Cartouche
A cartouche is a type of punctuation mark that surrounds a proper name. Cartouches exist in sitelen sitelen and sitelen pona, in the absence of letter case (which is used to mark names in the Latin script). However, they have slightly differing shapes and uses between writing systems.
sitelen pona[edit | edit source]
In sitelen pona, the cartouche is a rounded rectangle ([ ]) that surrounds a series of word glyphs. It usually indicates to read the glyphs as an acrostic: the first phoneme of each glyph spells out the name. This fully acrostic system is described in Toki Pona: The Language of Good, and is thus the most common, and probably oldest, method of writing names in sitelen pona.
The cartouche and the glyph for the word nimi (nimi) have the same shape, but different sizes; the cartouche is usually drawn beyond the top and baseline, while the glyph for nimi fits within a character space.
Proper names consisting of multiple consecutive words can be written with a separate cartouche around each word.
Alterations and alternative readings[edit | edit source]
In situations (such as small pixel fonts) where space is limited, the horizontal lines of the cartouche are sometimes omitted, leaving only the bracket-like endcaps.
In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Toki Pona edition) and some earlier works,[1] a cartouche containing a single glyph may be an initial, standing in for an earlier cartouche with the same first glyph. Oz periodically resets these abbreviations, writing out the full name the first time it is used in each chapter.
Multiple adjacent cartouches (for consecutive proper words) are sometimes written without a gap. Rarely, they are intentionally merged into a single cartouche with a separator line at the word boundary.
Some speakers have used cartouches with combined glyphs, cartouches with phonotactically invalid sequence of glyphs, or alternative cartouche shapes, to indicate a name written as syllables or morae. These methods are unstandardized and prone to confusion and misinterpretation. The nasin sitelen kalama system attempts to formalize them, using middle dots and colons within cartouches (which usually mark sentence boundaries otherwise) to indicate how many morae to pronounce.
As its name suggests, the less-used nasin sitelen kalama pi linja lili uses tally marks across the cartouche line below each glyph, to indicate how many phonemes to pronounce.
Text encoding[edit | edit source]
In fonts that support ASCII transcription, as well as the Ajemi input method, the ends of a cartouche are inserted with square brackets ([ ⋯ ]).
This feature was introduced in linja pona. It and some other fonts require an underscore before each word glyph, which manually adds a combining cartouche extension consisting of character-width top and bottom lines. (For example, ma [_kasi_alasa_nasin_awen_telo_a] would display as one spelling of ma Kanata, with each underscore manually extending the cartouche across the following glyph.)
Some later fonts include a preferable method, an OpenType feature that automatically extends the cartouche across all glyphs between the start and end. For such fonts that also have ASCII transcription, word glyphs can simply be separated with spaces, whether they are within or outside a cartouche. (That is, the previous transcription simply becomes ma [kasi alasa nasin awen telo a].)
The UCSUR includes control characters equivalent to the opening and closing brackets. It also includes a codepoint for the combining cartouche extension, for compatibility with fonts and environments without OpenType support, but its use is now discouraged.[2]
- U+F1990 SITELEN PONA START OF CARTOUCHE
- U+F1991 SITELEN PONA END OF CARTOUCHE
- U+F1992 SITELEN PONA COMBINING CARTOUCHE EXTENSION
The availability of alternative cartouches is rare and specific to certain fonts.[which?]
sitelen sitelen[edit | edit source]
In sitelen sitelen, the cartouche's shape is a bubblified outline of the symbol in Egyptian hieroglyphs. It is the union of an oval or rounded rectangle, and a very short rounded rectangle along its bottom border, protruding at the sides. It surrounds a series of syllable glyphs representing the name.
There is another similar punctuation glyph called the capsule, which instead marks the enclosed syllable glyphs as a common (non-proper) word.
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ jan Tepu. (10 February 2022). "sona nasa pi (jan [a ni sona a ni])" [Einstein's strange theory] (in Toki Pona). Readings in Toki Pona. Retrieved 15 March 2024.
- ↑ "Sitelen Pona: U+F1900 - U+F19FF". Kreative Korp. Retrieved 8 November 2023.