Punctuation & Formatting

In Toki Pona, punctuation is always arbitrary (beyond sentence separation) and serves more of a reading aid.

In sitelen pona, the characters themselves provide most of this function. For sentence separation, no distinction is made between exclamation marks, question marks or periods.

Instead, the content of the sentence itself indicates if it's a question, said energetically, or a regular statement:

kon li lete

This sentence is a normal statement.

kon li lete ala lete

kon li lete anu seme

These are 2 ways for the grammar to indicate a yes/no question.

kon li lete a

The word "a" can indicate emotional emphasis, so this sentence is more of an exclamation.

seme li lete

kon li seme

The word "seme" is used to ask about details, so this sentence is a question.

sentence separation

There is no total agreement how to separate sentences in sitelen pona. The best method is to work with line breaks. In this course, if sentences need to be separated in the same line, we will use an interpunct "·" for this purpose.

mi tawa. o awen

However, this should be used rarely. Line breaks will be the default.

mi tawa
o awen

related formatting

There may be additional features of sitelen pona that appear in the lessons.

If there are quotation marks, we will use CJK-style characters to indicate speech:

te toki to

In this course, colons will not be in use. Instead, we rotate the symbol for "ni" to indicate the direction of which sentence gets referred to.

mi lukin e niv<
waso li tawa

waso li tawa
mi lukin e ni^<

It is also common to put "pi" phrases inside of an extended "pi" shape.

jan pisona pona li pana e sona
jan pi(sona pona) li pana e sona