[Latingp] Tongan evidence for line 62 of Latin GP Code Points

Meikal Mumin meikal.mumin at uni-koeln.de
Tue Dec 12 17:19:48 UTC 2017


Dear Mats,

in the shared Dropbox I created a folder Tongan, which contains a file
called "tongan-lg.pdf". On pages 14-15 you can find further details about
the orthography. Long vowels are represented in Tongan orthograpy by use of
a Macron ("long vowels, as in màlò"). Meanwhile definiteness is marked by
stress, which is is written in Tongan using a rising accent ´ following the
vowel ("The fakamamafa pau or defi nitive accent falls on the fi nal vowel
of a word and designates defi niteness, as in tangata ́ (the man).  An
example of the difference that the defi nitive accent can make is this: ko
e tangata means “a man” but ko e tangata ́ means “the man”.")

Logically this leaves us with a sequence ā´, which should be confirmed by
an expert on the language.

Meanwhile Wikipedia
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_language#Tongan_alphabet> informs us
that "Although the acute accent has been available on most personal
computers from their early days onwards, when Tongan newspapers started to
use computers around 1990 to produce their papers, they were unable to
find, or failed to enter, the proper keystrokes, and it grew into a habit
to put the accent after the vowel instead of on it: not á but a´. But as
this distance seemed to be too big, a demand arose for Tongan fonts where
the acute accent was shifted to the right, a position halfway in between
the two extremes above. Most papers still follow this practice.".

This is why I commented this in column J "Possible variant of ā´ ". I hope
this clarifies the situation.

Best,

Meikal
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