Re: Marking tones in conlangs

I haven't used tone in my conlangs, mostly because I have no ability
to hear or make tonal distinctions.  But I like the diacritics for
Romanization.  I would give the differently-intoned vowels different
symbols in the native orthography.

To me, acute for rising and grave for falling make more sense visually
than the "arrows" of caron/circumflex. I like the idea of macron above
for high steady and macron below for low steady.  I would also put the
acute/grave below if there were a distinct low+rising or low+falling
tone.

On 2/7/06, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
> Joseph B. wrote:
> > I'm curious to know how others here mark tones in any tonal conlangs
> > they have created.
> >
> > Thanks.
>
> If I've got a language with level tones, I'll use acute for high tone
> and grave for low tone (in romanization). Double acutes and double
> graves can be used for languages with more than 3 level tones (although
> I don't have any of those yet...). In the native scripts, there are
> distinct letters for vowel sounds with different tones (one letter for à
> and a different letter for á, for instance).
>
> Contour tones in romanization would be marked with a circumflex
> (falling) or wedge/caron (rising). If there's a difference between high
> rising and low rising, the high rising tone is marked with double acute
> and the low rising with a wedge. High falling is a circumflex and low
> falling is a double grave.
>
> That's the general idea, but there are complications. Yasaro has a pitch
> accent system, where the stressed vowel can be long or short, rising or
> falling. The rising accent indicates a historical stress on the final
> syllable, which shifted back to the next-to-last syllable (like in
> Serbo-Croatian). I use an acute accent for the short rising stress and a
> wedge for long rising; grave for short falling and circumflex for long
> falling.
>

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>