sitelen pona is a logography, pretty much as basic as they come. Each word has a glyph and you put them in the order you say them, left to right and top to bottom because of course we're only using the dominant one even though li and e (glyphs that appear in every sentence that is not dead simple) can literally be used as arrows to point the direction. Well, sucks for us free directionality enthusiasts.

There are only two noteworthy features of this logography: Its (bad) approach to loanwords and its (worse) compound glyphs.

The loanwords are dealt with a (non-standardized) system where you put inside of a box glyphs of words that each represent their first letter. Example given in pu: Kanata (Canada) can be written as [kasi alasa nasin awen telo a]. Yes it takes over six times the space of a regular word, and each of the three /a/s is a different symbol. This is not a bug, it's a feature. The idea is that you're supposed to pick symbols that resonate with you to spell your name, but that's hard to do when some letters have very few options (For the worst example, /u/, oftentimes the filler vowel of choice to keep consonant clusters recognizeable, has three glyphs to choose from, and one of them is the word for "sex", so you pretty much have to choose between "mouth" and "fight".) and tokiponizing the name of someone that one doesn't know personally or something that doesn't have a personality (such as countries) forces the writer to make potentially unfortunate decisions.

People thought this was kind of annoying, and decided to allow you to take more than a single letter from each word... Each dot (which take an entire character slot each) means you take one mora from the word before, so [pona ·] means /po/, [pona · ·] means /pona/, and [taso · pona · lin · ·] means /tapolin/. You may have noticed this rarely actually saves space. On top of that, this whole system isn't even followed by everyone, with some really weird implementations by some people... (looking at you, jan mi-sona-ante-li., and jan... sona-3-jan-2?). And worst of all, /pe/, /nu/ and /ju/ can't even be represented with a single glyph plus a dot, since none of toki pona's words start with those morae!

Meanwhile, the compounds are made shoving a glyph inside another glyph to write two words in a single slot! Despite the fact some regular words' glyphs are formed like that too... Yes that's all there is to say about the compounds, which I am pretty sure only exist to make toki pona's symbol one thing instead of two.

One of the bigger problems you will encounter trying to figure out sitelen pona is telling glyphs apart, doubly so if you're dyslexic.

This section will focus on jan Sonja's bad habit of making distinctions solely by rotation and mirroring, and the next on other difficult distinctions.

awen, kama and tawa

awen, kama and tawa all look like oversimplified legs. The only difference between them is which way the feet face (outwards, left and right respectively).

To make their differences more obvious, awen stays the same, while kama and tawa are changed to resemble more a walk cycle: to be precise, kama's legs are getting closer to each other (visually crossing), while tawa's are getting further away.

mi, sina and ona

mi is the number 9, sina is the number 6 and ona is σ but upside down. They're supposed to be pointing hands, pointing at the relevant person: mi points to the writer, sina to the reader, and ona to the side. Of course, this isn't good for dyslexics. And the hands barely look like hands to begin with. Also, this analogy isn't very good, since it breaks whenever one writes text that isn't flat in front of you.

The personal pronouns are notably difficult for logographies, so this almost excusable. Almost. My solution was to start with the jan (person) glyph for mi and sina, but swap out the head for uta ("mouth", for the speaker) and kute ("ear", for the listener) respectively. ona stays the same, just redesigned to actually look like a hand.

monsi and sinpin and the other direction glyphs

All the direction glyphs (except that one) are built with a box and a dot. All the spinning of the box and relative positions of the dot makes them annoyingly difficult to tell apart, and a big dyslexic hazard.

To fix this, I used a cross (X) to mark location glyphs, and combined them with a relevant word (usually a body part):

• sewi ("up") uses lawa ("head");
• poka ("side") uses luka ("arm");
• anpa ("down") uses noka ("foot");
• insa ("inside") uses poki ("container");
• sinpin ("front") uses uta ("mouth");
• monsi ("back") uses ike ("bad", because there's no glyph for "butt". I originally used jaki ("nasty"), but they got similar (see the final part));

lon ("at") and meso ("middle") stay the same except for changing their dot to the cross, since they're pretty self explanatory.

ni and epiku

ni, meaning "this", is an arrow pointing downward. epiku, meaning "epic", is an arrow pointing upward.

