Q: как будет моё имя на токи поне?

Two disclaimers:

• For convenience, let’s only use the Latin alphabet here. The lesson on names shows everything you need for sitelen pona!
• This lesson makes more sense once you’ve already seen all Toki Pona words!

Most Toki Pona speakers choose a Toki Pona name. This name is how others will refer to you in Toki Pona. In Discord communities, people usually set their nickname to their Toki Pona name.

You’ve already seen a few example names:

• jan Nowa — Noah
• jan Ema — Emma
• jan Maja — Maya
• jan Mili — Millie

But these are very simple cases. The sounds in these names are already shaped similar to normal Toki Pona words. Chances are, your name will require more work. So let’s learn about it!

Picking a Toki Pona name has three parts to it:

1. What are you?
2. What name do you want as a starting point?
3. How do we mould this name into a shape that Toki Pona allows?

1. What are you?

So in Toki Pona, all names are adjectives. They always have to be used with a noun — we call this a head noun. This means you get to choose a head noun you will be known by.

The most popular head noun is 󱤑 jan, person. About 3/4ths of all active Toki Pona speakers call themselves jan. You can think of it as a default option — you can’t go wrong with this.

1 out of every 8 Toki Pona speakers uses one of the words for animals: 󱥢 soweli, 󱥴 waso, 󱥑 pipi, 󱤁 akesi, 󱤔 kala, 󱦀 kijetesantakalu. This is a bit more playful. People do that because an animal is an important part of their identity, or just because they like this animal.

1 out of every 8 Toki Pona speakers use some other words as headnouns. 󱤎 ilo, 󱤟 kulupu, 󱤺 mun, 󱤗 kasi, 󱤌 ijo — you can choose to be anything. This too can be for identity reasons (you could be plural; you could present as non-human). Or it can be for fun, to be unlike others.

2. What name do you start with?

Most people want to adapt a name they already use. Often, it’s a first name. For example, jan Sonja’s first name is Sonja. Sometimes, it’s a first name + last name. jan Misali’s name is Mitch Halley.

English first names are often short, with only one syllable: Mitch, Bill, Bob, Jake, Jane, Joe. Toki Pona likes to avoid such short names, because there are too few possible ones. If too many people have the same name, it starts getting confusing. It’s best to start with a name between two and four syllables long.

A lot of people use their online nicknames. jan Ke Tami’s name is an adaptation of his nickname RetSamys. jan Waputo’s name is an adaptation of his channel name RobWords.

If you want, you can also just come up with something different! jan Tokawi’s name is Howie, but he decided to add Tok- to it just for fun, to look more like toki.

3. How do we make the name work in Toki Pona?

You might know the Vietnamese surname Nguyen, pronounced ŋwiəŋ. But in English, these sounds can’t go in that order. So when English speakers say Ngyuen, they adapt it to what English allows — “win”.

When saying names in Toki Pona, we do something similar: we change the shape of the name to make it pronounceable. We call this process tokiponisation. Some parts of it can be explained in guidelines. Other parts are more art-like, like knowing what to experiment with.

Let’s go over the guidelines briefly.

Short guidelines

First, many consonants from your language may change:

• b, p, f all become p.
• d, t both become t.
• g, k, χ, ʁ all become k.
• θ becomes t or s.
• s, z, ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, dʒ all become s.
• w, v, ɹ all become w.
• r, ɾ, l all become l.
• h disappears completely.

More consonants exist in other languages, of course, but these are enough to give you the overall picture.
Something interesting to notice here are the sounds ɹ, r, ʁ. In many European languages, these sounds are spelled with “r”. English has the first one, Russian has the second one, French has the third one. But in Toki Pona, they remain different: w, l, and k!

Second, your word may have diphthongs: vowels during which the tongue has to move. In English, names like Jake, Joe, Ryan, Roy, Howard have diphthongs. While tokiponising, think of diphthongs as a sequence of vowel + j or w. For example, the five names from before become Sejk, Sow, Wajan, Woj, Awat at this stage.

Third, every consonant in your word must come before a vowel. If we look at a name like Thomas -> Tomas, the last consonant s doesn’t have a vowel, so it is lost: Thomas -> Tomas -> Toma.
You often find more than one consonant together: Christopher -> Kwistapa has kw and st. You can pick which one is lost and which one remains: Christopher -> Kwistapa -> Witapa.
You already know [n] is special, and can go after vowels in words like anpa, ante, insa, linja. It does that in names too: Benjamin -> Pensamin, Humphrey -> Anpi.

Fourth, the sequences [wu wo ji ti] never occur in Toki Pona words. So in names, they become [u o i si]: Timmy -> Simi, Woodrow -> Uso.

Fifth, if some of your vowels are directly adjacent, add j or w in between: Nihon (Japan) -> Nion -> Nijon.

Finer details

The steps I described above are kind of like the “most common” scenario. An experienced Toki Pona speaker can deviate from it to get a better result. For example, for the name Ashley or Gwen, they might choose to insert a vowel, instead of dropping a consonant: jan Asuli, jan Kuwen. For a name like Russian Mikhail, they might choose to move the consonant in between the vowels to preserve it: jan Mikali.

Syllable count

If you follow the guidelines perfectly, you’ll notice the number of syllables always stays the same from the beginning to the end. This is usually the case! Even with ‘finer adjustments’ like the ones above, you usually only gain or lose about one syllable.

If you know any borrowings from English to Japanese, this will surprise you! Japanese and Toki Pona result in quite different borrowed words. Compare:

• Shakespeare (2 syllables)
  • Sheikusupia (Japanese; 5 syllables)
  • Sepi (Toki Pona; 2 syllables)

This is because Japanese inserts vowels to preserve consonants, while Toki Pona drops consonants to preserve syllable count.