Re: HELP: Hiksi Tone Spelling--ENTER AND WIN!!

JS Bangs scripsit:

> I invite anyone to give
> suggestions on how it could be possibly crammed into the 26-odd characters
> of the Latin alphabet.
I'm going to assume that the presently documented consonant set holds,
and that the never-documented vowels require only the letters a,e,i,o,u.
I favor tonal spellings, and I propose using the letters r, b, d, j
to represent them.  As a matter of convenience, g can be used for /N/
(as in Samoan) and nk for /Nk/, thus eliminating all letters outside a-z.

> There are six tones in Hiksi, plus a vowel length distinction that's
> relevant.  For short vowels there is a simple two-way distinction: High
> tone v. low tone.  For long vowels all six tones come into play:
>
> Low (22), Rising (24), Mid (33), High (55), High-falling (453), Low-falling (231)
>
> All words contain a tone break, before which are "upper" tones and after
> which are "lower" tones.
The letter -r- is used to mark the position of the tone break.  If the
tone break is at the beginning of the word, no -r- appears in it.
The tone letters -b, -j, -d appear after the vowel nucleus, but before
any letter -r-.

Before the break, short syllables have no tonal letter (and are high);
long syllables are marked with -b if high, -j if high-falling, and -d if rising.
After the break, short syllables have no tonal letter (and are low);
long syllables are marked with -b if mid, -j if low-falling, and -d if low.
Because of the alignment, moving the break requires only moving the -r-,
leaving the tone letters alone.

In the real-world Hmong romanization, -b means high tone and -d low;
in this system they mean the highest and lowest variants of the upper and
lower tone groups respectively.  -j is high-falling in Hmong, which has no
low-falling tone; in this system -j is used for both falling tones.
For example,  "Hmong" in Hmong orthography is "hmoob", where "oo" is
nasalized "o", and "b" is high-level tone.

Tonal spelling takes some getting used to for people who have the
letter = phoneme (more or less) equation in their heads, but is
very useful in Hmong orthography as well as Yi romanization (the
native Yi orthography is a tone-syllabary with 1100+ glyphs).

        The great value of [tonal spelling] is that tonal
        distinctions are ineradicably built into the spelling
        of all syllables, and so anyone who can remember
        the letters of the alphabet can remember the tones
        of the words, which seems to be much easier for many
        Westerners than remembering diacritic marks. Unlike
        with [other systems] which allow one to drop the
        diacritic marks or tone numbers, one is forced by
        [tonal spelling] to remember the tones when writing,
        otherwise the words cannot be expressed.
                --David Prager Banner, defending Gwoyeu Romatzyh

--
John Cowan                                <jcowan@...>
http://www.reutershealth.com              http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Yakka foob mog.  Grug pubbawup zink wattoom gazork.  Chumble spuzz.
    -- Calvin, giving Newton's First Law "in his own words"