Wiktionary:About Toki Pona

This is a Wiktionary policy, guideline or common practices page. This is a draft proposal. It is unofficial, and it is unknown whether it is widely accepted by Wiktionary editors. Policies – Entries: CFI - EL - NORM - NPOV - QUOTE - REDIR - DELETE. Languages: LT - AXX. Others: BLOCK - BOTS - VOTES.

Introduction

The aim of this page is to explain the norms used in Toki Pona entries. It is intended to complement, not supersede, WT:CFI and WT:ELE.

Entries

Layout

• (===Alternative forms===)
• ===Glyph origin===
• ===Etymology===
• ===Pronunciation===
{{tok-IPA}}
• Definitions
• (===Usage notes=== … ===Anagrams===)

Any ===Production=== sections should be removed. The manually coded form (Signed Toki Pona, toki pona luka) is effectively deprecated and unused as of Toki Pona Dictionary. Its successor, luka pona, is its own separately constructed sign language rather than a modality of Toki Pona.

Glyph origin

A ===Glyph origin=== section should show any widely accepted sitelen pona and sitelen sitelen glyphs using {{tok-sitelen}}.

A word that is well attested in its own right may not have a widely accepted or standardized glyph, especially in sitelen sitelen. Typically, glyphs in wide use have several images on Wikimedia Commons, including one that can be considered canonical, with most other instances of the glyph being based on that instance.

A few words have multiple recognized sitelen pona glyphs. Some, like namako, are in free variation. Others are specific to certain senses of a word.

There should then be a bullet point for each glyph, describing it in the same form as an etymology.

Community-made glyphs often have additional information of note, such as the designer, development of the design, previous glyphs that influenced this one, and first inclusion in a font.

Descriptions may also include lists of glyphs with shared features, sometimes called "radicals" among speakers.

===Glyph origin===
{{tok-sitelen}}
* ''{{l|tok|sitelen pona}}'':
* ''{{l|tok|sitelen sitelen}}'':

(If and when Sitelen Pona gets encoded in Unicode, the descriptions of the glyph should be moved to the article about the glyph itself.)

Definitions

Many Toki Pona dictionaries define words by listing various examples of potential meanings. However, this may be misinterpreted as polysemic distinctions, instead of a broad underlying monosemy. (Multiple more recent projects have emphasized describing the range of words' semantic spaces in detailed prose.)

Using telo as an example, rather than this format which suggests four distinct senses:

===Noun===
# water
# liquid, fluid
# wet substance
# beverage

…something like this might be preferred:

===Noun===
# Liquid or fluid, especially water or a beverage.

Part of speech

Any non-particle word may include ===Adjective===, ===Noun===, and ===Verb=== sections, as all such words can be used freely in any of these grammatical roles. (Words with other parts of speech are a closed class.)

Of these, the first part of speech should be the one given in the dictionary section of Toki Pona: The Language of Good, as senses in the other two parts of speech follow mostly regularly from that one:

• ===Adjective===: Of or relating to [primary sense].
• ===Noun===
  • That which is [adjective sense, or past participle of verb sense].
  • The act of [gerund of verb sense].
• ===Verb===: To be or make [primary sense].

Of course, if there is a pithy English back-translation for any of these senses, it can be listed at the end of the definition.

Occasionally, a word is derived into other parts of speech multiple times and returns to its original part of speech with a sense transposed in meaning. For example, moku can go from a verb "to consume", to a noun "something consumed; food", back to a verb "to be food; to be consumed". However, relatively few words are said to exhibit this phenomenon. Look up monsutatesu for more information.

An idiosyncratic part-of-speech analysis, mentioned in Toki Pona Dictionary, classifies most words only as content words and does not draw a distinction between the aforementioned three parts of speech. Under this analysis, a word may take a head, modifier, or predicate position in the syntax, but it usually has a single definition that is constant between all of these roles. There may be discussion on whether to switch to this system. Using a ===Content word=== header is not mentioned on WT:POS, for one potential challenge.

Multiword terms

Because Toki Pona is based on mindfulness of context, meditation on the personal significance of things, and creative description, many speakers try to prevent multiword phrases from becoming lexicalized. As a result, even many common phrases are sum-of-parts and do not warrant entries.

Acceptable multiword terms include:

• Phrases that pass the fried egg test (often with a specific referent, thus equivalent to a proper noun): toki pona, sitelen sitelen, nimi sin
• Place and language names suggested in Toki Pona: The Language of Good, and any alternative or additional names derived from endonyms that can be attested: ma Antasika, toki luka Kepeka, ma Juwese
• Entries in the "Phrase Book" section of Toki Pona: The Language of Good, as the closest fit to the Wiktionary phrasebook guidelines: mi tawa, ale li pona, sina pilin seme?

Letters

Toki Pona uses these letters:

• (Latin script letters) a, e, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, s, t, u, w.

The letters have no widely accepted names in Toki Pona.