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Re: Marking tones in conlangs

From:Katya <snapping.dragon@...>
Date:Tuesday, February 7, 2006, 18:23
On 2/7/06, Joseph B. <darkmoonman@...> wrote:
> > I'm curious to know how others here mark tones in any tonal conlangs they > have created. > > Thanks.
I've tried a lot of different ways. Some are - Using the diacritics that others have mentioned. I think this is the best way if you want your transcription system to be as obvious as possible. I've had some langs (phonologies, really) that already needed some of those diacritics, so it was just a matter of tinkering around until I found something that was unambiguous and not too bizarre. Once I toyed with using diacritics both above and below, such as macron above for level high tone, macron below for level low tone, and then additional acute and grave accents above for the other tones. For a different lang with only high, low, and mid (unmarked) tones, I used a dot below and above, which was both silly and pretty looking. For a while I was working on one conlang that had too many diacritics already, and I tried using a following e to mark low tone and a following y to mark a high tone. I abandoned this lang so I didn't work on that idea any further. I haven't really been happy with any of the ways of marking tones except the first three that I've mentioned, though. I don't really like using a transcription system that seems to bizarre to me. -- Katya