Adding Additional Contrast to toki pona

A lot of what makes this sitelen special, in my opinion, is that it gives us the ability to create more contrast without changing toki pona grammatically or in any other way. In written toki pona, sometimes, the role content words play in a sentence can be slightly unclear. Spoken speech, on the other hand, comes with more context and the ability to verbally stress certain ideas and ask your conversation partner for more information when you feel you don't understand. So because written communication heavily lacks these important queues, a reader may occasionally be left unsure what the writer had intended to say. The good news is, there is a "solution" to this built right into the structure of sitelen Kuwi.

To exemplify this, take this sentence in toki pona:

o pana e sitelen tawa mi

Most likely the intention of this sentence would be very clear based on context. Perhaps there is an photo on a chair and the speaker says "o pana e sitelen tawa mi." There is no doubt what's being asked. OR perhaps the speaker has created a video and is ready to have a publisher post it online. Again the context tells us all we need to know. But That doesn't mean we can't add additional contrast when writing to make such distinctions clear via orthography instead of context.

Our initial interpretation, passing a photo over:

o pana e sitelen tawa mi opana- esitelen- tawa- mi-

And our second interpretation, publishing a video:

o pana e sitelen tawa mi opana- esitelentawa mi-

As you can see, because the bottom half of a block defines a word as a modifier for the top half, in our second interpretation "tawa" can't be acting as anything but an adjective for "sitelen," while in the first interpretation we can use - after "sitelen" to create a contrast between the words, making it impossible to interpret tawa as modifier, leaving it as a preposition as the only option. Again, context will almost always account for this in a conversation, but being able to create this contrast in orthography and eliminating the need for context in some situations is something I think is just fun and cool.

1st and 2nd Person Pronouns:

Since the pronouns “mi” and “sina” are not directly followed by “li,” this manifests itself in an interesting way in sitelen Kuwi, as this is the only time the bottom half of a block may not necessarily be interpreted as a modifier. Instead, one block alone can constitute a whole clause, like "mi moku":

mimoku

However, when the predicate that follows “mi” or “sina” contains a modifier, this predicate phrase should be separated from the pronoun completely using -, such as in "mi soweli ala:

mi- soweliala

Below is not the recommended way to express this misoweli ala-

Using "lon"

Similar to what we saw with "tawa" above, "lon" can act as a modifier when occupying the bottom half of a block or as a preposition when occupying the top half, such as in "soweli lon" (a real animal):

sowelilon

or "...e soweli lon tomo mi" ("an animal in my house") esoweli- lon- tomomi

As seen above, when "lon" acts as a stand alone preposition, it will take -, but when "lon" defines the following content word as a location such as "insa" or "poka," that new content word will occupy the bottom half of the lon block. Otherwise, it will be interpreted as a noun. Take this sentence as an example: "telo loje li tawa lon insa mi"

teloloje litawa- loninsa mi- ("blood is flowing inside me")

teloloje litawa- lon- insami ("blood is trickling down my guts")(your guts aren't necessarily inside you, they may be on the gound)

Spacing

Spacing is the final way in which we can create more contrast between concepts within sitelen Kuwi. Because content words, particles, and function words are all easy to distinguish visually, spaces are not exactly necessary:

sowelisina liwilemoku etelokili anu seme-?

sowelisinaliwilemokuetelokilianuseme-?

However, spaces can still be used to group and separate ideas to further mark out connections and boundaries. For example, the sentence "waso lili mute en soweli suli tu wan li moku ala moku e kili jelo jaki?" could be separated like this:

wasolilimute- en sowelisulituwan limokualamoku- ekilijelojaki-?