marking diaresis and accent

[Wallace Chafe]

John (who?)

For whatever it's worth, Seneca is written with the umlaut for nasalized 
vowels (nostrils), and it's quite possible to add a raised accent mark 
(either acute or grave) that fits on top of the two dots. It's possible 
with Times New Roman, and probably other fonts.

Wally Chafe

--On Monday, September 03, 2012 4:52 PM +0300 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
>> 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 ?
> and ?, 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
>
>