Tone Encoding in African Languages

Hi all,

I am quite a new-commer to TEI, but I find this technology really relevant
and potentially helful for the representation and encoding of such
prosodically meaningful features as tones in Bantu languages found in
Africa. Indeed, I am advocating a semantic markup of tones  in the
perspective of data sharing and re-use, rather than a graphical annotation
generally using accented characters, whereby an accute accent which
represents a high tone for example, may encode both lexical and grammatical
meaning, therefore making its interpretation ambiguous for the machine.

I am due to give a talk in this regard next week in Cape Town, and I wish
to suggest TEI as a possible encoding framework for language corpora
builing on Bantu languages.

Does anyone have an idea whether there already exists any encoding scheme
for tones (as meaningful prosodic units associated with segmental phonemes)
within TEI?

Looking forward to your feedback.


Best

Emmanuel Ngué Um
Archive Manager for ALORA (https://alora.cerdotola.com)