The principle of referential independence: A morpheme qualiies as a word if it The principle of conceptual unity: This requires that each written word convey The principle of minimal ambiguity: Word space can show that two words When a morpheme demonstrat

mark, colon, hash, or other mark. The use of such a meaning-based symbol at the front of the verb alerts the reader to the correct tonal melody of the word. Such a symbol will not be taught as a mark of pitchtone, but as a grammatical marker i.e., equals recent past tense, and should be recognized like a sight word. This amounts to morphemic writing of grammatical tone Bird 1998:16. In languages with shorter words, distinctive markings directly over the vowel may still be the easiest. Many Grassields Bantu languages use diacritics for grammatical tone. According to Anderson and Alomotor 2005, Awing requires the marking of habitual aspect. Diacritics are used for this purpose, with two dots over he vowel ӓ. The rule is that this diacritic be placed on the irst vowel preceding the verb in a sentence. Note the contrast in the following example sentences. Nouns 11. Try to ind a system to distinguish tone for nouns if lexical tone proves to make a distinction for several minimal tone pairs e.g., 5 percent or more of words in the lexicon. Use the pitch pattern of the noun in isolation, unless for some reason underlying pitch patterns are neutralized in isolation. Expect to ind at least two main pitch patterns for nouns; many languages will have more, such as Bila in Eastern DRC and Tharaka in Kenya. 36 Functors 12. Marking tone in functors small grammatical words such as to and too can be very important, if sentence order does not already tell the reader which grammatical word they are reading. Most important is to distinguish functor minimal tone pairs that can be confused in relatively short sentences. Word Boundary Principles Word breaks have always been a challenge in writing Bantu languages, partly because of the extensive aixation of monosyllabic morphemes. We can assist luent word recognition by matching the intuitive knowledge of mother- tongue speakers. The following guidelines should help you do this Van Dyken, et al. 1993:7. Examples added are mine.

1. The principle of referential independence: A morpheme qualiies as a word if it

clearly communicates meaning, even when heard or seen in isolation. Conversely, each language has certain morphemes which cannot communicate meaning in isolation, such as Bantu noun class markers.

2. The principle of conceptual unity: This requires that each written word convey

only one concept. When compound words are formed, it is because the two words join to form a new and unique concept. 36 Proto-Bantu had four distinctive tone patterns for disyllabic nouns: LL, LH, HL, and HH, which might be expected in most Bantu languages; even reduced tone systems with only two or three lexical tone distinc- tions on nouns might still require tone-marking. Tharaka has an extra-high tone.

3. The principle of minimal ambiguity: Word space can show that two words

are pronounced with diferent stress patterns e.g., blackbird and black bird are distinguished orally by diferent stress patterns. Ignoring these diferences can lead to ambiguities in the written text which are absent in speech. If both blackbird and black bird were written with a space between the two component words, the diference in the two meanings would be lost. Example: In Tharaka, the proclitic wa ‘each’ has an entirely diferent function and stress pattern from the wa written separately, meaning possession, so the writing system relects the distinction.

4. When a morpheme demonstrates mobility, it is usually written as a separate

word, even if it doesn’t make sense in isolation. In Swahili, Wageni wenu wataika lini? Or Lini wageni wenu wataika? are both correct Translation: When will your guests arrive?. Since the adverb lini clearly is not obliged to follow the verb and its aixes in this example wataika , but is movable it is isolatable as well, it should be written as a separate word from the verb, for readability considerations. 37

5. The principle of separability: A functor is written separately from the word with