Toki Pona Forums

I've searched all around these forums looking at many, many different styles of pictoglyphs, heiroglyphs, calligraphies, and alphabets with no sense of what is being used as the standard writings of tp. Is there one written by Sonja? Has a standard been set? If not, then the community should make it official.

The official writing system for tp is and always has been the Latin alphabet (or, rather, the needed 14 letters) plus period, question mark, exclamation mark, comma, colon, and single and double quotes. I think that is all. All the rest are artistic riffs, some even beautiful on their own and used for various ornamental or monumental purposes (I can imagine a stele in Yucatan carved in sitelen sitelen). They have no standing and are often very annoying. I suppose the tp hand signs are also official, though no one uses them, so far as I can find (there is a YouTube dictionary of them.) Even the usual numerals aren't official, since we don't have enough numbers to make it worth dealing with.
Sonja has a set of hieroglyphs or runes or whatever in pu. They are no more official than any of the others -- and harder to write than some.

I think a standard should be set. Since it's such a small language, we could just use a heiroglyphic language, as well as an alphabet for informal nouns.

As noted, the standard is set: the Latin alphabet. If you want a "standard" fanciness, Sonja logoglyphs probably get a nod. They have an alphabetic application for unofficial words.
There are no informal nouns in tp. All unoffical words -- which do, admittedly correspond to English proper nouns -- are adjectives and need always to be modifying a noun in tp.

Hello, lovely tokipona community!

I recently got an official tokipona book (the one is now available at Amazon). One of the book's appendixes presents a writing system consisting of simple ideograms, which (I thought) was a kind of official.

I like it because all symbols are easy to remember and write (in contrast of the "sitelen" system, which looks attractive and mysterious, like Maya signs, but is not quite suitable for hand writing because of complexity).

But surprisingly I can not find any reference to this writing system in the net, including the http://tokipona.net/ website. What happened to it? Is it no more supported? What is a modern alternative?

As noted, the official tp writing system is the (reduced) Latin alphabet. Sonja's hieroglyphics are a code that has a certain cache' (it's by Sonja), but it is officially no more favored than any of the dozens of other writing systems (codes) out there. It is supported by being in pu and by a fairly enthusiastic community of Facebook and YouTube, but not -- except incidentally -- on the Forums or in the corpus.
As a courtesy, please accompany any message in any code with its clear text, as some people have enough trouble learning tp without adding another whole pile of symbols. (I should note that the concept of "official" doesn't fit tp well, since it has no offices, governing bodies, etc. but consensus does seem to exist on many things.)

C-F wrote:Hello, lovely tokipona community!

I recently got an official tokipona book (the one is now available at Amazon). One of the book's appendixes presents a writing system consisting of simple ideograms, which (I thought) was a kind of official.

I like it because all symbols are easy to remember and write (in contrast of the "sitelen" system, which looks attractive and mysterious, like Maya signs, but is not quite suitable for hand writing because of complexity).

But surprisingly I can not find any reference to this writing system in the net, including the http://tokipona.net/ website. What happened to it? Is it no more supported? What is a modern alternative?

jan "C-F" o, toki!

there is no "official" ideogram system in Toki Pona. You are right the ideogram system in pu is easy to learn. But only a few people use it.

You can learn it here:
http://www.memrise.com/course/702934/to ... elen-pona/

The text examples of pu in this ideogram system are here:
http://www.tomo-lipu.net/

pona!

Hiya! If you go to tomo-lipu.net you can find the translation exercises in pu written in sitelen pona. Keep in mind that tokipona.net is a little old, I think it's still pre-pu. There's a font that I have but forgot where to find it (though I did put a link up somewhere myself too, I think). I love sitelen pona, and it does have some support in the facebook group (and recently in toki pona taso) with some posts using it or focusing on it, and someone has translated part of a comic into it semi-recently, though for general chat the Latin alphabet is usually used. I agree that it's really easy to learn, and it looks like a fair few people in the community are familiar with using it, but it's not necessarily universal (as in, it's basically treated as the "official alternative" alongside sitelen sitelen which is older, but no-one's obliged to learn it). I hope that answers some of your questions.

If you want to type in linja pona, the name for the "official" writing system mentioned here there is a tool at https://symbol-boards.glitch.me/. I personally use kanji. There is a converter here: http://tokipona.net/tp/Compress.aspx
sina wile sitelen e toki kepeken linja pona la ilo li lon ni: https://symbol-boards.glitch.me/. mi la mi kepeken sitelen kansi. ilo lon ni: http://tokipona.net/tp/Compress.aspx
君要画え言使糸良ら具在此：https://symbol-boards.glitch.me/。私ら私使画かんし。具在此：http://tokipona.net/tp/Compress.aspx

You could even write it using Hebrew
:סינא בילע סיטלן ע טוקי קפקן ליניא פונא לא ילו לי לון ני
https://symbol-boards.glitch.me/
:מי לא מי קפקן סיטלן קנסי. ילו לי לון ני
http://tokipona.net/tp/compress.aspx