combining words into new words like that is reallllly weird for toki pona is my main issue
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Think of it a a proper noun loaned from what non-Tokipona speakers call it? Then the problem instead becomes that it's not an endonym. And I think that's the real issue, that toki pona doesn't really have an endonym and the only way to get one would be to create it.
toki pu is probably the closest thing, but what about toki ku then? Or toki pi nasin mi, if that diverges from pu but is otherwise recognizable Toki Pona.
Not necessarily a serious suggestion, but maybe the endonym could be Pona? Making the language "toki Pona" 
pona already matches toki pona's design goals semantically and this is why i think it's not a lexicalized compound
ah, to be clear I meant Pona, as a proper adjective
I believe the vibe of this thread that "toki pona" is not lexicalized, but "Pona" could be designated as an endonym, meaning that the language could be described as "toki Pona" in addition to the non-lexicalized "toki pona"
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my take on this is that you could analyze it that way but ultimately the orthography is not that important here
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yeah the orthography would just be written clarification. ultimately, when you speak, pona and Pona are the exact same; I think things like this often steer me away from using certain fringe conventions in sitelen pona e.g. using lengths of long glyphs to demarcate nesting, using different alt glyphs for different particular meanings of the same word
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