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kalama |
Toki Pona has a very simple sound system. There are only 9 consonants and 5 vowels.
Every letter is always pronounced the same, regardless of what comes before or after it. Toki Pona is written all in lowercase, even in the beginning of a sentence. A capital letter is used for proper names of people and places.
Because Toki Pona has so few sounds to distinguish from one another, the range of a single Toki Pona sound can often span more than one English sound.
The 9 all pronounced as one would assume in English, except j, which represents a "y" sound.
| p | like p or b | |
| t | like t or d | |
| k | like k or hard g | |
| s | like s or z | |
| m | as in English | |
| n | as in English* | |
| l | like Spanish l or r; English l is also acceptable | |
| w | as in English | |
| j | like y |
*When n appears at the end of a syllable, it represents any nasal consonant. It is freely assimilated to the following consonant, i.e. nanpa sounds like nampa, and the n in ma Sonko sounds like a velar ng sound.
There are five vowel sounds. They correspond loosely to the five vowels of Spanish, Esperanto, Japanese, Croatian, or Hebrew. Toki Pona does not distinguish between long or short vowels.
| a | as in father | |
| e | as in get | |
| i | as in machine | |
| o | as in more | |
| u | as in food |
The first syllable of a word is stressed.
There are no set rules for sentence intonation. It is not necessary to raise the tone in questions as we do in English, however there is also nothing wrong in doing so.
Syllables have a very simple structure: consonant + vowel + (optional n)
Examples: kama, pona, kepeken, nasin, sinpin, Sonko, sewi
The first syllable of a word can begin without a consonant. n cannot occur at the end of a syllable if the next one begins with m or n. The following syllables are impossible: ji(n) wu(n) wo(n) ti(n). (The ungrammatical sequence ti becomes si in loan words.)
Theoretically, these rules allow a total of 92 possible one-syllabe words, 6624 possible two-syllable words, and 476,928 possible three-syllables. In practice, however, the entire language has only 118 words.
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