Marking Grammatical Tone In Orthographies: Issues And Challenges

Abstract

When the concept of how to mark tone in an orthography arises, usually the first thought is to attend to the lexical tone. However, many African languages also employ grammatical tone, and how to indicate this in a practical orthography can involve entirely different approaches. These alternative approaches have significant advantages, but also traps for the unwary. Grammatical tone distinguishes constructions that are otherwise ambiguous, but unlike minimal pairs for lexical tone, contextual clues for disambiguation involving grammatical tone are often absent. Here different strategies for marking are presented, especially semiographic strategies, indicating meaning rather than the phonetics. I also present a warning about using non-Unicode characters.