> I'd personally love a unified syntax for tone that doesn't involve drawing squiggly lines over the word, or a number next to it, but that's a pretty specializ

> I'd personally love a unified syntax for tone that doesn't involve drawing squiggly lines over the word, or a number next to it, but that's a pretty specialized need, I think.) That would be lovely and possibly and attainable goal for a minimally tonal language like Japanese, but the challenge is generalizing any such system to heavily tonal languages like Hokkien, with six or seven tonal markings and additional layers of complexity like tonality rules that depend on different word boundaries and positions. It's a shame that different shades of ink weren't invented and/or normalized sooner, because a lot of this state space could be captured using a simple convention of two stroke weights (light/heavy) by two shades of color (red black) for every glyph. "Rubric" was an early gesture in this direction but unfortunately never escaped its original application.