The romamization of a complex tone system

Hi all,

I'm a new member here so I will start with an
introduction.
Languages are somewhat of a hobby for me, and in
another life I would
love to be a linguist.  My real career is in music,
classical
composition.  Throughout my life, mostly due to
Tolkien and SciFi, I
have been interested in con-langs, so I've decided to
give it a try.

Naturally, given my training in music, I am interested
in pitch and
tonality in language.  As I have begun to tackle this,
creating the
phonology, alphabet and considering how pitch will be
used and what
it will express, I have been stuck on the problem of
representing a
relatively complex tonal system in roman characters.
I have a
general knowledge of Chinese and an understanding of
the pinyin
system, which works fine for 4 tones and short words.
However if the
number of tones exceeds this, say 12 tones in a
variety of
combinations, I start to run out of meaningful roman
characters,
there are only so many a's!  Using numerals would
become excessive,
especially if I decide to mark every, or every other,
syllable.  I
don't think I would like to read a word like:
     ha3tse7sha1
I would think that the above would simply get annoying
and confusing.
I am creating an alphabet with the Hebrew torah trope
system in
mind.  But for someone checking the lang out casually,
I cannot
expect them to care about an alphabet system too much.

So if anyone has any suggestions, or could point out
something I've
missed, thanks.
J.



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - Coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games
http://sports.yahoo.com

Replies