Punctuation & Formatting
In Toki Pona, punctuation is always arbitrary (beyond sentence separation) and serves more of a reading aid. In sitelen pona, the characters themselves provide most of this function. For sentence separation, no distinction is made between exclamation marks, question marks or periods. Instead, the content of the sentence itself indicates if it's a question, said energetically, or a regular statement: kon li lete This sentence is a normal statement. kon li lete ala lete kon li lete anu seme These are 2 ways for the grammar to indicate a yes/no question. kon li lete a The word "a" can indicate emotional emphasis, so this sentence is more of an exclamation. seme li lete kon li seme The word "seme" is used to ask about details, so this sentence is a question. There is no total agreement how to separate sentences in sitelen pona. The best method is to work with line breaks. In this course, if sentences need to be separated in the same line, we will use an interpunct "ยท" for this purpose. mi tawa. o awen However, this should be used rarely. Line breaks will be the default. mi tawa
o awen There may be additional features of sitelen pona that appear in the lessons. If there are quotation marks, we will use CJK-style characters to indicate speech: te toki to In this course, colons will not be in use. Instead, we rotate the symbol for "ni" to indicate the direction of which sentence gets referred to. mi lukin e niv<
waso li tawa waso li tawa
mi lukin e ni^< It is also common to put "pi" phrases inside of an extended "pi" shape. jan pisona pona li pana e sona
jan pi(sona pona) li pana e sona