Hi all, A couple of points:
Most linguistics books and papers I've seen for the African languages I work with every rarely use the established orthography, rather they tend to write the language using the IPA. As to whether Yoruba tones are linguistic annotations or not. That will depend on who you speak too, and ultimately official > > The problem of ambiguity can easily be solved by using an unambiguous writing > style. For example the ff made up English sentence is considered bad writing > style even though it is grammatically correct: > > > Refuse? Yes, refuse. > Not that mabiguious of an axample as an exhortation. Resolving ambiguity through unambiguous writing style seems to be counter productive. In the sense that one one hand it drives a larger wedge between orality and literacy. So that sentence patterns and writing style is further divoorced form the spoken language. And form the point of view of the written word as an artistic form, you create a stilted, artificial writing style. Poetry, poetic prose, satire and other forms require the ambiguity you recommend removing form the written language. The equivalent wold be trying to write English poetry in "plain" English. Doesn't work. Writing style is contextual. It depends on what you are writing. In most European languages different types of docuemnt may have different writing styles. I'd use a different writing styles for training materials or government reports, or academic papers or prose or poetry. Andrew -- Andrew Cunningham Language IT support Dinka Language Institute Australia http://home.vicnet.net.au/~andrewc/ http://home.vicnet.net.au/~agamlong/dlia/ http://www.openroad.net.au/languages/african/dinka/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AfricanLanguages/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
