| Sitelen Pona | |
| Also Known As: | sitelen pona |
| Type: | Logographic |
| Qid: | Q58372003 |
| Creator: | Sonja Lang |
| Published: | 2014 |
| Languages: | Toki Pona |
| Sample: | Sitelen Pona.svg |
| Caption: | "sitelen pona" in Sitelen Pona |
| Ipa-Note: | [ˈsitelen ˈpona] |
Sitelen Pona is a constructed logography used for Toki Pona.[1] It was originally designed circa 2013 and published in 2014 by Canadian linguist Sonja Lang, the language's creator. Most later characters and features were proposed and adopted by the speaking community. Sitelen Pona is the second-most used writing system for Toki Pona after the Latin script.[2]
Sitelen Pona was designed by Lang in preparation for her upcoming Toki Pona textbook release. In 2013, she published a page listing 20 characters as a sample of the book's contents.[3] The book, Toki Pona: The Language of Good, was published in 2014, and it included the first full description of Sitelen Pona in a dedicated section.
In 2024, Lang published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Toki Pona edition), the first in the su series of illustrated storybooks aimed at beginners, in which all Toki Pona text is written in Sitelen Pona. This was the first published book that used Sitelen Pona as a primary script.
Sitelen Pona is typically written left-to-right, top-to-bottom. As a logography, each word is written with a single grapheme. Many of the characters are derived from translingual and universal symbols such as pictograms, road signs, mathematical symbols, and emoticons.[4] They have been described as "mostly easy to recognize, quick to remember and simple enough that even a child could draw them."
A head followed by a single modifier (e.g. a noun followed by an adjective) may be combined into one character by stacking the modifier grapheme above the head grapheme, or by nesting the modifier grapheme inside the head grapheme if there is space. The symbol of the language [5] is written this way, with the grapheme nested inside the grapheme .
Names (grammatically proper adjectives) are written by enclosing multiple characters in a cartouche shaped like a rounded rectangle. Each character inside represents the first phoneme (or, equivalently, letter) of its word. The specific characters used in a name may be chosen creatively to convey meaning about its subject.
In an alternative system called nasin sitelen kalama, characters inside a cartouche can be followed by interpuncts or dots, where each interpunct represents the next mora of the word, and a colon represents all morae of the word.[6]
Sitelen Pona punctuation is unstandardized and thus highly variable, as The Language of Good features only the cartouche. As a result, some texts use no punctuation at all, instead relying on formatting and context.
Sentence boundaries are typically marked with an interpunct, period, line break, or a wide space. Question marks and exclamation marks are often proscribed due to their similarity to the characters for the words seme and o respectively.
Where quotation marks are used, CJK-style corner brackets (「...」) and double high quotation marks (“...” or "...") are most common.
Some speakers use lexicalised markers for quotations, although the usage of such is non-standard. te and to are the opening and closing markers respectively. Their graphemes in sitelen pona are very similar to the CJK-style brackets.[7]
The original English edition of Lang's book Toki Pona: The Language of Good introduces 120 hieroglyphic characters, one for each of the core words taught in the book.
The 2022 Esperanto edition of the same book (Esperanto: Tokipono: La lingvo de bono) includes alternative ways to write three words.[8]
The same edition presents characters for the 17 additional words spotlighted as "essential" in Toki Pona Dictionary (nimi ku suli).[9] According to the accompanying text, these were the most commonly used characters for those words as of 2022, but there were still disagreements in the speaking community, and the following characters might be subject to change based on future community consensus.[10]
Notes:
| Blockname: | Sitelen Pona |
| Rangestart: | F1900 |
| Rangeend: | F19FF |
| Assigned: | 155 |
| Script1: | Sitelen Pona |
| Sources: | UCSUR |
| Codechart: | omit |
| Note: | Part of the Private Use Area, font conflicts possible[11] [12] |
, Sitelen Pona has not been encoded into Unicode. Unofficially, it is included in the Under-ConScript Unicode Registry since 2022, at the Private Use Area codepoints range U+F1900–U+F1AFF.