Toki Pona miscellanea
musi a!
This is where I collect stuff I've done with the conlang Toki Pona. I love how it manages to whittle down everyday vocabulary to a bare minimum of 118 words without becoming trite and boring. It also has the most kickass theme song ever.
If you want to generate a name in Toki Pona, I have a little script for you.
Something a lot of Toki Pona users like to occupy their time with is experimenting with different writing systems. A bunch of them seem to be very knowledgable in this area, as a matter of fact. I can understand why - delving into the history of human writing is fun! I aim for breadth more than depth though. My amateurish, muchly Wikipedia guided attempts at adapting various letters and syllables to Toki Pona can be seen in the submenu to the right. (I do know when to back down, this whole thing started out with Chinese characters - I spent a lot of time picking them out - and now they're firmly stashed away, partly because of Hanzi Smatter.)
I sure can tell you about what not to use. I fiddled with Thai script for a couple of days before I gave up. A rundown of the reasons why you shouldn't attempt to turn Toki Pona into butchered Thai are:
- Thai uses up to five tones to distinguish words from one another, which (among other things) is determined by the first consonant of the syllable. Many of the consonants therefor are represented by several letters. That's what happens when alphabets evolve.
- Some of the consonant letters spell different sounds at the beginning of a syllable than at the end. This wouldn't matter quite so much if Thai didn't consider spaces between words to be wasteful.
Now, if that doesn't stop you from wanting to learn Thai, then Learning Thai is a great place to go to.
Luckily, there are writing systems that adapt much more easily. Two of the more interesting ones are Hangul (Korean script) and Tengwar (Elvish script), both of which have already been sorted out for Toki Pona use by enthusiasts:
jan Pije's page on Tengwar for Toki Pona - a very beautiful abjad, that you must admit!
jan Kowi's page on Asian scripts for Toki Pona - so far it only features the Korean alphabet, but he plans on including guides to Chinese and Japanese writing as well. This may take a while because they don't adapt quite as well. Hangul, on the other hand, is extremely neat, straightforward and efficient.
For these purposes, I find the Unicode font Code2000 and its siblings completely indispensible. It even includes Tengwar in its entirety. It's shareware, but not crippled at all and much cheaper than what it could get away with.
By Eris, I love Mac OS X. I have the whole world at my fingertips. It's a breeze to install (or uninstall, for that matter) and use dozens of writing systems, including digitally tricky ones like Japanese and Korean, and those I haven't activated lie waiting for my perusal a mere two clicks away.