Extended glyphs

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• Origin of long pi?
• Image of nested pi

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In sitelen pona, extended glyphs have a low horizontal line that extends under adjacent words.

Long pi

While not universal, an extended form of the word pi (pipi) is very common. The low line continues under all glyphs in the pi phrase: pi(ijo ijo)pi(ijo ijo)

ma-pona pi(toki-pona)

ma pona pi toki pona

Nested pi

This subject is nonstandard and may not be understood by most speakers.

Long pi makes it possible to visually represent nested pi phrases, a contentious grammatical structure that is ambiguous in the Latin script and in other modalities.

The extension of the outer pi would be wrapped under that of the inner pi. Because current sitelen pona fonts do not support nested extensions, here is an approximation with the inner pi unextended:

pi(ijo ijo pi ijo ijo)pi(ijo ijo pi ijo ijo)

This is not commonly used. Proficient speakers generally avoiding phrasings that use multiple pi and if they do use it, they don't necessarily make a distinction between nested and unnested versions of extended pipi.

Other extended glyphs

More recently, some speakers extend other characters:

• a - typically without putting other characters on the extension line: a󱦗　󱦘a󱦗　󱦘 This is meant to distinguish stretched a (aaaaa) from repeated a (a a a), although other solutions have been proposed.
• ala (alaala) across the question-marking pattern X ala X: {ijo}ala(ijo){ijo}ala(ijo)
• anu (anuanu)
• Most prepositions across their phrases, by analogy with pi phrases
  • kepeken (kepekenkepeken): kepeken(ijo)kepeken(ijo)
  • lon (lonlon): lon(ijo)lon(ijo)
  • tawa (tawatawa): tawa(ijo)tawa(ijo)
• awen (awenawen) and kama (kamakama), by visual similarity to tawa: {ijo}awen(ijo){ijo}awen(ijo)　{ijo}kama{ijo}kama

Long lon

Some speakers also use an underline on its own to mark a prepositional phrase with lon. This can be analyzed as omitting the dot from its glyph (lonlon), or merging it with the glyph above.

For example, mi lon tomo sona, normally written mi lon tomo-sonami lon tomo-sona, would become mi (tomo-sona)mi (tomo-sona).

This style may stem from fonts that require pi to be manually extended under each character, making it easy to insert a low line not attached to any pi.

UCSUR

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

• 󱦓 U+F1993 SITELEN PONA START OF LONG PI
• 󱦔 U+F1994 SITELEN PONA COMBINING LONG PI EXTENSION
• 󱦗 U+F1997 SITELEN PONA START OF LONG GLYPH
• 󱦘 U+F1998 SITELEN PONA END OF LONG GLYPH
• 󱦙 U+F1999 SITELEN PONA COMBINING LONG GLYPH EXTENSION
• 󱦚 U+F199A SITELEN PONA START OF REVERSE LONG GLYPH
• 󱦛 U+F199B SITELEN PONA END OF REVERSE LONG GLYPH