Q: имена в sitelen pona выглядят длинными. Как их сократить?

sitelen pona names can be quite long:

People have come up with three notable systems to make names easier to read and write.

1. dot system: 󱤿󱥠󱤕

The dot system, or nasin sitelen kalama, was created by jan Pumiko in 2022. 40–60% of Toki Pona speakers say they use it, or use it in some situations. In nasin sitelen kalama, you split up a word into morae: chunks that are like a syllable, but smaller. One mora is either consonant+vowel, or the -n after a vowel:

• to-ki
• ja-n
• a-n-pa
• si-n-pi-n

By adding middle-dots after a character, you increase how many morae should be pronounced in the name:

(You might notice a funny quirk of this system: 󱦐󱤅󱦑 makes up a full mora, so adding a dot adds the next mora, which is -n. But 󱦐󱥟󱦑 is not a full mora, so adding a dot only completes the first mora, which is si.)

You can also use a colon to mean the entire word should be pronounced:

Put several characters together in a cartouche, and you can write a name:

• 🎉 you use fewer word characters to write one name!
• 🙁 the cartouche is still quite long.

2. tally system: 󱤿󱥠󱤕󱥍󱤩󱤨

The tally system was created by jan Sonja in 2024 for use in official letters and books, where narrow pages require shorter names. In it, every character in the cartouche gets a tally mark below. You use one tally mark for every sound or letter you want to pronounce:

3. initial system

This method was first shown by DavidAR in 2019, and was tried by jan Sonja in lipu su: “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Toki Pona edition)”. At first, you introduce a person, language, or place with its full name:

But in following sentences, you abbreviate the name to just the first character: