Writing Toki Pona in the Hebrew alphabet

[janPeka]

The Hebrew alphabet, which is not just used to write Hebrew but also Yiddish, Ladino and a number of other Jewish languages, is aesthetically one of my favorite scripts. So here is a way I propose of writing Toki Pona using it:

A אַ
E ֵאֶ
I יִ
J י
K ק
L ל
M מ
N נ
P פ
S ס
T ט
O וֹ
U וּ
W ו

The goal here was to use a minimal number of letters and take advantage of diacritics wherever possible, while still making it almost immediately readable to anyone familiar with the Hebrew alphabet. The result is (kind of) a 10-letter alphabet for Toki Pona.

?נאַסיִן ניִ ליִ פוֹנאַ אַלאַ פוֹנאַ טאַואַ סיִנאַ

[janKipo]

As a practical matter, I don't like writing in strange systems. But for the aesthetics of it, Hebrew is a reasonable addition, if we don't have it already. The choice to use diacritics rather than more letters, while probably forced by the vowel phobia of classical Hebrew, is an unfortunate choice for us presbyoptic readers.

[jan Seloki]

only 2 questions: (yes I know this is an old post)
would vowels (niqqud) always be used? They are more time consuming to type & of course Hebrew rarely uses them anyway.
would א or ה be used to ending words with a final vowel? ה is used in Hebrew in place of a final vowel that is not indicated as in קָנְתָה‎ (kan'tá) ( this is only for a or e because i o u are already indicated by consonants/semi-vowels). א is simply a placeholder so it would be fine since toki pona doesn't have an 'h'. sina could be either סינה or סינא.

[janDdsk]

Diacritcs are ugly little buggers, and not like there aren't enough free letters to use guys.
Here's a version liberally inspired by yiddish. I'm merging o and u because, as I recall, that won't cause any ambiguity anyway.

a א
i י
e ע
o/u ו

p פ, or just כ for simplicity.
t ת
k ק
m מ
n נ
-n ן
l ר
s ס
w ב
j צ

All in keeping with Hebrew? No. So what, not as if Hebrew orthography was all in keeping with Aramaic.. Which was not all in keeping with phonecian, ad infinitum.

[janKipo]

Since this is all just a code for tp, it doesn’t matter how well it correspond to the original (whatever that may be in this case) so long as it works for tp. You can even write it left to right or throw it Arabic or Japanese. Knock your lights out!

[jan Seloki]

Diacritcs are ugly little buggers, and not like there aren't enough free letters to use guys.
Here's a version liberally inspired by yiddish. I'm merging o and u because, as I recall, that won't cause any ambiguity anyway.

a א
i י
e ע
o/u ו

p פ, or just כ for simplicity.
t ת
k ק
m מ
n נ
-n ן
l ר
s ס
w ב
j צ

All in keeping with Hebrew? No. So what, not as if Hebrew orthography was all in keeping with Aramaic.. Which was not all in keeping with phonecian, ad infinitum.

I could see using ע instead of א for 'e' so you could easily distinguish between 'a' & 'e' like pona a - פונא א vs pona e - פונא ע, but should it be used everywhere in place of e or only at the end of a word? For example sama could be סמא, would seme be סמע or סעמע? The full version with vowel marks would be either ֱסֱמע or ֱסעֱמע
Just out of curiousity, why use כ (c)?
צ is a ts sound.
כ is a c/k sound.
ר is an 'r' sound, but there already is an 'L' sound: ל.
ב (v/w) is fine for 'w'. ו has been used as a 'w' sound, along with o/u, but in modern Hebrew it's often pronounced as a 'v' anyway. you could use טווא to specify ו is a consonant (if you want to keep with Hebrew rules) for tawa but טבא isn't a bad idea. Cyrillic does the same thing - тава would be tawa in Russian pronounciation but В is used as a w for toki pona.
I would propose using י for j since it is a 'y' sound anyway, instead of צ (ts) otherwise צן would be tsan.
I probably won't use א/ע in the middle of a word & only write them at the end for words ending in a vowel to distinguish between similar words. סמא/סמע for seme/sama, using א for e, & ע for a.

[janDdsk]

Yes.... I DID say it was not in keeping with standard Hebrew.

'ayin for e because that's what Yiddish did.

Just out of curiousity, why use כ (c)?
- Just because it's one stroke rather than two.

צ is a ts sound.
- Yes, so what? I used yud for a vowel already, and I like how ts looks.

כ is a c/k sound.
- Yes, we covered that already.

ר is an 'r' sound, but there already is an 'L' sound: ל.
- Yes, but resh is simpler to write and doesn't stick up.

I would propose using י for j since it is a 'y' sound anyway, instead of צ (ts) otherwise צן would be tsan.
- Go ahead, I wanted yud for the i because it's a lot more common than j. And jan would be צאן in my scheme.

As for the rest.. Yes. As mentioned I don't care how Hebrew does it. I wanted to avoid diacritics, vowel ambiguity and overly similar letters.

[jan Seloki]

I know some don't like diacritics, but I prefer to actually attempt to transliterate toki pona's sounds to another script, when writing tp in another alphabet. with toki pona it makes perfect sense to me to write it in Semitic scripts since they leave a little ambiguity themselves because of omitting vowels/writing them as diacritics.

Using hebrew's sounds the vowels would be
ֹאַ אֵ אִי ו
o i e a
for u you could use:
אֻ is a short u
&
וּ is a long u
but both are the 'u' in tube.

kulupu could be either קלף or קולופו
with diacritics ֻקוּלוּפּוּ קֻלֻףּ
waso ijo selo suli seli pini pana pona
פונה פנה פיני סלי סולי סלו ייו ווסו
ֹפוֹנהַ פַנהַ פִינִי סֶלִי סוּלִי סֶלוֹ ייוֹ ווַסו
suli could also be סֻלִי