This one in particular really annoys me because epiku is a ku suli, a word that got added after the original book and somehow is recognized by enough people to become part of the must-know vocabulary. A word that literally just means "very good", in the not many words language. I know that they're not trying to be efficient but this is ridiculous.

To fix this epiku is now the pog face. It is a joke of a word so it gets a joke of a glyph.

Well, that's what I would have said if they hadn't fixed epiku's glyph already, by making it a smile with emitters. It works, even if epiku is still a really really dumb word.

Exception: ike and pona, lupa and nena

ike being a frown and pona being a smile is quite iconic and I couldn't come up with a better idea than adding eyes to both glyphs, so they stay.

lupa ("hole") and nena ("bump") have a similar relationship, so I kept their flipping as well.

a and o

Both of them are exclamation points with fat dots. And only one of those has a tail. Excluding that, they're the exact same.

They appear again in Part 20 with some related glyphs, so I'd rather wait until we get there.

en, sin and namako

sin (new) and en (and) have a strange relationship with namako (extra). Without namako, which was not in the original 120 words, en and sin could coexist, but namako looks too much like both.

To fix that, I changed namako to an alternative glyph that I found on Linku, which resembles a pepper. Apparently, the toki ponists agree with me, because this alternate has become more popular lately.

ike and lupa, pona and nena

All of these are literally just arches except lupa and nena are vaguely longer. The second pair means "hole" and "bump", so I stole sitelen pona pona's fix and added a ground line to them, making them similar to capital omega(Ω).

lape, lawa, ona and misikeke

lape ("rest"), lawa ("head"), ona ("they") and misikeke ("medicine") all boil down to a circle and a stick going through it. It only cuts out one way on lawa, stays inside in misikeke, stays outside in lape and only tangents ona, but they all still look a little too similar when put together. To fix these:

• lawa is given eyes like the animal glyphs;
• ona's thumb, like I mentioned earlier, is made explicit, as the glyph should resemble a hand;
• The remaining two, misikeke and lape, should be hard to confuse, but, to be safe, misikeke is a taller capsule while lape's circle is small and evenly sized. (I've seen some fonts make lape's circle more of a tall oval to fill the height of the glyph, and that just looks insanely awkward.)

len, selo and sijelo

These are all bottomless squares with lines in the middle. selo is the biggest offender, being too similar to both, and the only one that is changed in this version: it is now covering a round object instead of what seems to be a table.

It looks like old meli but we will get to those eventually.

lili and suli

"Let's differentiate two glyphs on size and literally nothing else", said a linguist that does not know jaki about scripts.

This is another fix I stole from sitelen pona pona: lili has a ground line below, while suli has a sky line above.

nimi, lipu and palisa

These are all squares. nimi is vaguely shorter and palisa is vaguely skinnier.

nimi gets the glyph for one inside it, as it makes people unique (and I sort of ran out of ideas), while palisa is positioned at a 45 degree angle (resembling Minecraft!) to reduce confusion.

ala, ante and weka

All three of these look like X's. To fix this, ante has been made diagonal, resembling a bisected N, yet another change inspired by sitelen pona pona. ala, has been made into a forbidden sign, but that's better justified in the next section.

nasin and epiku

Both are upward arrows, but epiku's is normal while nasin's has its tip in the middle. What were the people making this sitelen sin thinking?!

epiku is now the pog face or emitter smile though, so the problem is already solved.

While I am aware that toki pona is not remotely attempting to represent every language in the world (no matter how much toki ponists lie to your face about it), it gets lazy with eurocentric glyphs and (nearly) only eurocentric ones, with languages like Mandarin getting no such treatment.

ala

X's meaning as exclusion is... weird, to say the least. On one hand, it's pretty common, even probably being the close tab button on your device of choice. On the other, there's less ambiguous ways to show the concept. While a cross can also mark a spot or fill a ballot, the symbol I chose to replace it, the ISO's general prohibition sign (∅), is unambiguously negative.

kule and crew: the theming of the color glyphs is just really weird

Either kule's canonical glyph is a "Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon" reference (which is absolutely not culturally neutral) or a reference to triangular prisms decomposing light (which bugs me too for some reason).

