Orthography and tone: a tone-system typology with implications for orthography development

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Issue Date: 
2014
Is Part Of Series: 
Publications in Language Use and Education 6
Extent: 
Pages 49-72
Description: 
Chapter 4 of "Developing Orthographies for Unwritten Languages," Publications in Language Use and Education 6. Some chapters of this book were presented as papers at the LSA Symposium in 2011.
The majority of the world's languages are tone languages. Words consist of consonants, vowels, and tonal melodies, each of which may serve to indicate minimal distinctions, both in the lexicon and in the grammar.... This paper describes various ways in which tone can be marked in an orthography. Following that, it focuses on two main types of languages: those with "stable" tone and those in which tones change according to the tonal context. In languages of the first type, tone generally has a heavy functional load, both lexically and grammatically. For these languages, writing tone on every syllable is possible and straightforward. In languages of the second type, that is languages with tonal sandhi rules, it is most important that grammatical distinctions are differentiated by tone marking. Various ways of representing grammatical tone distinctions in an orthography are presented.
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Published
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Cahill, Michael and Keren Rice, editors
2014
Entry Number: 
56608