This has probably been proposed before; I just think it’d be cool.
Japanese is the only language I know any of that uses Chinese characters, so I’m only considering Japanese usage when I make these choices.
Criteria I use include: - Meaning of the character - Distinctiveness from other characters in this list - Ease of writing/reading - Pronunciation/etymology (for particles, mostly)
On the other hand, using just hiragana for the particles あ え ら り ん お ぴ could be visually appealing too. This isn’t an Official Toki Pona Proposal, it’s just me spitballing what could possibly be done.
Then again, one could also choose which character to use on the fly based on the precise meaning of what they’re trying to convey, but I’m not sure how keeping that is with the “spirit” of Toki Pona. Could be fun to read and write, though!
Literally means “sub–”, like as a prefix, but is used pretty often to just make an “a” sound in proper nouns.
I considered 選, but 択 is simpler to write.
You might recognize this as the kanji for shinobi, but it can also mean “endure”. I went with this because my original choice, 待, was much too close in appearance to 持, which I chose for jo; and because 忍 is pretty visually distinct from many of the other choices I’ve made here.
Okay so in Japanese they use the hiragana を to mark a direct object. The katakana version, ヲ originated from the kanji 乎. As far as I can tell, this character is only used to refer to a specific kind of marking used to aid reading classical Chinese writings. (The hiragana version originated from 遠, which means “far, distant”.)
Literally refers to addition in a mathematical sense. But “and” is not usually written in kanji in Japanese.
神 (god) is used as a slang term to mean something great or fantastic. Kind of like saying “god-tier” in English, I guess? I feel like it has the same vibe as epiku.
Hopefully not to be confused with insa.
This character is the origin of the hiragana ん.
This is the character that the hiragana and katakana お and オ were based on.
I’m not super thrilled that the default third-person pronoun in Japanese means “he/him”, and “she/her” is formed by adding the character for “woman” to it. But then, it turns out that 彼 can also (rarely) be used for あれ “it, that”, which is also in keeping with the definition of ona.
Look, I could have used 丸, but how could I resist?
Can mean “queer” as in “strange”, but can also mean “exciting”, “charming”, “miraculous”. For lack of any actual kanji that refer to transgender people, I like this option.
Maybe? I don’t know what to do here. Japanese is very circumspect about this kind of thing. Could be confused with olin by someone not expecting this.