… diacritic symbols such as acute accent for high tone and grave
accent for low tone …
All too often, tone orthographies are established by fiat and
defended by anecdote. Whether or not tone is marked, the most
frequently cited justifications offered by the designers are either
linguistic analysis, or socio-political factors, or an
impressionistic evaluation that ‘we tried it and it seemed to work
fine’. This article presents objective evidence that an existing
tone orthography for an African tone language actually hinders
fluent reading and writing.
