Strategies for Representing Tone in African Writing Systems--论文代写范文精选

在某些情况下,这可以归因于一个社会语言学，不支持方言文化。在其他情况下,拼字法本身可能是罪魁祸首。如果声调语言很难，很大一部分的原因,要么是设计的人没有足够注意语气的功能,或在正字法中，没有确保信息编码。下面的语言essay代写范文进行详述。

Abstract 
Tone languages provide some interesting challenges for the designers of new orthographies. One approach is to omit tone marks, just as stress is not marked in English (zero marking). Another approach is to do phonemic tone analysis and then make heavy use of diacritic symbols to distinguish the ‘tonemes’ (exhaustive marking). While orthographies based on either system have been successful, this may be thanks to our ability to manage inadequate orthographies rather than to any intrinsic advantage which is afforded by one or the other approach. In many cases, practical experience with both kinds of orthography in sub-Saharan Africa has shown that people have not been able to attain the level of reading and writing fluency that we know to be possible for the orthographies of non-tonal languages. 

In some cases this can be attributed to a sociolinguistic setting which does not favour vernacular literacy. In other cases, the orthography itself might be to blame. If the orthography of a tone language is difficult to user or to learn, then a good part of the reason, I believe, is that the designer either has not paid enough attention to the function of tone in the language, or has not ensured that the information encoded in the orthography is accessible to the ordinary (non-linguist) user of the language. If the writing of tone is not going to continue to be a stumbling block to literacy efforts, then a fresh approach to tone orthography is required, one which assigns high priority to these two factors. This article describes the problems with orthographies that use too few or too many tone marks, and critically evaluates a wide range of creative intermediate solutions. I review the contributions made by phonology and reading theory, and provide some broad methodological principles to guide someone who is seeking to represent tone in a writing system. The tone orthographies of several languages from sub-Saharan Africa are presented throughout the article, with particular emphasis on some tone languages of Cameroon.

Introduction 
Until recently, tone was generally not marked in the languages of sub-Saharan Africa, even though the vast majority of these languages are tonal (Nida 1964:26). In such languages, the pitch on an individual syllable can be contrastive, distinguishing lexical items and grammatical categories such as verb tense. Designers of new orthographies were often ignorant about tone and imported many assumptions from the orthographic traditions of European languages (Baker et al. 1982:5).1 These imported assumptions can be seen in the sound-symbol correspondence, so that g and not some other symbol denotes the voiced velar stop. 

They can also bee seen in the use of digraphs and trigraphs, so that tsch denotes the affricate Q in the original Germanbased orthography for the Dschang language (Djoumessi 1957); today this segment is written c. The very sound distinctions to be represented are heavily influenced too, as can be seen in the traditional resistance to mark tone: In discussions of the establishment of a practical orthography, for innumerable African languages and probably for languages elsewhere as well, resistance to any indication of tone has been exceedingly common, and has often approached the level of irrationality. (Welmers 1976:34) Carrying over the phonemic contrasts of a colonial language into indigenous languages has led to the over-representation and under-representation of the necessary contrasts, and this in turn has made writing systems difficult to learn (Sapir 1933). 

Ample anecdotal evidence suggests that the omission of tonal distinctions from the orthography of many tone languages is a barrier to fluent reading.2 However, the experimental literature on reading of tone languages is ambivalent; see Bird (1998) for a survey. With the advent of phonemic theory there came a widespread acceptance that orthographies should be phonemic, where there is a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes. Accordingly, tone also had to be marked (Pike 1948:36f). Williamson states that ‘if the language is a tone language then we need some method for indicating the tones so as to distinguish different words’ (Williamson 1984:7f). 

Mfonyam echoes the same idea: ‘We ruled out a priori any system that did not mark tone because we were dealing with tone languages’ (Mfonyam 1990:23). The assertion that tone should be marked in tone languages does not have to be accepted uncritically, however. For some tone languages there may be abundant nontonal clues to the identity of a word or of a grammatical function.3 While Pike (1948:37) and Williamson (1984:44f) countenance this possibility, it is seldom explored in depth. Together with the assumption that tone should be marked in tone languages are the concomitant assumptions that tone should be marked phonemically and diacritically. Phonemic tone marking involves identifying the inventory of tonemes – according to some variety of phonemic theory – and assigning a grapheme to each. Note that the same grapheme might be used for more than one toneme, and the absence of any tonal grapheme in a given position might also represent a toneme (a ‘zero grapheme’). Depending on which variety of phonemic theory is used, a contour tone may be a distinct toneme from the level tones, even though the contour might be trivially analysable as a sequence of level tones. 

These tonemes then form the basis of the tone marking system. Morphophonemic alternations may be fully spelled out: ‘tonemes substituted in morphology or syntax or sandhi should be written as pronounced’ (Pike 1948:37). In what follows, this phonemic marking, along with schemes that come closer to phonetic transcription, will be referred to as shallow marking schemes, for reasons that will become clear in x7. The second assumption, referred to above, is that tone should be marked diacritically (Williamson 1984:41, Pike 1948:38), whether by accent marks as is the long-established practice in Africa (International African Institute 1930:14); by punctuation marks before each word, as in many Ivorian languages (Hartell 1993:124ff); by the recycling of underutilised consonant graphemes to mark tone (see x4.1); or by numbers as in many languages of Latin America, especially Mexico (Pike 1948:95ff).4 The goal of this paper is to survey and critically evaluate a variety of potential and actual tone marking schemes for African languages. The focus will be on the orthography as it is used in texts written by and for speakers of the language in question. In x2 the two extremes of shallow and zero marking are described. Then in sections 3-6 I survey various methods that have been used to mark tone in the languages of sub-Saharan Africa. We shall see that there is a veritable cafeteria of choices awaiting the designer of a new tone orthography. Following this, there will be a discussion of the contributions that phonology and reading theory have to make (x7). Here we shall that solutions to tone orthography problems will depend critically on the nature of the language itself. Finally, some methodological principles are discussed in x8. Elsewhere, I review the experimental literature on reading African tone languages and report on my own experimental work (Bird 1998), and discuss a variety of sociological factors which impinge on orthography design and revision (Bird & Hedinger 1997).

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