What is sitelen Kuwi?
Sitelen Kuwi, also referred to by some as sitelen leko, is a script for toki pona. I originally designed this script for a separate project that was similar to toki pona functionally, but after putting the project on hiatus, I decided to repurpose the script here.
What Niche Does sitelen Kuwi Fill?
Sitelen Kuwi has its own visual identity and writing style apart from sitelen pona and sitelen suwi. It is for those who want to experiment with something new while staying true to the essence and structure of toki pona. My hope is that sitelen Kuwi will find its own niche, just as sitelen suwi has, and live in tandem with sitelen pona, sitelen Lasina, and all other sitelen the community has come to adore.
What were my goals when creating this script?
For a very long time I have been drawn to the idea of creating a new script for toki pona. Written language is my passion beyond all else; I love seeing new and innovative ways to mark thoughts on paper and finding something beautiful in the different shapes of other languages, and through this passion I wanted to contribute to toki pona. But I wanted to do something that hasn't been done before, so I needed to approach it differently than I would any other project of mine. So I approached it from two different angles: Adding Contrast and Visual Parsing. but what does this mean?
Adding Contrast
Words in toki pona naturally carry some ambiguity, This is a key feature of the language and part of why many have fallen inlove with it. But what if there was a way to eliminate some ambiguity by creating additional contrast between ideas in written communication? What If we could do this without changing the way the language functions at all? What if, when reading and writing (which are the main ways through which users consume material for toki pona), there were intuitive visual clues that could create this contrast? These are questions I toyed with in many different ways in my many different attempts to create a new writing system.
Visual Parsing
I consider toki pona to have three major categories for the syntactic role a word can play:
- particles,
- content words, and
- (what I call) function words.
What does this have to do with visual parsing? Well, let’s take a detour to Japanese and try to understand where I’m coming from. For those of you who unfamiliar with how the language works, Japanese combines three separate writing systems, each with their own function for written communication. The writing systems are as follows:
- Kanji are characters borrowed from Chinese which carry semantic meaning.
- For example, 魚 is the character for fish. This character represents a meaning, but not necessarily a pronunciation.
- Hiragana is script native to Japan (although derived from cursive Kanji) that represents the language phonetically.
- For example, the characters ひらがな each represent one syllable, and when put together, they make up the word "hiragana".
- Katakana is similar in function to Hiragana but different in use. It is mainly used for more recent loan words (as compared to Kanji).
Along with just the functional differences, there are also clear visual differences: Kanji tend to be more complex with many straight and angled lines while Hiragana tend to be curvier and more simple in comparison. Here is an example with Kanji in red and Hiragana in blue:
私は食堂で食べます。
Hopefully, it is clear from this example how these visual cues can quickly tell the reader where semantic meaning ends and grammar begins, which is exactly what I wanted to have as well. I wanted visual cues that could quickly tell the reader what part of toki pona’s grammatical patterns they are looking at.
Summary
Sitelen Kuwi is a project I undertook to create a script that is much easier to parse grammatically, such that readers can easily pick up on the functions and relationships of different words through orthography alone. Of course, this does not take away from my other objective of creating something I personally find aesthetically pleasing and fun to play with.