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Letters
Now it's time to learn the characters used for the different sounds in Toki Pona. As you will learn later, the letters are combined into blocks, each representing a syllable in the language. This makes it a lot more compact (if you write small) than most Western writing systems.
The Consonants
First you'll learn the symbols for consonants. I've put them in order of how simple they are. Here they are:
K
N
S
T
P
M
L
The Vowels
At this point you may be asking where the "j" and "w" are. Well, in Korean, those letters are a part of the vowel. Huh? You see, the sounds "ja" or "we" are considered a single vowel in the Korean language (palatalized and labialized for the linguists out there). So when writing those sounds with Toki Pona, we have to use a modified vowel rather than two separate characters. As you'll see below, it's a lot easier than it sounds.
Here's the list of vowels, including the palatalized (j + vowel) and labialized (w + vowel) ones:
A
JA
WA
E
JE
WE
I
WI
O
JO
U
JU
As you can see, to add a "j" sound in front of a vowel, you simply add another line to the vowels basic shape. To add a "w" sound in front of a vowel, you add a small shape to the left of the vowel.
You may be wondering why this shape looks like a smaller version of a "u" in all cases but one ("wa"). In the exception, it looks like a small "o". This is because in Korean all vowels are considered either "light" or "dark". The light vowels shown here are "a" and "o". The dark vowels shown here are "e", "i", and "u". When pronouncing them, you can easily imagine why they would have those names. "A" and "o" are much lighter sounding, whereas the others sound darker, pronounced further back in the mouth. The reason for different shapes for labialized vowels is because light vowels can only be combined with light vowels and dark vowels can only be combined with dark vowels. This is why "wa" is literally "oa" and the others ("we" and "wi") are literally "ue" and "ui".
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