marking diaresis and accent

[john]

Hi Pam, 

I briefly suggested this to them last week (among other
suggestions). The objection raised was that the circumflex has been
traditionally used by linguists working on Dinka (and I think Nilotic
languages in general) to mark falling tone. This has never been used in
the orthography but unfortunately the Dinkas who would be deciding
whether to accept this have I think gotten used to this notation. It's
especially unfortunate because they have considerable difficulty even
perceiving falling tone, and the situations in which it's used differ
radically from dialect to dialect (unlike the cases in which I've
convinced them to use high tone marking, which are the same in all
dialects), so the category of falling tone is for practical purposes
orthographically useless. I agree that it's a pretty iconic way to
combine umlaut and acute accent, and it's more familiar to them that the
Hungarian long umlaut. I am going to try to suggest it again. Maybe if I
can get all of the foreign linguists working on Dinka (like 5 of us) to
suggest this notation they'll accept it. 

Thanks and best wishes,


John 

On 03.09.2012 16:35, Pamela Munro wrote: 

> I have used a
circumflex to mark stressed (normally shown with acute ´) on vowels that
have a diaresis to show quality -- thus (if these transmit) in Garifuna
the sixth vowel (high back unrounded) is written ü (u umlaut) and I
write a stressed one as û (u circumflex). This is pretty iconic.
> 
>
Pam
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
> Pamela Munro
> Professor, Department of
Linguistics
> UCLA Box 951543
> Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
> 
> On Sep
3, 2012, at 1:06 PM, john <john at research.haifa.ac.il> wrote:
> 
>> Dear
Funknetters, On my recent trip to South Sudan, I managed to convinced a
group of Dinka language specialists that it would be a good idea to mark
tone in a limited number of contexts (specifically high tone in specific
grammatical contexts which are always associated in high tone in all
forms and all dialects). This would be pretty rare, occurring on maybe 1
or 2 percent of the vowels. The problem is that they already mark voice
quality with diaresis (aka umlauts, two dots over the vowel), and this
occurs on about a third of the vowels. The most common way to mark tone
in African languages is with an acute accent, but this would create a
complication in that some vowels would need to be marked for both voice
quality AND tone. This would be a bit of a mess, aside from which I
don't know of any fonts which have such a symbol. I thought of using the
Hungarian long umlaut (basically two parallel acute accents) to mark
both diaresis and acute accent simultaneously (this is the diacritic
function it has in Hungarian, although both of the linguistic functions
are completely different). This was not a great hit with the Dinkas, I
guess because they'd never seen it before, but I suppose they might
accept it if they were given some kind of keyboard demonstration showing
that it really isn't so complicated. Another difficulty is that in
Hungarian at least this symbol is only used over and , but in Dinka it
would have to be used over all 7 vowels (the five basic ones and also ɔ
and ɛ, which are part of the regular orthography). Do any of you have
any ideas of how to deal with this problem of marking diaresis and tone
(it can be something other than acute accent, I don't really care)
simultaneously and/or the associated problem of how to write it on a
computer keyboard? Thanks, John