[Lexicog] Tone languages in Toolbox/Shoebox

[neduchi at NETSCAPE.NET]

Dear  Sophie Salffner and Stuart McGill,

You are not alone in your problem; and the solution is also not around 
the corner!

My first language, Igbo, is also a tone language. The identified tones 
are High, Low, and Downstep; marked with < ´ >, < `>, and < - > 
respectively. I have not found ANY software that can handle a 
combination of the tone marks with specific alphabets as single units. 
I have explored some options and found out the following:

(1) Unicode:
The Unicode angle has been closed. It is no longer possible to add such 
combined symbols/characters as 'new' Unicode character.

(2) Fonts and Operating Systems:
You can use specific Unicode-based fonts, like Doulos, CODE2000, 
Gentium etc. to achieve this character combination. It works fine on 
Windows OS with service park 2; Microsoft programs on the system also 
handle the combined characters as single units. But that's not of much 
help to the linguist: other software not produced by Microsoft do not 
work that find.

(3) Font Solution:
Since the Unicode angle has been blocked, the buck has actually been 
passed to those involved in "Font Design". It is now the font 
developers that are to design the identified characters as 
"pre-composed" characters. A font like "Doulos" should then contain 
these "pre-composed" characters. That's when Shoebox, Toolbox, or any 
other software can handle them the way we linguists would like it.

On the other hand, since Doulos has now been made available under the 
OpenFont License, 
(http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=OFL), may 
be some font designers might be in the position to add the identified 
characters of African languages as "pre-composed" characters. That 
should be the permanent solution to your problem and MY problem.


Best regards,
Chinedu Uchechukwu
Otto-Friedrich-Universität, Bamberg, Germany.




-----Original Message-----
From: sophie_in_africa <sophie.salffner at gmail.com>
To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
Sent: Fri, 07 Apr 2006 00:11:10 -0000
Subject: [Lexicog]  Tone languages in Toolbox/Shoebox

   Dear fellow linguists,

 we're two PhD students working on African tonal languages for our
 projects and during our preparations for our fieldstay we've
 encountered a few software problems. We hope some of you might be able
 to help us with this.

 We intend to use Toolbox (the follow-up tool to Shoebox) as a software
 program for lexicon building and for interlinear morphemic glossing.
 The problem is that we have not yet found ways to tackle tone in the
 program. In particular we have the following problems

 1. Ways of associating a lexical tone with its tone-bearing unit
 2. How to make Toolbox disambiguate between for example an "a" with
 high tone, an "a" with a mid and an "a" with a low tone. So far we can
 make it "look" right by adding diacritics as secondary characters but
 this does not help for searching, glossing, ... since Toolbox seems to
 ignore secondary characters in for example searching.
 3. How to search a database not just for segmental sounds, e.g. all
 "a", but specifically for "á" etc.
 4. How to deal with grammatical tone, in particular the following
 5. How to enter segmentless tonal morphemes such as tonal melodies for
 tenses of verbs
 6. How to mark up a downstep that has grammatical function
 7. How to include grammatical rules for phonological processes
 8. How to formulate phonological and prosodic rules where tones and
 segments behave differently, for example floating tones like in a
 tense marker "á" where the segment "a" is deleted but the high tone
 stays behind and affects the tone of the following words

 Has anybody encountered similar difficulties? How did you solve the
 problems? What advice can you give us? Do you know alternatives to
 Toolbox that are more suitable for tonal languages?

 We'll happily provide a summary of the replies and post it here.

 Thanks for your support,

 Sophie Salffner and Stuart McGill
 School of Oriental and African Studies





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