Why writing languages with strange characters?

When writing a language, we have to render the different sounds of it into characters, without imitating stupidly any other language orthography. That may help, of course, but that has to be done with logic and taking into account the specificities of the language involved. The (international) phonetic alphabet would be a bit heavy for use in a standard orthography, but French or English alphabets for instance, don't always fall short of bantu specificities. One has then to resort to a set of characters that may disturb a non-linguist. The aim of this page is to convince, with examples in Lingala (which is far from being to most complex case), those who are still reluctant to use special characters for their language. Two aspects will be tackled: vowel aperture and tones.

Vowel aperture, roughly speaking, refers to the degree of openness of articulation; In our case, we find two kinds of "o" and two of "e". If we transcribe them the same way, we produce a confusion that never happens orally.

elenge	eleŋge	stove sp.
	elɛŋgɛ	young person

Prosodic features are things like the accent or tones, and because of the semantic values they bear, we should include them in writing. Compare:

mbata	mbatá	slap
	mbáta	sheep

Or:

mbala	mbala	time
	mbálá	yam

In context, the need for distinction is even strengthened:

mbala moko	mbala mɔ́kɔ́	once
	mbálá mɔ́kɔ́	one yam

If we have simultaneously phonetic and prosodic differences, the confusion brought by an "insipid" orthography is still more obvious:

moto	moto	person
	mɔ́tɔ	fire

The language also makes use of tones to differentiate tenses in conjugation.

kokoma	kokoma	write
	kokóma	become

Hence:

nakokoma	nakokoma	I'll write
	nakokóma	I'll become
	năkokoma	I'm writing
	năkokóma	I'm becoming

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