Steven Bird
List of John Benjamins publications for which Steven Bird plays a role.
Articles
2001 Orthography and identity in Cameroon Written Language & Literacy 4:2, pp. 131–162 | Article
The tone languages of sub-Saharan Africa raise challenging questions for the design of new writing systems. Marking too much or too little tone can have grave consequences for the usability of an orthography. Orthography development, past and present, rests on many sociolinguistic issues having… read more
1999 Strategies for Representing Tone in African Writing Systems Written Language & Literacy 2:1, pp. 1–44 | Article
Tone languages provide some interesting challenges for the designers of new orthographies. One approach is to omit tone marks, just as stress is not marked in English (zero marking). Another approach is to do phonemic tone analysis, and then make heavy use of diacritic symbols to distinguish the… read more