(10-03-2018, 12:21 PM)VViews wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Unless they were copying a text they didn't understand in the first place, but why bother to do that?
MarcoP, you bring up the example of tones in Mandarin, which leads me to ask an OT question: are there medieval examples of Mandarin or other Asian languages transcribed using a roman alphabet? From what I understand the earliest are from the late 16th century, but I'm curious to know if there are earlier ones.
Missionaries tended to formalize alphabets for many of these languages, which is why it's hard to find early ones. Many cultures didn't have a written language before trade and missionary expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries.
I know there's a Cyrillic version of Mongolian, but it's recent and the Latin alphabet for Vietnamese isn't very old either.
The tonal languages tend to be Asian and African. Many of them have extensive character sets rather than accents/diacritical marks, although some make distinctions with "tails" or curls that go in different directions.