Practical Orthographies
In practical alphabetic orthographies, a number of approaches are used. Diacritics are common, as in pinyin, though these tend to be omitted. Thai uses a combination of redundant consonants and diacritics. Tone letters may also be used, for example in Hmong RPA and several minority languages in China. Or tone may simply be ignored. This is possible even for highly tonal languages: for example, the Chinese navy has successfully used toneless pinyin in government telegraph communications for decades, and likewise Chinese reporters abroad may file their stories in toneless pinyin. Dungan, a variety of Mandarin spoken in Central Asia, has, since 1927, been written in orthographies that do not indicate tone. Ndjuka, where tone is less important, ignores tone except for a negative marker. However, the reverse is also true: in the Congo, there have been complaints from readers that newspapers written in orthographies without tone marking are insufficiently legible.
Read more about this topic: Tonal Languages
Famous quotes containing the word practical:
“Whether there be any such moral principles, wherein all men do agree, I appeal to any, who have been but moderately conversant in the history of mankind, and looked abroad beyond the smoke of their own chimneys. Where is that practical truth, that is universally received without doubt or question, as it must be, if innate?”
—John Locke (1632–1704)