Re: Tone Marks

>Date:    Sun, 17 Feb 2002 22:26:15 -0800
>From:    Jim Grossmann <steven@...>
>Subject: Tone Marks
>
>I'm offering this post in case anyone else is struggling with tone marks.
I am very much. I have a language with two register tones, just like you.
I dislike using numbers, so I used the acute accent ` to indicate low tone,
high one being not marked. It works, but still I am looking for more
elegant solutions.

<snip>
>However, with tens of pages in
>Word, I've decided to come up with my own tone marking scheme.   It's not
>really phonetic:   the tone marks don't mark vowel letters.   But this
>system has two virtues:  it requires no special characters, and presents the
>reader with more visual variety than the accent marks I used before.
I like your system: just three symbols to over all situations

>I'm sure that others have thought of different ways to convey tone without
>using special characters.   I hope that all you others post too.
Lately I was looking into my notes of Papiamentu. Papiamentu has a distinct
low tone in (especially) verbs. Since this is not written or marked in any way
in the official orthography, I wrote a small dot under the vowel having low tone.

It still looks good, so I am going to try this with my language. Unfortunately
there are no fonts making this possible. I asked Boudewijn to create a font
for me with vowels having a dot below. As soon as I have results, I'll show you.

Rob