Written in 2024 by ilo Sanli. Idea by jan Wilelen. Suggestions incorporated from jan Awasa and jan Kiwin.
Nasin sin Lonuke is a set of reforms to Toki Pona to resolve existing ambiguities and add nested grammatical
structures without creating further ambiguities. It completely removes the need for e ni:
constructions
and makes Toki Pona more expressive and compact. It's named for one of its nimi sin, lonu
, which
encloses nested clauses, and a closing particle that pairs with it, ke
.
Nasin sin Lonuke is presented in this document "as it is built", with each section only incorporating reforms above it. This smoothly and easily introduces each new concept without being overwhelming or confusing.
To use nasin sin Lonuke, your existing nasin must do the following:
The nested pi
problem is trying to work out the meaning of A pi B C pi D E
. Does
pi D E
attach to A, or does it attach to B C? If you know your nimi sin, you know the words
te
and to
, which enclose quotes. The first change that nasin sin Lonuke makes is
introducing a new word, ke
, which is like to
, except it's used to close off
pi
phrases and more seen later. Here's how it resolves the ambiguity:
jan pi kulupu utala pi ma pona
is now unambiguously
jan (pi kulupu utala (pi ma pona))
, meaning a "a soldier of ma pona's army".jan pi kulupu utala ke pi ma pona
is now unambiguously
jan (pi kulupu utala ke) (pi ma pona)
, meaning "a soldier of a ma pona" (not necessarily in
ma pona's army, just some army).Additionally, omitting the second pi has an interesting effect. jan pi kulupu utala ke ma pona
would
mean (jan (pi kulupu utala ke) ma) pona
, meaning "a good soldier of a land".
Some speakers don't use to
when it's obvious that a quote is closed. Similarly,
ke
may be dropped when it's impossible that a pi
phrase is still going. This is most
common when it's followed by li
or e
, as these cannot nested into pi phrases.
With Toki Pona's ability to include multiple predicate phrases in a sentence, ki
without
ke
is very difficult to use in complex sentences and will result in miscommunication. For example, in
the sentence, jan ki moku e kili li pona li olin e mi
, where does the ki
clause end? It
obviously ends before li olin e mi
if it's a complete sentence as opposed to just a noun phrase,
but it is ambiguous whether li pona
is in the ki
clause or not.
ki
as it currently exists resolves this ambiguity in writing by extending part of the glyph (much like
pi
does too), but it is more pona to resolve it in speech too. Of course, ke
can
be used to close off a ki
clause, leaving listeners in no doubt as to the structure of sentences.
jan ki moku e kili li pona li olin e mi
is now an interjection without a
predicate. It needs a ke
somewhere, otherwise each subsequent li
keeps
attaching to the ki
clause.jan ki moku e kili ke li pona li olin e mi
now means "the person who eats fruit is good and
loves me", leaving li pona
and li olin e mi
clearly outside of the ki
clause.jan ki moku e kili li pona ke li olin e mi
now means "the person who eats fruit and who is
good loves me", putting li pona
inside the ki
clause.There are plenty of nested clauses where the head of the clause is the object of the nested sentence. The preferred
way to do this with ki
in nasin sin Lonuke is to use resumptive ona
.
kala ki mi moku e ona
simply means "the fish that I ate".The nimi sin lonu
introduces a way to embed full sentences into toki pona sentences. It means
"event of (sentence)" as a noun and is most useful for replacing standard Toki Pona's
e ni:
, tan ni:
, ni li ... :
family of constructions and avoiding the need for
a new sentence. For example, mi wile e ni: mi moku e kili pona
becomes
mi wile e lonu mi moku e kili pona
. As a predicate, lonu
means "is an event of
(sentence)". For example, tenpo ni li lonu mi moku e kili pona
means "now is an event of me
eating good fruit".
