A range of possibilities

[janKipo]

I don't see Hangul offering many advantages over kana, except compression (which is not always an advantage). The marks to mark various things that tp in Latin does with punctuation and capitals would work, but why not just use punctuation (as modern Japanese and Korean do -- more or less consistently, depending).

[mije Wi]

1) tp doesn't use punctuation to give any taste to the expressions.
2) no punctuation / no spaces gives an ancient flavour.

These are nopt very good reasons I know...

[janKipo]

tp uses punctuation for 1) ends of sentences (.?) 2) indicating that what follows is referent of an earlier 'ni' (:) and it has been suggested that commas be used a) to set off 'la' phrases and b) to set off prep phrases. None of these are very tasty but most of them are handy for understanding what is going on.

The taste for old is a matter of taste, and, to satisfy that, you can do what you will. But the effect of your writing is loike then to be more aesthetic than informative.

(Sorry, my kana is too rudimentary and too far in my past to follow the subscription)

[mije Wi]

A fact on my side is that punctuation gives no flavour. If you choose to use it, it's automatic.

jan li jo e jan sewi la jan li wile e ala.

[janKipo]

I'm not sure it is automatic (though it may be in these tp cases), since I have to fight (in English) daily with the questions of what opunctuation to use and what my choices mean. I asm not sure what counts for flavor (see the implications of punctuation coices in English).

Very optimistic believer line, open at one level to empirical disconfirmation everywhere. But on another level, of course, profoundly true.

[janJan]

A system which has kanji, hirigana and katakana is much more complex ("ike mute mute") than a system with only one set of kana.

I like this system:
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y292/m ... kipona.gif
because it actually uses FEWER symbols than the latin-based Toki Pona alphabet.

I discovered this system thanks to your link, and I like it too ; it's a bit like Hangul which I also like for TP, with an added smoothness and reduction in the number of symbols as you rightly emphasize. However, I can't find any more information about it : no mention of it apart from yours. Do you know who proposed it ?

I wanted to check the way to write some words, and was wondering if there were placeholders, or if some extra rule intervened in words like "anpa", because then a vowel comes first, so I guess a vowel can be on the top line if under it we find a letter that doesn't have different vertical positional values like "n" :
?
(just ignore the fraction line, I couldn't find a better way to show it here)

[janKipo]

The mark under the a should probably be the "final n" marker rather than the "initial n."
I see that this system achieves its reduced symbol load by making some symbols ambiguous, which may in fact work here, but is generally a bad move (and makes dictionaries a bitch).

[janJan]

The mark under the a should probably be the "final n" marker rather than the "initial n."
I see that this system achieves its reduced symbol load by making some symbols ambiguous, which may in fact work here, but is generally a bad move (and makes dictionaries a bitch).

Are you then suggesting solutions i. or ii. below :

i.

ii.

I guess that for the dictionary you'd have to look up the romanized version ; can't there be a positional dictionary ?

[janKipo]

Well, i looks better but ii is more consistent with the scheme, as far as I understand it.
Position alone won't help here, since both p and a (in this case) occur in the first (upper) position. One possibility would be to allow a null upper position for vowel-initial words, giving a form iii with nothing on top and the an below (to make sure, you might use a 0 marker -- a slash, say, or an x -- in the upper space, as many systems of this sort do).

[sano]

Given that there are currently 118 lexical entries, why not simply use CJK radicals, or some variation thereof. There is no need to have any sort of alphabetical system when the words do not inflect, decline, or any sort of function that would require a fluid writing system.

I'll attempt to put together a proposal and see how you all feel about it.