- ISO 15924
Toto- Family
- South Asian
- Type
- alphabet
- Direction
- LTR (left-to-right)
- Baseline
- bottom
- Word separation
- between words
- Ligatures
- unspecified
- Status
- Current
- Unicode
- true
- Diacritics
- true
- Contextual forms
- false
The Toto (txo) language has a population of only 1500 living in a single jungle village in India near Bhutan.
The script for Toto was designed by Dhaniram Toto who is an elder in the Toto community. The script was officially launched in the community on 22nd May 2015.
The script supports the 30 phonemes found in the language.
Tone
Tone is only used when the lack of it would confuse two words (the same could be said of vowel length). When tone is used it can either be rising or falling, and it is pronounced across the entire word (or phrase) - most easily heard in the final syllable. Tone is carried in the lexical stem but generally heard most in the suffix morphemes. A character for rising tone is included in the script. Falling tone is not marked. The tone marker appears only on vowels, and it is currently placed on the first vowel of the stem.
Vowel Length
Another supra-segmental that is only used when required for contrast is vowel length. Vowel length is indicated by doubling the vowels.
Some words have a vowel sound that is repeated with a very short gap between. In these words an apostrophe ( ’ ) is used between the vowels. It is recommended that implementations use U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE to represent this.
Breathiness
Breathiness is only marked on vowels. Front vowels all have contrasting breathy versions, but not back vowels. Mid and close front vowels also have rounded versions that contrast.
Diphthongs
There is some debate about whether there are diphthongs in the language. In the Toto script they are not written.
Digits
There are currently no script-specific digits. A column including 10 free slots may be needed in the future if the community decides to encode script-specific digits.
Punctuation
Latin script punctuation is currently being used with the Toto script. An apostrophe is also used to mark a glottal.