[Lexicog] superscripted letters in orthographies

[David Foris]

Most of the 14 Chinantec languages (Otomanguean, Oaxaca, Mexico) use superscript numbers to indicate tone levels and tone glides, although at least one uses subscript numbers.  Some of the more recently developed orthographies, however, have utilised other methods to make these distinctions orthographically.

 

The idea behind the superscripting is to facilitate reading by making the numbers less intrusive to the reader, but to be there when needed to disambiguate tone pairs (and sets); e.g. in Sochiapan Chinantec, maʔ has seven nouns distinguished only by tone/stress (potentially, there are 14 tone/stress distinctions), and almost all verbs distinguish between present and future by a tone/stress change.

 

David Foris

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Crockett [mailto:asigwan at yahoo.com] 
Sent: Monday, 20 September 2004 9:29 a.m.
To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Lexicog] superscripted letters in orthographies

 

A recent comment about superscripted letters caught my attention. Does anyone know of any languages that use superscripted letters in their official orthographies? I imagine this is pretty rare, but I was wondering how rare it is. Of course I’m talking about phonemic differentiations and not something like abbreviations. For example, I mean writing something like tegged and teggwed to differentiate between a normal ‘g’ and a labialized ‘g.’ I don’t mean something like “ 1st. ”

 

Thanks,

Crockett

 


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