marking diaresis and accent

Mike Cahill mike_cahill at sil.org
Mon Sep 3 15:12:57 UTC 2012


Yes, there's font solutions that can combine diacritics, but crucially, for any solution to be used, it must have buy-in by the actual users. It's good that the Dinka (at least some of them) see the need - that's a huge step. 

I think there may be a totally different approach possible here, since you're talking about "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)." So far, everyone has focused on the phonetically high tone, and how to mark it, localizing the tone mark on that particular vowel. Another possibility, since you're talking about a grammatical construction, is to mark that particular grammatical construction. Once the Dinka know that it's that construction, then they will pronounce it the way that construction is pronounced. 

Not knowing what construction you're talking about, I can't be too specific on suggestions, but one type of example that's been used is an otherwise unused letter or punctuation mark at the beginning of the sentence or word to mark a specific grammatical construction. 

This also has the advantage that in writing, they'll use that symbol (assuming it's been taught well). One problem with trying to mark a phonetic high tone in a very few contexts is that people may have trouble in writing, to decide when to mark high tone and when not to, and they'll probably end up not marking at all, not a desirable outcome.

Best to you,

Mike Cahill

-----Original Message-----
From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [mailto:funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of john
Sent: Monday, September 03, 2012 9:34 AM
To: Claire Bowern
Cc: Pamela Munro; funknet at mailman.rice.edu
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] marking diaresis and accent

 

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

 



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