New Writing System

We have been in the habit of writing accents over vowels in order to represent the tonal part of the Nzime or Badwe'e languages. Any vowel without an accent was at low tone. If lexical tones (High, Low, or combinations of these) were changed by grammatical tones, the resulting phoneme of pitch was marked in the text. As a consequence, one word could have multiple orthographic representations. We lost "stable word image". Very few Cameroonians were able to master this, however, and so after 33 years of frustration, we have now discontinued this effort in favor of a proposal which has gained acceptance by our Cameroonian hosts: Instead of accents representing tones, they differentiate words or verbal constructions which need differentiation. Sometimes words that are true homophones are differentiated by means of accents. This is the case of the following pair of words:

edwe “to give”

edwè “to die”

Another pair is a case of near homophones. In this category I put the following:

ebè “to plant”

ebe “to be”

These are not true homophones since there are some contexts where they are different, due to the fact that “to be” is a toneless verb and “to plant” is a low-tone verb. But other word pairs have the same letters and different lexical tones. For example, in Nzime, there are three words that are minimally differentiated by tones. We use accents to differentiate them from each other: (double-click to enlarge) In the future tense (negated), there is a prefix on the verb with a high tone, but in the present tense, negative construction, the prefix on the verb has a low tone. The first is represented by á-, while the second is represented by a-.

Nye áto.

he/she Future:negative:go

He/she will not go.

Nye ato.

he/she Present:negative:go

He/she is not going.

By using a minimum of accents, people respond to the writing system as being something that they can master. Here is a sample of the difference the new writing system makes. The old is in the left column, the new at the right. (double-click to read it)