Re: Marking tones in conlangs

Joseph B. wrote:
> I'm curious to know how others here mark tones in any tonal conlangs they
> have created.
>
Gwr is monosyllabic and has 5 tones: high, high-falling, mid, low,
low-rising. In my ever-growing wordlist, I'm using XXX-h/-f/-m/-l/-r resp.

In html, I use superscript h/f/m/l/r or 5/4/3/l/2 resp. (with a slight bias
toward the letters since they're obvious) and those seem to be the clearest
and least likely to lead to confused readings. As I recall, David Peterson's
Sheli used numbers, but in a different order.

I tried using diacritics, but since two vowels aren't standard (r and ÿ
y-umlaut) (and for a while I couldn't do unicode things like macron and
breve), that didn't work. Apparently there's a way to get diacritics onto
ANY letter, but I haven't figured that out :-(

I tried using acute for high, circumflex or \ for falling, no mark for mid,
grave for low, and / for low-rising. Again, the problem of r and ÿ. Hmm, one
could use 0175 ¯ for high, \ falling, nothing or - for mid, _ for low, / for
low rising, but they clutter up text, I think; something more mnemonic
(letters or numbers) is clearer and more immediately understandable.

The native script will have special diacritics, but so far proper placement
has been a problem.

Vietnamese as I recall uses a variety of diacritics, including dot-under;
but some vowels require two IIRC.

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