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simply used the German umlauted vowels (shown in the first column of Table 1 above)
instead of the Igbo subdotted vowels. But, with his method, an Igbo word like ụ̀tọ́
‘sweet, sweetness’, whose tone is indicated on the word itself, is written as ütö
[LH]. This simply means marking the tone extra. Such a method, however, becomes
irrelevant when one tries to use it for the representation of a fully tone-marked Igbo
text. The method has not found much acceptance (Uchechukwu 2001), but the author
has also agreed to change it in line with the existing orthography (Anyanwu 2000).
There is no doubt that this would become easier for him as a result of the growing
improvements in computer technology, including the freely available Igbo keyboard
and Unicode-based font programs.
Igwe’s dictionary was written in line with the existing orthography; however, the
author’s effort involved the use of the ‘Symbols’ windows within Microsoft’s Word to
painfully click on the individual Igbo characters of his 850-page dictionary! The only
mark the method left on his work can be seen in the combination of the vowel with
a tone mark. Within the Microsoft 95/98 system used by the author, this lower case
vowel is automatically changed into an upper case vowel through such a combination.
Thus, a combination of the vowel with the high tone symbol (accent acute)
yields ; and a combination with the low tone symbol (grave accent) is realized
as . This is regardless of whether the letter occurs at the beginning of a word,
in the middle, or at the end. But with the current improvements in the different
operating systems, as well as the available Igbo keyboard, such problems can now be
completely addressed.
The spellchecker is still an on-going project between Andrew Scannel and myself.
For the time being, this is restricted to Aspell and Igbo texts without tone marks. The
development of a spellchecker for fully tone-marked Igbo texts shall be taken into
consideration at the appropriate time.
4. Prospects for Computer Linguistics
The above situation of the Igbo language has not only highlighted the stages
involved in the struggle of the language with modern technologies, but also how this
development can be enhanced.
The texts of the Igbo language without tone marks can be processed to some extent
by some corpus processing or development systems. Such texts are of little research
significance, however, since they cannot graphically represent the very phenomena
that are of interest to both the ordinary linguist and the computational linguist.
Compared with the situation of such matters just a few years back, it is already a
great advancement to have some software that can handle Igbo texts without tone
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