.
>
> sina ken ala ken sona e ona.
>
> ma Kanata li suli.
>
> jan pi sona mute li pali pona.
>

* linja pona:

![](/lpona.png)

* linja pona (syllables using composite characters):

![](/lpona2.png)

* linja pimeja:

![](/lpimeja.png)

* sitelen pona pona:

![](/spp.png)

* insa pi supa lape:

![](/insa.png)

### sitelen pona in Unicode

At this moment, toki pona has not been recognized by Unicode officially. Most 
fonts designed for sitelen pona use ligatures in order to convert Latin-based 
toki pona text into sitelen pona. However, the toki pona community submitted a 
proposal to encode sitelen pona to the
[Under-ConScript Unicode Registry](https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/), an 
unofficial project to coordinate using parts of the Private Use Areas to writing 
systems for constructed languages. Said proposal has been 
[accepted](https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/charts/sitelen.html), and, as a 
result, many newer toki pona fonts now try to use the same range of characters.

![chart of sitelen pona's UCSUR points](/sitelen_ucsur.gif)

> **Description of sitelen pona in USCUR**
> 
> If you want to find the codepoint (character number) for a character, take 
> the large number on the left, the small number on the top and add the two. For 
> example, the character "lawa" has the number F1924. The number on the side is 
> F1920 and the number on the top is 4. These are base-sixteen numbers. "10" 
> doesn't mean ten, it means sixteen.

### sitelen emoji / sitelen pilin

A system called "sitelen emoji" (or "sitelen pilin") adapts sitelen pona by
using an emoji character for each of the possible sitelen pona characters. This
makes it possible to use in most web browsers and messenger apps.

* [Official page](https://sites.google.com/view/sitelenemoji)

* [Description of the system, as well as a Windows emoji character chart and
example text](https://omniglot.com/conscripts/sitelenemoji.htm)

---

[Page about other alternative writing systems](x2.html)

[Top page](index.html)