Zulu tone logic

Hi Codecat, with the word ubuntu, the orthographic tone marks say úbuntu. But it IPA has the accent on the penultimate, i.e. /uɓúːntu/. I don't get how it corresponds to the orthographic, which is on the antepenultimate syllable. Is there any logic with this connection?

The tone part of the noun templates is not fully functional yet. What it currently shows is the underlying tones, before any of the tone rules are applied which spread and shift it around. My original intention was to implement the tone rules in the modules later. However, I'm finding that it's sometimes hard if not impossible to figure out what the underlying tones are, so I'm thinking of redoing it so that the surface tones are input directly. It's a work in progress. The pronunciation section should be accurate, though.

@CodeCat Cool! Can you please tell me where you get the tone data from?

Mostly from Doke's Zulu-English dictionary. It only gives the surface tones, and gives them as numbers on a scale from 1 to 9. It's not straightforward how to interpret these numbers initially, you need to have known high-low patterns to compare with the numbers. For example, what Doke gives as 2.4.3.9 is actually a HLHL pattern; the 4 is not particularly low but because it's lower than the surrounding tones, it's a low tone. The article w:Zulu grammar gives a good overview of the tone rules, but it's not at all straightforward to derive the original underlying tone from the surface tone. In fact, sometimes it's simply ambiguous as multiple different underlying tone patterns can result in the same surface tone.

Is that you editing on Zulu grammar? That'll make it more enjoyable to read!