lesson 7: names

Names

Pointing at things is nice, but sometimes it’s nice to be more specific. Introducing: names! A revolutionary technology that allows you to talk about someone or something in particular.

Let’s learn the words for things that often have names:

You already know one name: sitelen Lasina! Let’s look at some names of people:

From these names you can see:

1. Names are adjectives: they come after another word.
2. Names start with a capital letter. If you spot a capitalised word in Toki Pona, you immediately know it’s a name!
3. In sitelen pona, we write names inside a big 󱥂 nimi. We call this name-block a cartouche, like the ones used in Egyptian hieroglyphs. For each sound in the name, we pick a word that starts with that sound. For example, ‘Ema’ can be spelled 󱤉 e, 󱤶 moku, 󱤂 ala.

People aren’t the only ones to have names! Let’s look at a language, a country, and a city:

These names tells us more about how a Toki Pona name is made:

4. When names enter Toki Pona, they change to the sound system of Toki Pona. There is no d in Toki Pona, so the word Deutsch starts with a t. Some changes are small, like Noah ~ Nowa, some are large, like français ~ Kanse.
5. Names are often not from English. We like to use endonyms: self-names of countries, languages, people, and so on. The name for French comes from French!

Let’s practice using the new words and names in sentences:

See also

• Q: what’s my name in Toki Pona?
• Q: in sitelen pona, names look long. How can I make them shorter?