marking diaresis and accent

[john]

They agree that high tone should be written in certain contexts, but
when the vowel is already marked with diaeresis, there isn't any obvious
way to write it. Adding both diaeresis AND an accent mark over vowels
would get too crowded, no one wants this. 

John 

On 03.09.2012 17:08,
Claire Bowern wrote: 

> Why not just use one of the many unicode fonts
that allows combining
> diacritics? That includes Times New Roman.
>
More philosophically, there's a long tradition in orthography design
>
of outsiders mandating solutions which don't get used for reasons
>
which ultimately have little to do with orthography itself. It sounds
>
like you already have agreement on how speakers would like this to be
>
represented, so why not use that and get the technology to work for
>
you?
> Claire
> 
> On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 9:52 AM, john
<john at research.haifa.ac.il> wrote:
> 
>> 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