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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 | a | e | i | j | k | l | m | n | o | p | s | t | u | w |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Greek | α | ε | ι | γ | κ | λ | μ | ν | ο | π | σ | τ | υ | β |
| Cyrillic | а | е | и | й | к | л | м | н | о | п | с | т | у | в |
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.
%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, 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.
Here's some basic text written in sitelen pona. (If your browser is unable to load the "linja pimeja" font, it should just show up in Latin alphabet instead.)
%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.
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.