For my idea, I used oko's shape as the basis of the color glyphs, since it means "eye", though I simplified it to be closer to a normal triangle. kule, meanwhile, is a sideways triangle divided into three parts as a nod to the rainbow.

The idea of using inspiration from other glyphs with well known colors is pretty genius, so I kept it in my redesign, just changing the upwards triangle to the sideways triangle/eye motif. Other than that, ala changed so pimeja needs to inherit that change, and I made walo's emitters more obvious.

Honestly, this is the part of the redesign I'm least confident in, but I still think it's a minor improvement over the fairly cramped originals.

moli

The usage of X eyes to represent death is... not great. They can also be used to represent unconsciousness or just being stunned, and are at best questionably universal as a symbol. I fix this by using the ala glyph over two dot eyes: dot eyes represent life in sitelen pona, so ala on top represents the absence of it.

ma

ma's symbol is an old alchemical symbol for Earth, which is technically now the astronomical symbol too, but even the International Astronomy Union discourages the use of them. I fix that by rotating the symbol 45 degrees, turning it into ijo (generic "thing") with the location X through it, indicating that it represents the idea of placement itself.

pilin and olin

pilin meaning both "emotion" and "sensation" is already mildly englishy but using the abstract heart shape to signify emotion just doesn't sit right with me, doubly so with olin meaning "love" and being literally just two pilins on top of eachother.

To deal with pilin, I decided to commit to the sensation idea, making it a luka ("hand") touching a line; to fix

olin

, I have two overlapping jan ("person"), since love tends to be a bond between people. It's not always that, but at least you can see where I'm coming from without cultural context.

seme

It's literally just a question mark. Just a question mark. Not every language uses latin script punctuation.

The fix here is lipu with ala's line through it: it represents the lack of knowledge.

nanpa

The number sign # originates from a British unit of measurement and is not very popular outside of English speaking regions as a way to represent numbers. In fact, it likely is now more associated with just tagging content, thanks to social media.

This one's fix is less orthodox: a pictogram of a podium. Podiums are a staple of the Olympic games, which are very international.

ken and wile

jan Sonja, my sister in Ra, why are these glyphs literally just the latin letters k and w? This is unexcusable laziness! At least you tried with the exclamation marks... It doesn't even make sense to have specifically these two be like this, they have nothing in common except being preverbs and the other preverbs are fine! (well, they're not, but they have actual pictograms at least...)

To fix ken, I made a pictogram of a bulging bicep, since that's similar enough to the idea of capability. Maybe a little confusable with wawa, but I tried my best.

Meanwhile, to fix wile, I turned it into a hand with an arrow: reaching out for something, wanting something...

a, o, kin, n and too many nimi sin

Steal a latin symbol once, shame on you. Steal it four times in the same lang and I am impressed by your determination to being lazy.

kin doesn't even follow the pattern, it has lete's symbol there randomly!

All of these (except kin, which is a plus sign with emitters) are emoji-like now. a has a dot-mouth and neck, o waves an arm (resembling wawa), and n has a checkmark made to resemble the thinking emoji (🤔).

Since we're here, let me rant for a second. Looking through Linku's rare and obscure words, I found:

• wa, exclamation-w, to express amazement;
• ako, exclamation-아 (yes that's hangul for a), which is just a Korean fandom thing;
• je, exclamation-j, to express excitement;
• ke, exclamation-k, to mean "okay".

