Simplified Orthographies

Beginning in the 1970's, we started writing tone marks over vowels so that all tones would be represented in the writing system. More recently, we have seen that this was counter-productive. It was sort of like giving a person a drink from a fire hose. They needed some marks to show them the tones of certain words, but they didn't need accents for every vowel, and when they say them in such profusion, they learned to disregard them. The new orthography is not tone-free but tone-lite. (In French, we call it "allege" in accents.) The original orthography would be useful for people who are not mother-tongue speakers of the language, but there never were many of those. Their needs will be served well by the existing publications. In the future, our publications will be focused on the needs of the mother-tongue speakers.