Re: The romamization of a complex tone system

Jesse Raccio wrote:
>>>
I have been stuck on the problem of representing a relatively complex tonal
system in roman characters.
[...] 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.
[...]
So if anyone has any suggestions, or could point out something I've missed,
thanks.
<<<

Well, it depends how your language uses tones.  My conlang Telona uses tonal
marks in a high-level way: instead of marking pitch or tone on each
syllable, it marks the whole word as taking one of the allowed pitch
patterns.  The number of these is small enough in Telona to be shown by a
single vowel diacritic per word.

If your conlang has constraints on which patterns of tones can occur within
a word (or even a phrase, I suppose), then marking a pattern rather than a
tone might reduce the number of distinct orthographic representations you
need.

Jonathan.