lonu sina pana e pan tawa mi ke li pini e lonu mi wile moku
means "You giving me bread stops
me wanting food".`Just like ki
and pi
, every nested sentence started with lonu
is closed with
a ke
. You might be wondering how these interact. If everything is closed with the same particle, how do
you know what's being closed by the ke
in a phrase like
lonu ona li jan pi kulupu utala ke
? The answer is that ke
only closes the
innermost construction that is still "open", so to speak. So in this case, that means that
ke
applies completely unambiguously to pi
. If this was the subject of your sentence,
you'd actually need a second ke
.
lonu ona li jan pi kulupu utala ke ke li pona
means "(the event of them being a soldier) is
good".lonu ona li jan pi kulupu utala ke li pona ke
means "the event of them being a soldier and
being good" and is an interjection because there's no main predicate. If this was the intended meaning,
the first ke
could be omitted too, as li
cannot be nested in a pi
phrase so
there's no doubt that the pi
phrase is closed.If spoken quickly without long pauses to indicate the position of full stops, nasin sin Lonuke as shown so far
would still be full of ambiguity. If a ke
is left off the end of a sentence and the next sentence could
appear to "run into" it, then a listener may become confused as to what belongs to the previous sentence
and what belongs to the next sentence. One way this could be solved is making all ke
particles
obligatory at the ends of sentences, but this is unworkable because you'd constantly need to remember how deep
you are in nested structures.
If mi wile e lonu sina alasa e kala ki pona tawa jan sona. mi pali.
was spoken quickly, a listener
might interpret mi pali
as belonging to the previous sentence and think that the speaker wants them to
fish for fish that are good for their working teacher when they mean a teacher generally. Resolving this
with the mandatory ke
approach may only put two ke
s at the end, but this would just keep
getting worse and worse for more deeply nested sentences. What you need is a way out of everything in the
current sentence and a clear marker that you're starting a new one.
This is where the nimi sin i
comes in. i
is mandatory at the start of every sentence and
allows for every ke
in the previous sentence to be dropped.
The phrase with separated sentences and all unnecessary ke
s removed is now
i mi wile e lonu sina alasa e kala ki pona tawa jan sona. i mi pali.
.
Standard Toki Pona does not have names for its letters. This is obviously a problem if you need to spell out a word
in an exclusively Toki Pona-speaking environment. In order to introduce words for the letters, nasin sin Lonuke
introduces the new vowel sound y
, which is the schwa vowel, a sound made by totally relaxing your mouth
while making a voiced sound. This follows every consonant in Toki Pona to make its letter name. For vowels, the
suffix -pu
is added, showing their connection to the official Toki Pona book, and metaphorically
literacy as a whole.
a
is apu
e
is epu
i
is ipu
j
is jy
k
is ky
l
is ly
m
is my
n
is ny
o
is opu
p
is py
s
is sy
t
is ty
u
is upu
w
is wy
y
is ypu
Most people's nasins probably don't introduce 15 nimi sin at once, but for such an important purpose, it's definitely worth it.
To spell out a word, use a te ... to
quote consisting exclusively of the word's spelling. For
example, I'd spell out my name as te ipu ly opu sy apu ny ly ipu to
.
Outside of quotes, strings of letters or single letters act as pronouns that refer back to the last thing that
begins with any of the letters in the same order. For example,
i soweli lili li alasa e kala. i ky li loje.
means "a small animal hunts fish. It is red."
but "it" refers clearly to the fish, not the animal. This is not the case with ona
which
makes no distinctions at all between referents. Strings of letters are very useful as many Toki Pona nouns begin
with the same head noun, and therefore the same letter.
i jan San en jan Timi li wile e ni. i sy li pali.
means "John and Tim want this. John works."
Nasin sin Lonuke still has a huge ambiguity problem. Standard Toki Pona uses the words kepeken
,
lon
, sama
, tan
and tawa
as both content words and prepositions.
