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ABSTRACT
Many scripts in Southeast Asia have developed ways of marking tone. When adapting such scripts to write non-tonal languages, language communities often find other uses for these symbols. The case of Cado, an Austroasiatic language of the Katuic sub-branch in Vietnam and Laos, is particularly striking in that they use tone marks as vowel diacritics in two different scripts. Because Cado speakers live on both sides of the Vietnamese-Lao border, they have chosen to use two separate writing systems based on their respective national languages. This paper presents preliminary orthographies for Cado in the Roman and Lao scripts, based on the Vietnamese and Lao orthographies. Cado has no phonation contrast, but it does retain vowel length contrast. Both Cado orthographies adapt tone marks from the Vietnamese and Lao orthographies to distinguish either vowel length or vowel quality respectively. The phonetic motivation for this cross-categorical use of tone marks is discussed, and examples of other orthographies in Southeast Asia that adapt tone marks and other symbols beyond their traditional phonetic category are given and compared with Cado.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. In this article, we consider the relevant phonetic ‘categories’ to be consonants, vowels, tones and phonation. Cross-categorical adaptation is therefore considered to be reassignment of symbols from one of these categories in the dominant language to another category in the language of the newly developed orthography.
2. It it also possible that the vowel marker in both languages may be independently derived rather than an adaptation of the mai ek tone mark, since the form for both the vowel marker and the tone mark is simply a vertical line above the consonant.
3. The Thai and Lao scripts are related, and use essentially the same tone marks with the same names.
4. Tone marks in Kui were later removed in favour of using particular consonants with inherent low or rising tone to indicate breathy register, as described by Van der Haak (Citation1991).
5. Note that we are here describing the situation when unused symbols from a dominant L2 orthography are reassigned values in the L1 orthography because those L2 sounds do not exist in the L1, such as final consonants for Hmong or tone for Cado. The situation would be quite different if L2 symbols for sounds that do exist in the L1 were instead reassigned to a different L1 sound; in such cases the cost of incongruence would presumably be much higher. However, we are not aware of any such actual cases occurring with newly developed orthographies, as the difficulties are obvious to native speakers.
6. This merger is phonologically unsurprising, since the monophthong inventory is asymmetrical and, therefore, unstable. Merging the /ɔ/ and /ɒ/ positions leads to three front, central and back vowels each.
7. The only case of ambiguity that remains for presyllables in the Vietnamese-based orthography is when the main syllable begins with /ʔ/, e.g., /paː ʔeːw/ <pa-eu> ‘belt’, which could be misread as /pa.ʔeːw/ with a presyllable.
8. Alveolar and palatal nasals are underspecified for prenasals in both scripts. In Lao script, using the <
> consonant could easily be confused as indicating /-j/ in coda position. This is arguably not a case of underdifferentiation, but actually of overdifferentiation, since all of the presyllabic nasals can be considered to belong to the same phoneme /N/, whose place of articulation is determined by the following main syllable onset.
9. Actually, Vietnamese usually uses spaces between syllables, even for polysyllabic words. Hyphens are sporadically used to join together the syllables of polysyllabic words, though typically only for monomorphemic loan words.
10. The reassignment of <q> is somewhat different than the other examples given, since <q>, which represents /k/ initially in some words, is never a final consonant in Vietnamese. Thus final <q> in Cado does not directly compete with any other grapheme-phoneme correspondence rule from Vietnamese as to its interpretation, though some readers might conceivably try to assign it the value of final /k/.