Unicode

The subject of this article is undergoing change. Specific and technical details here might not be up-to-date. This article will need to be updated once the subject is no longer in flux.

Logo of the Unicode Consortium

Unicode (often tokiponized as nasin Juniko) is a text encoding standard designed to support every major writing system, avoiding the incompatibilities of character sets. Each character in Unicode is assigned a codepoint, which is often written as "U+" followed by its index in hexadecimal. Most text on the Internet is encoded in Unicode.

Toki Pona

Main article: UCSUR

As of January 2024, Unicode does not include any Toki Pona writing systems. Many tokiponists hope for sitelen pona and sitelen sitelen to eventually receive Unicode support. In the meantime, sitelen pona has been specified for the UCSUR, adding unofficial support within a Private Use Area of Unicode.

Tokiponists have also created several original scripts written using preexisting, unrelated Unicode characters. These writing systems are referred to as sitelen Juniko.

Proposals

There are have been a few past proposals for a sitelen pona Unicode block. In 2021, shortly after the publication of Toki Pona Dictionary, Gabriel Tellez submitted a proposal consisting only of the glyph chart for linja pona. It was rejected by the Script Ad Hoc Group in its recommendation. As of January 2024, there is undergoing work for a proposal for sitelen pona, cowritten by Under-ConScript Unicode Registry maintainer Rebecca Bettencourt and many important figures in the Toki Pona community. A preliminary proposal was submitted on 16 April 2024.

sitelen sitelen does not seem to be under consideration, as it has far fewer users and lacks font implementation of its nonlinear writing direction. Additionally, there is currently little existing architecture for scripts similar to sitelen sitelen, such as Mayan hieroglyphs.

Concerns

Several issues may have to be resolved before Toki Pona is proposed for Unicode. For sitelen pona, the size of the community and public interchange might not be concerns. Potential issues for the sitelen pona proposal include:

• Recency. While the ISO 639-3 code ought to relieve concerns that Toki Pona itself is transient, the words and features used to write it have been in flux. However, the UCSUR and the font sitelen seli kiwen (both also by jan Lepeka) may provide a working standard.
• Font standardization. Many fonts support different features and sets of characters, and implement them in different ways. While the UCSUR has largely resolved this to an extent, some common features remain unstandardized, such as directional nini, te tote to, and whether to use the halfwidth or ideographic space. Also, there may be established UCSUR codepoints for features that should be handled in OpenType instead of Unicode, chiefly cartouche extension.
• nimi sin. Which words ought to be encoded beyond those in the UCSUR is a point ripe for debate. A word's usage may not be proportional to usage of corresponding glyphs—as less used words have less recognized glyphs, and nimi sin usage may differ between sitelen pona and Toki Pona in general—so Linku usage data may not be sufficient. The proposal team is planning to conduct research throughout 2024 to obtain better data for which words to encode.
  • The prospect of adding nimi sin over time, as they meet some criteria for inclusion, is evocative of new emoji being added to account for the limitations of the original set. The Unicode Consortium may be motivated to avoid a similar situation by avoiding or postponing support for Toki Pona. If not, there could be a system outside of Unicode for encoding nimi sin, possibly using a new UCSUR block. This would come at the expense of complicating the encoding situation rather than submitting one proposal and being done with it.
• Commerciality. While the Toki Pona "logo" toki-ponatoki-pona would not receive its own codepoint, it occurs as part of sitelen pona pupu. Moreover, pupu and kuku refer to and graphically represent commercial products that are not fully in the public domain. If this is an issue, an idea is to reserve the codepoints for these glyphs, not officially defining them, but allowing de facto use. Otherwise, fonts would have to create workarounds to encode them, which may create another standardization problem.

References

English Wikipedia has an article on
Unicode.