Toki Pona is a minimalist constructed language created by Sonja Lang, with only 137 essential words. It has a thriving community online, can be learned in a couple of weeks, and is very fun to use. Because it has so few words, the most common writing system for it (other than the Latin alphabet) is a logography (one symbol per word) called sitelen pona.
A 14-segment display is a way of showing alphanumeric characters with very few display elements. It looks a lot like the familiar 7-segment display you'd see in a digital clock, but a 7-segment display can't display all the letters of the alphabet. 14 segments is just enough to display every number and letter (although it's not quite enough to get both upper and lower case with full recognizability) and many symbols.
Without further ado, here is the symbol chart for sitelen palisa:
The 14-segment display is pretty limited -- it was designed for 36 alphanumeric characters and a handful of symbols, and I'm trying to cram 137 visually distinct and meaningful glyphs into it. So I had to make a bunch of compromises.
My order of operations looked something like this:
- If it's possible to just do the sitelen pona glyph, do that.
- Otherwise, if it's possible to use the sitelen pona pona glyph, do that. Sitelen pona pona is a simplified version of sitelen pona that changed a fair number of glyph shapes to increase readability -- I like it, but I also fully recognize that it's sufficiently different to cause experienced sitelen pona readers difficulty. That said, a lot of the changes for sitelen pona pona worked very well here.
- If neither of those is possible, just try to create something evocative that doesn't step on something else.
Most of the glyphs fall into 1) or 2), but I'll talk about my specific thought processes for other ones here.
- akesi, pipi: Too complex. I stuck with the "lots of legs" for pipi and went in a rounder, more froglike direction for akesi.
- awen, kama, tawa: these all use variations on the same "feet" radical in sitelen pona, so I did a simplified version of the same thing. The top stem "leans" in the direction of motion.
- e: Not possible to get across the classic "double li" shape, so I tried to evoke "li but with more stuff."
- jasima, kon, telo: Glyphs with multiple squiggles got simplified to a single squiggle.
- jelo, kule, laso, loje, pimeja, walo: All the color words in sitelen pona share a triangular radical, so I did something similar. The word "kule" is just the radical -- a triangle with a line atop. There's a vertical riser added for (from left to right) laso, loje, jelo. This order was chosen because "cyan magenta yellow" is the usual order for secondary colors. The glyph for walo is a line above indicating "all", and the glyph for pimeja is the kule glyph with a line through it.
- kalama, moku, uta: I had to change the uta radical from a closed semicircle to an open arc in some places. Frustratingly, I couldn't do the same for uta itself because of lili, suli, and pona.
- kijetesantakalu, mu, musi: Musi is basically its sitelen pona design, but that's not super clear because the two loops touch each other, and because it looks like a cat face. I added a line to mu to indicate the middle dot and it really looked like a cat face. Then I recognized serendipity when I saw it and added eye-mask lines to make kijetesantakalu. It looks enough like a raccoon face to make me smile, anyway.
- kiwen: Can't do the diamond shape, so instead it's reminiscent of a chisel or fang or maybe a stalactite?
- ko: It's supposed to look like it's dented, like a lump of clay that's been struck.
- kokosila: A star, to represent the Esperanto roots of the term.
- lanpan: Went with the inverted pana shape instead of the other one.
- leko: Had to offset the squares a little bit but I think it gets the idea across.
- lipu: The square is already ijo, and rather than making ijo more complicated, I added a middle line to lipu to make it look like an open book.
- lukin: Can't do a center dot, so the eye is looking downwards.
- meli, mije, tonsi: No great way to do any of these three glyphs, so I took a different approach and modeled them off the three arms of the transgender symbol (⚧).
- moli: Kind of a combination of the "two x in circle" sitelen pona and the "circle in big X" sitelen pona pona.
- n: Most glyphs I've seen for this are a variant on the "exclamation point radical" but I figured this is rare enough in writing that I could get away with just using a little n.
- olin: This one was hard. I ended up just adding a center line to pilin to indicate "pilin but more complicated" but I'm not sure it works. One of the glyphs I'm the least happy with.
- palisa: It's a slightly bent stick.
- poki: Of all the ones I had to create from scratch, I think I like this one the best. It's a slightly open box or picnic basket.
- sama: Went with a mathematical triple-equals to differentiate from the colon.
- selo: Had to bend the four legs of the figure.
- sike: Without a great way of denoting a circle that didn't interfere with ijo, lipu, or leko, I went with a "circlular arrow" motif to denote a cycle.
- suno: A sunrise.
- supa: Had trouble differentiating from nena, so I went with a three legged stool.
- tomo: Similar problems with kiwen -- pentagons are just not a shape 14 segment displays are suited for. I opted for this kind of church-and-steeple or castle-and-tower design.
- brackets: The brackets to indicate a name cartouche are supposed to look like the ends of a banner.