Andrew, Paa Kwesi, Anja, all,
A few quick thoughts...
--- In AfricanLanguages@yahoogroups.com, "Andrew Cunningham"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
. . .
[Andrew]> 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.
I guess I'll have to go back to look at some more materials. I seem to
recall that at least for the languages of West Africa that I had most
exposure to, they were written in established orthography. But these
used some characters from IPA (that decision goes back 40-75 years) -
characters that are now in the IPA range of Unicode (lower case) and
other extended ranges (capital letters).
It is true that people don't follow whatever is supposed to be the
established rule because: (1) they don't know (usually people who were
schooled in English or French but not their mother tongue); (2) they
think they know better (usually experts, and maybe they really do or
don't); or (3) some technical issue having to do with the computers or
user skills.
[Andrew]> As to whether Yoruba tones are linguistic annotations or
not. That
> will depend on who you speak too, and ultimately official
It will be interesting to see how this evolves as more people use
Yoruba. The convenience issue is one thing (easier to dispense with
tone marks than to go to the trouble to add them). Also a question of
habit. I think in Vietnamese (perhaps the most complex use of the
Latin script plus diacritics), where kids learn to read and have the
advantage of exposure to a lot of written material, people apparently
get used to certain patterns and combinations for words and sounds. So
they write them (like we in English write through rather than thru).
Not sure how things will shape out in African languages.
On the other hand, if there were today a speech-to-text program for
Yoruba, the technical ability to analyze tone (can we do that?) and
the choice of the programmers to account for tone or not could have an
important effect on written Yoruba (and whatever other language -
there are lots of tonal languages in Africa of course).
> >
[Paa Kwesi]> > 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.
> >
>
[Andrew]> 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.
There is a lot here to think about. I think I understand where Paa
Kwesi is coming from but tend to think that Andrew is right about
writing styles.
In effect we write, as we speak, in different registers (for different
purposes). Often there is overlap. I got a comment once that I write
like I speak (or was it the other way around?). Then there are things
in speech or in writing that don't translate well from one to the
other. Then new forms arising like the infamous IM (instant messaging)
styles.
I mentioned speech-to-text - I think that has potential to blur
boundaries further, but having used one of these softwares, I also
realize that you interact with it in a different way than you would
say with a sound recording device (or with another person when you
weren't being recorded).
But there still is writing style(s) to be considered and in the cases
of languages where written communication is not that common, these
things will develop. Orthographies and rules for them may facilitate
use of the written forms in ways that relate constructively to the
spoken forms. IOW, this I think was the reason for the WYSIWYG
approach (BTW, this description was not my invention but one I learned
from a Fulfulde text written by Sonja Fagerberg-Diallo some years
ago). I guess the return trip of WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you
get") is WYTSHIWYW ("what you think/speak/hear is what you write" -
don't try pronouncing that acronym, by the way).
Well I'll leave it there for now. There is quite a lot written on this
general topic of transcriptions and writing - in the case of African
language transcriptions one of the earlier was a colonial era document
(with some colonial era references) at:
http://www.bisharat.net/Documents/poal30.htm
Best to all...
Don
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