This causes problems like in the sentence i jan li toki e tomo tawa mi
, which might be "a person
talks about a house to me" or "a person talks about my car". It would be simpler if these words only
ever had their content word meaning, and their prepositional meanings were reassigned onto nimi sin.
The new prepositions are:
pe
for kepeken
lo
for lon
sa
for sama
ta
for tan
wa
for tawa
As described in sona pona la's page on prepositions, these are used in the prepositional senses of these words, with the sense of "transitive verb" or the unlisted intransitive verb senses retaining the use of the original content words. The ambiguous example at the start of this section now becomes:
i jan li toki e tomo wa mi
means "a person talks about my car". i jan li toki e tomo tawa mi
means "a person talks about a house to me".For easy memorisation and to add an essential missing word to Toki Pona, all five prepositions merge into
pelosatawa
, which means "preposition" as a noun and "is a preposition" as a
predicate.
You might've noticed that in multiple-li sentences containing nested clauses, ke li
shows up a
lot. This is because as many li
phrases as you like may keep attaching to the current clause unless
closed off by li. This rule is bad for creating opportunities to drop li
, and can be fixed with no loss
of compactness by introducing a further nimi sin, je
.
je
replaces any li
after the first predicate phrase in a sentence or
nested clause. This means that any li
in a sentence must be within the current nested clause if that
clause does not have a predicate phrase yet, or outside of it if it already has one. je
maintains the
current nesting level, but li
does not if there's already one in the current clause. This makes
ke li
much less often needed, and provides a much more natural way out of nested clauses than needing
to think about how many layers deep you are all the time.
i jan ki moku e kili li pona li olin e mi
was previously an interjection but has now become
ungrammatical! This is because i jan ki moku e kili li pona
now has an implied
ke
after kili
because clauses or sentences can't have more than one predicate phrase
(the first is after ki
), so that portion has now become a complete sentence. Adding a further
li
phrase is now impossible, because there's nothing it would be closing off.i jan ki moku e kili li pona je olin e mi
now means "the person who eats fruit is good and
loves me".i jan ki moku e kili je pona li olin e mi
now means "the person who eats fruit and who is good
loves me".You might not actually know which nimi sin belong in a speaker's dialect. You might also not know if a speaker
adheres to the rule that name words in Toki Pona are not allowed to clash with Toki Pona's official words. This
can be a problem! For example, ke
is a Chinese
surname). Mishearing someone's name as the closing particle in nasin sin Lonuke could cause a lot of
confusion!
5o fix the clarity problems with names, nasin sin Lonukes introduces a new rule: every name must end in a consonant other than n. This makes names never clash with the phonological space of root words, and additionally makes them more flexible to represent names from other languages:
Paris
becomes ma tomo Palis
Samflir
becomes ilo Sanlil
Ithkuil
becomes toki Ikuwil
When a name ends in a vowel, you have two options. You can either add a consonant onto the end that wasn't there before, or clip the last vowel sound off if it results in a final consonant that isn't n. For example:
Emily
becomes jan Emilis
or just jan Emil
Barry
becomes jan Palis
or just jan Pal
When a name ends in n, you can add -y and then treat it as a name that ends in a vowel, or you can change it to an m if that fits the name better. For example:
John
becomes jan Som
or jan Sonys
With any consonant now able to end names, it's important to make it clear when this is happening to prevent
mishearing. This is done by inserting pauses around names. The pause at the start ensures that names that start with
valid Toki Pona words don't "break off" and are clearly separated from the head noun phrase, as an
example jan Kelis i
might end up sounding like jan ke li si
, which is no good.
Pauses are written with dots and are given the letter word awenpu
. With dots enclosing names and their
forms completely unable to clash with official words, capitalisation becomes redundant and Toki Pona may be written
entirely in lowercase. However, capitalisation may still be optionally used to indicate stress in names, to borrow
their stress pattern into Toki Pona.
ilo Sanli
is now ilo .sanlil.