[RNLD] Using diacritics

[Stephen Morey]

Dear RNLD members,

I am working with a language - Lainong in Northern Myanmar - where the community have decided to write using a Roman orthography and with three diacritics for tones.

The tones are
low tone (which is marked by combining grave accent 0300 on the vowel)
high tone (unmarked)
mid tone (marked by combing macron 0304 on the vowel)
and
stop tone (= glottal stop) marked by prime 2032) after the vowel.

I have two questions.

1) What is the best way of setting up data entry for members of this community. They are using Word. Is it better to make a special keyboard which they can shift to, or to set up short cut keys in word?
(there is already the Cntrl ` shortcut for the grave accent.)

2) When these combinations are entered, is it still possible to search for all examples of the grave accent, or do the characters combine such that any search needs to be separately for ù ì à ò è (it seems to me the latter). If I make a keyboard with Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator that has a separate key stroke for each of the three diacritics, will they not combine and then be searchable?

Stephen


Stephen Morey
Australian Research Council Future Fellow
Centre for Research on Language Diversity
La Trobe University
Website: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/about/staff/profile?uname=SMorey<http://www.latrobe.edu.au/rclt/StaffPages/morey.htm>

Language data website: http://sealang.net/assam
Dictionary websites: http://sealang.net/ahom;  http://sealang.net/singpho; http://sealang.net/phake

Linguistic data archived at::
DoBeS:  http://www.mpi.nl/DoBeS and follow a link to projects, then Tangsa, Tai and Singpho in North East India
ELAR: http://elar.soas.ac.uk
PARADISEC:  http://www.paradisec.org.au

North East Indian Linguistics Society: http://sealang.net/neils
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