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lipu sona pona | toki pona personal style

Different people have different ideas about how toki pona is supposed to work. Given the language’s intentionally minimalist grammar and vocabulary, that’s to be expected. Here’s a list of my personal preferences and phrases that I use commonly.

In sentences that only have "mi" or "sina" as a subject, but several predicates (verbs or adjectives that would otherwise be separated by "li", I separate the sentence into two:

mi pali. mi moku. - I work and eat.

I try to avoid using "en" anywhere other than the subect, but tolerate using it in phrases that follow "pi".

When I use "kepeken" as a verb ("to use") instead of a preposition ("using, with the help of"), I include the object marker "e" the same way I would with other verbs.

I may insert commas as pauses to differentiate between ambiguous phrases or to help in reading possibly confusing sentences. For example:

mi pana e tomo tawa sina. - I give your car.

mi pana e tomo, tawa sina. - I give you a house.

mi pana e tomo tawa, tawa sina. - I give a car to you.

I insert commas after "la" in all circumstances:

ken la, mi ken pali. - Maybe I can work.

tomo pali li open la, mi ken pali. - If the office is open, I can work.

I use "open" and "pini" as pre-verbs meaning "begin (doing smth)" "finish/stop (doing something)".

When a numeral is used as a number, I usually write it with Arabic numerals. If it's an ordinal number, the word "nanpa" may be represented with a number sign (#).

I don't use "pi" before "nanpa" if it's followed by an ordinal number.

I use "pu" as all possible parts of speech, not just as a verb.