nasin sin Lonuke

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.

Prerequisites

To use nasin sin Lonuke, your existing nasin must do the following:

Resolving nested pi

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:

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.

Reforming ki

Adding ke

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.

Resumptive ona

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.

lonu

what lonu means

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 and ke

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.

Separating sentences

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 kes 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 kes removed is now i mi wile e lonu sina alasa e kala ki pona tawa jan sona. i mi pali..

The letter words

Introducing the letter words

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.

Most people's nasins probably don't introduce 15 nimi sin at once, but for such an important purpose, it's definitely worth it.

Uses of the letter words

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."

Prepositions

Introducing prepositions

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.

pe, lo, sa, ta and wa

The new prepositions are:

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:

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.

Reforming multiple-li sentences

The problem with multiple-li sentences

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

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.

Clearer names

The problem with names

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!

Unambiguous names

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:

Fixing names that now don't work

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:

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:

Pauses

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.