lesson 27: colours

Let’s talk colours!

In sitelen pona, many colour words look as if they were compounds: they consist of a triangle from 󱤞 kule combined with another word, like 󱤂 ala, 󱥰 uta, 󱥤 suno, 󱤗 kasi. There are several other compound glyphs in sitelen pona, as well: 󱤶 moku, 󱥉 pali, 󱤙 kepeken have a 󱤭 luka, and 󱤕 kalama, 󱥌 pana, 󱥡 sona, 󱥬 toki use three lines we dubbed ‘emitters’. Props to you if you spotted these patterns earlier!

The colour words, of course, mean a whole range of colours, not just the ones listed here. 󱤣 laso is an especially interesting one: in Toki Pona, green and blue are just shades of one colour, like in Japanese, Vietnamese, Zulu and many other languages. These two sentences together makes sense in Toki Pona, but not in English:

Do you need colours?

Like genders, Toki Pona colours are used less frequently than you might expect. In natural languages, colours often serve as easy shortcuts to mean something much more specific: a white lie, the black market, a greenhouse. Toki Pona doesn’t like shortcuts that don’t get to the point:

There’s a big difference between a white house and the White House:

I only bring it up now, because colours are the most obvious example, but the same actually applies to any phrase! Before using adjectives, it’s often useful to stop and think: are these adjectives getting the important part you wanted to talk about, or are they just shorthand for something else?