toki ne pona - an incredibly quick and dirty set of completely optional patches for toki pona
by miredo

updated December 9th, 2024

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About:

A Toki ne Pona document should be able to be mechanically converted to toki pona by just looking for the new words.

I suspect there will be issues if Sonja Lang uses the other simple syllables as book words, but that is a future issue. Anything ending in u is two syllables in an attempt to future proof this.

The design is that you could theoretically strip out all the new grammar and be left with perfectly understandable Toki Pona.
Some of the alterations may result in slightly ungrammatical Toki Pona post-conversion, but it is totally expected that something like "mi li pona" or "soweli pi walo" would be easily understood by a Toki Pona speaker with no knowledge of Toki ne Pona. 

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Words and grammar:

* markers go before the word and are entirely optional
* ne marks adjectives or adverbs (you can use this immediately after li to make it clear you are describing what's before li! "leko li lete" -> "leko li ne lete")
* nunu marks nouns
* lulu marks verbs
* po marks prepositions
* no indicates possession (if used with pi, put after pi)

using markers to make it clear when prepositions and pre-verbs are being used as other parts of speech is incredibly handly
I have not made a word to deal with pre-verbs.

* la with a comma after is context, la with a comma before is an if x then y statement, la with no comma could be either (IIRC, this convention is followed in lipu pu)
* li can be used after mi or sina alone
* pi can be used after a lone adjective or adverb for emphasis

That's it.
Mark as much or little as you want, althouhg words remain whatever possiblity until they are marked. I remember seeing a Toki Pona lesson guide that tried to teach it based on "slots" for parts of speech based on what words are in a sentence already; I don't think it's a great way to teach someone new, it is a useful way to look at the language for someone who does know it.

I will probably need a bit of a guide for a few edge cases (kama sona: kama is a preverb, so to mark it, say kama nunu sona).

I considered a big set of changes, but that's worthless.
The best thing about Toki ne Pona is if you just remove the new eords, it should be plain, mostly understandable Toki Pona. Use as much or as little as you want.

toki ne pona li pona po tawa mi. sina ken kama sona e toki ne pona po kepeken tenpo lili.



jan ne tawa - the moving person, the person of motion


there are other changes I want to add but they absolutely break the fact that you should be able to outright ignore the new stuff if you don't know it.


bonus idea but don't actually use this if you want the above statement to remain true:
use nu directly attached to one of the new particles to turn it into a noun about what it's for
nunu is the word for noun, for example, or nupo for preposition
technically you could do like "mi lu nunu e toki ni "to say the same as "I verbed this word" verbed but that is intensely ugly and completely breaks the above