Abstract
This article discusses the representation of downstep in the tonal orthographies of some three-tone languages of West Benue-Congo, in the light of the phonological properties of tone in the languages. Ebira has total downstep, which makes both downstepped high and down-stepped mid to be perceived at a level close to outright low tone, and written so; downstepped high in Igala is realised around the level of the mid tone and is often written as mid in the or-thography. In Gwari, the docking of floating high tonal morpheme and contour simplification interact with downstep in such a way that downstepped high tones are frequently written as mid. It is shown that these situations arise because surface tone perception is taken as the sole parameter for tone categorisation, ignoring the underlying tones of lexical items in the lan-guages as well as the number of tones and possible terracing-triggered intersections between the tones. It is argued that the orthographies of the languages will be far more accurate if these obvious facts of downstep are incorporated.
Highlights
It is not uncommon to find languages whose orthographies are inaccurate or at variance with the language facts
This means that the downstep phenomenon flew under the radar during phonological analyses and orthographical development of the languages. This was the reason rather than relate to the inputs to the utterances in (11–15) above, orthography designers related to their perception, which resulted in misrepresentation of the tones as well as a total disregard for what could have been a major contribution of DS to tonal orthographies
It has been argued that DS is being misrepresented in the orthographies of Ebira, Gwari and Igala, and this is a logical consequence of misperception owing to the inability of speakers to identify a distinct contrast between it and the basic tonemes to which it is merged in each language
Summary
It is not uncommon to find languages whose orthographies are inaccurate or at variance with the language facts (cf. Elugbe 1991: 49). This is partly because of the so-called trouble of adding diacritic marks to symbols of sounds and partly because of the erroneous believe that tones are secondary and their contributions to larger linguistic units can be inferred from the segmental constituents of such units (Bamgbose 1965: 15; Lojenga 2011: 1; Williamson 1980, 1984: 41) Another problem with tone, which is the focus of this article, relates to tones that are non-automatically lowered in environments containing no phonetic low tones. It can be contended that the tonal misrepresentations discussed in this article could be said to be matters of orthographical convenience By this it is assumed that the facts are apparent, but the most convenient approach to orthography design was adopted.
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