arXiv cs.CL· K\'ol\'a T\'ub\`os\'un·· 9 天前AI 评分12
约鲁巴语轮廓声调标注：一项排版与计算方案
Marking Contour Tones in Yor\`{u}b\'{a}: A Typographic and Computational Proposal
AI 导读
针对约鲁巴语轮廓声调在正字法中难以标注、部分人名拼写甚至反转原意的问题，该论文提出采用 caron 和 circumflex 符号在单元音上编码升调和降调。这些符号自 Olmsted（1951）以来在约鲁巴语音系研究中已有先例，如今首次可通过标准键盘输入和计算文本处理实现。方案已在 WriteYoruba 键盘和 TTSYoruba 语音合成器中落地实现。
正文 · 原文
Abstract:Yorùbá is a tonal language in which contour tones pose persistent orthographic challenges. These are especially notable for personal names and lexical items whose conventional spellings avoid vowel lengthening that would otherwise provide a host syllable for the second tone. A particular concern is a class of names in which the conventional spelling does not just omit tonal information but inverts the meaning of said name, sometimes asserting the opposite of what the name intends. This paper describes the problem, illustrates the inadequacy of current solutions, and proposes the adoption of the caron and circumflex marks. These are symbols with precedent in Yorùbá phonological scholarship since Olmsted (1951), used as orthographic conventions on single vowels to encode rising and falling contour tones, making them accessible for the first time through standard keyboard input and computational text processing. The proposal is supported by an implementation in the WriteYoruba keyboard and the TTSYoruba speech synthesizer, whose architecture and listener evaluation are reported separately (Tubosun et al., 2026).
| Comments: | v4: clarified the description of Gboard's support for contour marks; narrowed the claim about WriteYoruba keyboard support; corrected the rendering of the grave accent in the introduction |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.38627 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2609.38627v4 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.38627 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite |
Submission history
From: Kola Tubosun [view email]
[v1]
Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:37:03 UTC (16 KB)
[v2]
Thu, 1 Oct 2026 16:05:53 UTC (16 KB)
[v3]
Tue, 6 Oct 2026 17:09:50 UTC (16 KB)
[v4]
Thu, 8 Oct 2026 14:34:40 UTC (16 KB)
来源：arXiv cs.CL · arxiv.org