Combined glyphs

Examples of combined glyphs in pu: pilin*ikepilin*ike pilin ike (scalar), telo*letetelo*lete telo lete (scalar), kala^lilikala^lili kala lili (stacked), toki*ponatoki*pona toki pona (scalar)

In sitelen pona, the glyph of a head word may be combined with the glyph of one modifier. These are called combined glyphs in lipu pu. They are also referred to as compound glyphs.

There are 2 main ways to combine glyphs:

• Stacked: The modifier glyph goes above the head glyph. kala lili becomes kala^lilikala^lili.
• Scaled: The modifier glyph goes inside of the head glyph. kala lili becomes kala*lilikala*lili. To allow for scalar combination, the head glyph generally must contain a single, sufficiently large, main negative space.

Grammatical restrictions

Many speakers limit combined glyphs to a head and the first modifier, as described in pu. This has been used for disambiguation, such as the sentence mi pana e tomo tawa sina: mi pana etomo-tawasinami pana etomo-tawasina clarifies that tomo tawa sina is a noun phrase where tawa is a modifier ("I give your moving room"), instead of tawa sina being a prepositional phrase ("I give a room to you").

Some speakers have experimented with extending combined glyphs to other situations, such as preverbs and their main verbs, or prepositions followed by one-word phrases. In the latter case, tomo tawa+sinatomo tawa+sina is even more distinct from tomo-tawa sinatomo-tawa sina. However, prepositions are increasingly clarified with extended glyphs instead (tomo tawa(sina)tomo tawa(sina)), or adjusting the preposition glyph to imply that it would connect to an extension line (tomo tawa() sinatomo tawa() sina).

Nonstandard combinations

The subject of this section is nonstandard and will not be understood by most speakers.

If you are a learner, this information will not help you speak the language. It is recommended to familiarize yourself with the standard style, and to be informed and selective about which nonstandard styles you adopt.

Merging

There is an occasional variant of scalar combination that merges the boundary of the modifier glyph into the head glyph. This is only legible with certain combinations of glyphs, and is largely used in logos or to distinguish non-proper names.

• 

  The logo of lipu tenpo is a stylized combined glyph (lipu*tenpolipu*tenpo) that merges the outer circle of tenpotenpo tenpo into the rectangular shape of lipulipu lipu.

kulupu

The glyph for kulupu (kulupukulupu) allows for a special combination, in which the modifier glyph replaces each of the 3 circle radicals. This plays on the fact that kulupu alone is interchangeable with the nonspecific phrase kulupu ijo, and the glyph for ijo is a single circle (ijoijo).

Recursion

Some people experiment with combining more than 2 glyphs at once, even using specific nesting rules to imply a group of modifiers as a pi phrase. Like merged scalar combinations, this may be more widely accepted in logotype design than standard writing.

Diacritics

Another experimental feature is treating the letterlike part of a (aa), kin (kinkin), and o (oo) as a diacritic. When placed below another glyph, that glyph replaces the vertical stroke. This feature was available in linja sike but has been deprecated.

UCSUR

In the UCSUR, the following codepoints are assigned to combined glyph control characters:

• 󱦕 U+F1995 SITELEN PONA STACKING JOINER
• 󱦖 U+F1996 SITELEN PONA SCALING JOINER