Sango in Transliteration

PROBLEM

Marking tones in Sango is very important. It is also very tedious, especially on non-French keyboards, and has given me carpal-tunnel problems over time. There is an easy solution I propose: a transliteration using capital letters to indicate tone. I find it not only easier to write but far easier to read with the correct tone than small arcane diacritic marks. I find my voice naturally rises in proportion to the number of capital letters and exploit this tendency to good effect.

ALGORITHM

The rules of transcription are easier than they sound here. Just looking at the example below, you can intuit the rules yourself.

• 1. Everything between backquotes (`) is left exactly as is (useful for foreign words).

  2. Optionally, convert American quotes (") to their French/Sango equivalent (« if preceded by whitespace, » otherwise).

  3. Since capitalization is used for tone, transcription converts everything to lowercase. Use an (arbitrarily chosen) tilde (~) prefix as a signal to add it back later.

  4. Convert x and c to short vowels ɛ and ɔ, respectively (x and c do not themselves occur in Sango).

  5. Lowercase vowels become low tone.

  6. Uppercase vowels become high tone:

     1. • At the beginning of a word.

        • There are only four exceptions, words that start with a medium tone that we treat specially in transcription:

        • Apx ↦ äpɛ (not), E ↦ ë (we), I ↦ ï ([formal plural] you), and IrI ↦ ïrï (vt. call) [but note regular noun form Iri ↦ îri (n. name)]

        • Why these exceptions, you ask? For less common words, the natural tendency would have been to migrate to initial high tone when moving from tribal to national Sango, but these words are so common that their tone structure likely got frozen in. Luckily, since there are no homonyms for these, there is no confusion here.

        • When following an uppercase consonant or a high tone vowel.

  7. All other vowels become medium tone.

But wait, you say! How would you write e.g. taâ, däâ, or bâä? Fortunately, we don't need to: these three combinations are allophonic in national Sango with other more common tone transitions with the same rising or falling character, and most Sango speakers tend to standardize on transitions that start lower and rise more gradually, or else fall more dramatically: taä, daä, and bâa. This is akin to the phenomenon in American English where cot and caught are pronounced distinctly on the East Coast but identically on the West Coast, with little apparent confusion. Presumably the same homogenizing forces were at work in that case as well.

To make detranscription unique, we adapt the following two conventions as well:

• • All consonants at the beginning of a syllable are written either all lowercase or all uppercase, never mixed.

  • An n at the end of a word is not technically a consonant, but rather a vowel nasalizer: always write this lowercase.

EXAMPLE

Here are a short example from the New Testament (Matt 2:19-20) in transcription. Notice that the x and c look enough like ɛ and ɔ that they pose little problem, and in reading this aloud, your voice naturally wants to rise in proportion to the number of capital letters, so the tones come naturally:

~SO `Hérode` aKUIi awx, ~yingC-~va TI ~gbIA agA na mosUmA na `Joseph` na `Égypte`, sI atxnx na lo:

"~lOndO, mc MU MOlxNGX NI na maMA TI lo, sI mc KIri na SEse TI `Israël`, tXnX TI SO Azo SO aYE TI FAa MOlxNGX NI aKUIi awx."

Here is the equivalent output with diacritics, much prettier but with my bad eyesight harder to read with the correct tones:

Sô Hérode akûîi awɛ, Yingɔ̈-Va tî Gbïä agä na mosümä na Joseph na Égypte, sï atɛnɛ na lo:

«Löndö, mɔ mû môlɛngê nî na mamâ tî lo, sï mɔ kîri na sêse tî Israël, tɛ̈nɛ̈ tî sô âzo sô ayê tî fâa môlɛngê nî akûîi awɛ.»

Here is an English translation (NIV):

After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said,

“Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.”