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% toki pona extra page 2 - other writing systems % /dev/urandom % april 2020
While the most common writing system for toki pona by far is the Latin alphabet, there have been others adapted, or created specifically, for toki pona.
Adapted writing systems
With toki pona only using 5 vowel and 9 consonant sounds, converting another language's writing system to toki pona can become rather easy. For example, here's how they can be converted to Greek and Cyrillic:
| Latin | Greek | Cyrillic |
|---|---|---|
| a | α | а |
| e | ε | е |
| i | ι | и |
| j | γ | й |
| k | κ | к |
| l | λ | л |
| m | μ | м |
| n | ν | н |
| o | ο | о |
| p | π | п |
| s | σ | с |
| t | τ | т |
| u | υ | у |
| w | β | в |
The language also only has 92 possible syllables (47 if "-n" is treated as a separate syllable). This means it can also be adapted for many syllabic writing systems as well.
For example, here are some suggestions for a way to write toki pona using Hangul, the writing system of Korean. (While in features symbols representing individual sounds much like an alphabet, they're arranged in syllabic blocks.)
Or here is a page on converting toki pona to Devanagari:
With some relatively small changes in sounds, it can also be written with the Japanese Hiragana system, as proposed here:
sitelen pona
The most common writing system created for toki pona is the logographic sitelen pona ("simple writing"), created by Sonja Lang herself and published in the official book.
Much like the Latin alphabet, it's written left-to-right and top-to-bottom, but each character represents an entire word instead of just one sound (or even more if "composite characters" are used). Unofficial words are written inside cartouches (long shapes that surround a bunch of characters), with characters for each letter added inside.
sitelen sitelen
Jonathan Gabel's "sitelen sitelen" writing system was designed as a more aesthetically pleasant method to write texts in toki pona. It's a non-linear system visually inspired by the Mayan script.
Compared to writing toki pona in Latin alphabet or sitelen pona, sitelen sitelen is significantly more difficult to understand, and therefore is only used rarely by the community. However, the impressive visual style of texts written in it -- such as this contract or the toki pona proverbs -- many of which are also used in the official book -- cannot be denied.