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% sitelen pona description and examples % /dev/urandom % june 2020
sitelen pona
%info% The part of the book describing sitelen pona was published with a non-commercial CC-BY-NC 4.0 license. Hence, it's easily available online in other courses, such as "o kama sona e toki pona!"'s page on the system, which describes it almost exactly the same as the official book.
Much like the Latin alphabet, it is written left-to-right and top-to-bottom. Each character represents one word (or sometimes even a phrase), or one letter in a proper name.
Since toki pona's basic dictionary only uses 120 words, there are only 120 characters one needs to learn. And most of these characters are, in one way or another, direct representations of 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, etc.
An adjective character can be put inside or over/under a noun character to represent a noun phrase.
%info% You might notice that toki pona's "logo", used on the cover of the official book and on most websites to represent it, 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" symbol (a rounded shape that surrounds all the characters), with characters for words that start with their first letters. For the example linked above (and used in the official book), "ma Kanata" is written as "ma [kasi alasa nasin awen telo a]".
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, depending on the text.
Examples
Here's some basic text written in sitelen pona.
%warning% (If your browser is unable to load the "linja pimeja" font, the text below would just show up in large Latin characters.
%sp% wan ni pi lipu ni li sitelen kepeken sitelen pona. sina ken ala ken sona e ni.
%spoiler% This part of this document is written using sitelen pona. Can you understand it?
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" 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.
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A font called "linja pona" is characteristic for its basic design and support for tons and tons of different composite characters. It is the most popular option.
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"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.
- I have also designed a font for sitelen pona, called "insa pi supa lape. 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.
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 it in most web browsers and messenger apps.