Thankfully all these have virtually no recognition but also why? These are so unnecessary and actively make the exclamation problem somehow worse!

sewi

For a change, we have an Arabic-centric glyph. It's written really oversimplified, but it's the symbol for Allah. And it really sucks:

• It doesn't fit in at all with the rest of the direction glyphs (this is supposed to mean "up");
• It is written so simplified in relation to the original that three of its seven defining elements are missing;
• This last one is less objective but I imagine it's really awkward to use a symbol that's explicitly a name of a monotheistic god as an adjective. I should ask one of my muslim friends to check.

To fix all this it's now lawa ("head") with the location X inside it (I mentioned it two sections ago).

Exception: math inspired glyphs (wan, ali, en, kipisi, sama)

So, math notation's whole point is that they're universal so anyone from any country can read the same math notation and get to the same unambiguous conclusion. This makes mathematical symbols pretty good inspiration for glyphs, which really helps for such abstract concepts. I take a little issue to percent of all things being used for division but it's no big deal.

An absurd amount of glyphs but especially lili: not space filling

Most toki pona fonts have the glyphs take up a squarish space. Despite that, many glyphs don't take up the entire square, making writing by hand more unintuitive than it needs to. This happens very often in the original book's chart, but fonts like linja pona fix most of those.

Except lili, which is literally designed to not fill its square. Why.

lili's new groundline is wide enough to fill up the square, and other small glyphs can be written wide enough for that now that differentiating from other glyphs isn't an issue, so this problem got fixed while I was on the other problems! Neat.

ko and jaki: not standardized

While having non-standardized glyphs is kinda super cool, so I'm changing my mind on jaki, ko is just annoyingly inconsistent with the number of bumps. From now on, it shall have exactly three every time. If you don't like scribble-jaki, you can use a frown with emitters... yeah it's about vomit.

meli and mije: gender presentation (featuring tonsi)

These are a big problem. Gender categories are a fundamentally cultural thing, and meli and mije are not only biased towards the western view, they're incorrect: you can find cis women with broad shoulders and cis men with long hair, and don't even get me started on trans people.

These glyphs are an interesting problem, as when divorced of culture all that remains is the reproductive meaning, yet I think it would be crude to use genital pictographs for this purpose. Ultimately, I decided to not divorce myself from culture and use the typical gender indicators (the Venus and Mars symbols), since gender itself is a culture-heavy concept.

kala, tonsi, kin and sewi: breaks off from a pre-established pattern

kala doesn't have eyes while the other animal symbols do, I fixed that;

meli and mije look like a pictogram of a man and a woman, but by that logic tonsi would be a humanoid with horns; I fixed that by changing meli and mije earlier: Now, tonsi fits in as just an abstraction;

And I just ranted a ton about kin and sewi, so I will not repeat myself.

majuna: uses a pre-established pattern incorrectly

majuna is the better of the two 2024 words. It's supposed to mean "old", but for whatever reason they thought that putting more stuff on the sin ("new") glyph would get the idea across and not the exactly opposite idea.

To fix it, I made majuna closer to sin, but turning the top tick 90 degrees as to vaguely resemble a sunset- I'm not the only one that sees a sunrise in sin, right?

akesi and waso: pictogram too abstracted

They barely look like lizards and birds. I gave waso a little wing and akesi a cute tail, and put only one eye on both instead of two.

kokosila: unintuitive origins

While kokosila is another one of those words that I could probably write a whole paragraph on how much of an insane and bad idea it is, I'm just redesigning the sitelen pona, so I'll digress. For now.

kokosila comes from crocodile, so we might as well embrace it and make the glyph a little croc! I think it would get along with kijetesantakalu. No idea why the glyph looks like "not talking" when the word is supposed to mean "not speaking toki pona when you're supposed to speak toki pona".

kalama and toki: even more unintuitive origins

One of these is a mouth with emitters and the other is a thing with emitters. Guess which got assigned to mean "talk" and which got assigned to mean "noise".

...

Of course, thing-emitter is "talk", and mouth-emitter is "noise"! What else could it be!?

I don't even know how to quip about this one, it's such an obvious oversight it hurts my head! Alternatively, instead of an oversight, it's a design decision to, again, make toki pona's silly logo look nicer. I undid this obvious swap either way.