Toki Pona Forums

About your footpiece, probably 'sina toki kepeken toki Epanja' "You speak Spanish", not "You are the Spanish language" as you wrote.

x is a velar fricative,which offers the choice of a velar sound, k, or a frictive s. Sonja chose s, possibly influenced by the fact that it was until recently pronounced sh and still is in parts of Mexico. The argument for k is a good one but lacks side argumentsother than English usage, which struggle to avoid.

No, we try to avoid English input and arguments that veer close to English are automatically suspect. So the case for/s/ is that it is a fricative, like /x/, is a sibilant like /x/used to be and still is in parts of Mexico (admittedly not parts where Spanish is dominant, but the "Mexico" is not basically a Spanish word), while /k/ is properly velar but plays to an Anglo preference. ("Texas" fares worse, with many folks preferring 'Tejas', which has only spelling, but not either Anglo spelling nor pronunciation.

But in the old Spanish, they were pronounced Shavier, Meshiko, and Teshas. So, back to Sonja’s side again. To the practical point, modern Spanish /x/ offers a choice for toki pona, /k/ for its velarity or /s/ for its fricativity. There is, at that point, no decisive reason for one rather than the other, so you use subjective factors. I don’t know Sonja’s subjective source here; maybe it’s just that ‘Mesiko’ “sounds better” than ‘Mekiko’ (it does to me). In any case, we are, as you note, stuck with it.