THEORY: Tone marking (Was Re: THEORY: Mandarin vowel phonology)

>>>>>>
Danny Wier scripsit:

> Where have I heard of Gwoyeu Romatzyh before?  Tell me more about it!
It was invented by Yuen Ren Chao, and it's a tonal-spelling system,
which hard-codes the tone into each syllable using special spelling
conventions instead of leaving it as an easily-lost diacritic.
Thus, ma1 = "ma", ma2 = "mar" (GR uses -l instead of -r for retroflexion),
ma3 = "maa", ma4 = "mah".  It's not as simple as "suffix -r, double, suffix -h",
though.
<<<<<<
There's another natlang that does that in romanisation, I can't think of the
name of it off the top of my head, (Hmoob-something?).  There are [quite a few]
tones, all of which are romanised by following the syllable with a seemingly
random letter of the alphabet.  The script writes two glyphs per syllable, IIRC
it's the CV component in the first glyph, with tone and (post?)nasalisation in
the second glyph.  Someone with the very excellent [Daniels 1996] should be able
to clarify this a bit better.  I have a copy, but it's not at work.

Despite the (non-canonical) sources I've seen to the contrary, this seems like a
likely way for the Bajoran (or Old Bajoran?) scripts to work.  Does anyone have
any canon(-ish) sources for Trek langs other than tlhIngan Hol, by the way?






*************************************************************
This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential
and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity
to whom they are addressed.
If you have received this email in error please notify the
sender. This footnote also confirms that this email message
has been scanned for the presence of computer viruses.
*************************************************************