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Among designers of orthographies for previously nonwritten languages, the prevailing wisdom is that native speakers of tone languages need to see at least some tones marked to achieve full literacy in those languages. A counter argument is that marking tone confuses native speakers of tone languages. We report here on an experiment on tone marking in Kom, a language of the Grassfields region of Cameroon. The results show that, for Kom at least, tone marking makes written sentences harder to figure out initially, harder to say, and harder to say correctly. Comparative research using refinements of the methodology described here will help us answer important questions, like whether or not these effects vary with the number of tones in a language or with the linguistic function of tones. The knowledge gained from comparative experiments will help speakers of the world's nonliterary languages achieve popular literacy in those languages. Popular literacy, we argue, is one of a small number of things that promotes the survival of language diversity.
Key words: tone languages, orthographies, indigenous literacey, field experiments, Kom
We know from much evidence that native speakers of all written languages use context to disambiguate homophone pairs that have a single written form. In English, for example, we do not mark the vowel in the word "wind" to indicate whether it sounds like the vowel sound in "shy" (as in "wind up the watch") or like the vowel sound in "sit" (as in "an ill wind blows"). We rely instead on the reader's understanding of context. In an extreme case of context dependence, adult, native speakers of modern Hebrew read and write their language without marking any vowels at all.
In many languages of the world, tone distinguishes between minimal pairs of words (lexical tone) and it can also mark grammatical features, like tense (grammatical tone). This raises the question: Does marking tone in writing previously nonwritten languages help or hinder native speakers who learn to read those languages?
At least since Pike's (1948, 1964) seminal ork on the phonemics of tone languages, designers of ortho phies have grappled with this problem. Pike (1964 ) argued in favor of marking at least some tones in these languages, a have some other linguists who study tone languages...