Contour tone diacritics with tipa?

Question

LaTeX allows for three level tones and two contours to be notated using the above-vowel diacritics: \'{} for the H tone (á), \`{} for L (à), \={} for M (ā), \v{} for LH (ǎ), and \^{} for HL (â).

The literature commonly uses above-vowel diacritics also for HM, ML, LM, MH, HLH and LHL, using sequences of the above level tones, for example a᷄ (MH) and a᷈ (LHL; note that this is not a tilde). TIPA, however, only offers tone bars for contours other than HL and LH.

Is there a way to combine diacritics in LaTeX for the combinations HM, ML, LM, MH, HLH and LHL, especially in a way available within \textipa{}?

Answer 1

I don't think there's any way to do this with tipa. I would recommend using a good OpenType font that has the relevant diacritics, and use XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX. In this case you enter them directly in your source. Here's an example using Charis SIL:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Charis SIL}
\begin{document}
\Huge
a᷄ a᷅ a᷆ a᷇ a᷈ a᷉
\end{document}