sitelen Lasina

sitelen Lasina is a common tokiponized name for the Latin alphabet, particularly as used to write Toki Pona. According to the 2022 Toki Pona census, it is by far the most commonly used writing system for Toki Pona, preferred by about 3 times as many people as the bespoke sitelen pona.

Letters

Original text related to this article:

Toki Pona: The Language of Good § Letters and Sounds

A flat-design emoji-based version of the "AEI pi toki pona" alphabet chart, by Raxicorico

Toki Pona uses 14 letters. Consonants are pronounced as in the International Phonetic Alphabet. For more about pronunciation, see Phonology.

j	k	l	m	n	p	s	t	w
[j]	[k]	[l]	[m]	[n]	[p]	[s]	[t]	[w]

Vowels can also be pronounced as in the IPA, but according to pu are ideally more centered, with /a/ being centralized and /e o/ being lowered to mid.

a	e	i	o	u
[ä]	[e̞]	[i]	[o̞]	[u]

Alphabet

Original "AEI pi toki pona" alphabet chart by jan Nikita

sitelen Lasina has no official alphabetical order or letter names. In practice, the collation order of the ISO basic Latin alphabet (identical to that of the English alphabet) is often used to alphabetize lists in sitelen Lasina.

This may be influenced by the prevalence of "AEI pi toki pona" alphabet charts, which are common visual aids. The first alphabet chart for Toki Pona was created by jan Nikita (Nikita Ayzikovsky), possibly the third speaker of Toki Pona, in May 2002. This chart has become well recognized as it was included in the pronunciation lesson from the course by Bryant Knight (jan Pije), as well as other courses and on Wikipedia. It originally used the name Elena ("Greece") for the letter E, as there was not any content words starting with that letter until the word esun was created.

Capitalization

Capital letters are not used in any common words, including at the beginning of a sentence. Thus, most text is completely lowercase. Capitalization is only found in names, and as names are proper adjectives that conventionally follow a common headnoun, sentences always start with lowercase letters.

Suli sitelen ni li ike.

(Nonstandard capitalization)

suli sitelen ni li pona.

(Standard capitalization)

Autocorrect may add unwanted capitalization that is nonstandard in sitelen Lasina. See Autocorrect § Dealing with automatic capitalization.

Punctuation

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Punctuation in sitelen Lasina is not expressly defined in the Official Toki Pona books. The most common punctuation marks are the full stop (or period) and the colon as sentence separators, as well as the question mark, exclamation mark, and the comma, which are optional.

The question mark is generally limited to sentences that are grammatically marked as questions. The exclamation mark is more permissive. It is used for commands, exclamations, interjections, and generally in sentences with a and o, but sometimes to mark emphasis in sentences without a spoken a.

The comma is often used to disambiguate sentences by dividing them up, or to make long sentences easier to read. It may be placed before or after the particle la, or not at all; in the Toki Pona Dictionary, jan Sonja calls this a "stylistic choice".

Quotation marks are sometimes used to clarify quoted speech.

The hyphen is generally not used in sitelen Lasina, instead being used as a control character in ASCII transcription of sitelen pona, where it is not supposed to appear verbatim.

See also

• Writing systems
• sitelen pona
• sitelen sitelen