marking diaresis and accent

[Benjamin Chauvette]

Have you considered using digraphs instead of diacritics, like in Cantonese
Pinyin?

For example, it looks like the Dinka orthography already uses <h>
exclusively for consonantal digraphs, so the adopting it for tonal digraphs
wouldn't be much of a stretch. Speakers could even use apostrophes or
hyphens, if they aren't used elsewhere in the orthography.

Best,
Ben Chauvette

On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 6:06 AM, 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 <u> and <o>, 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
>
>
>