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[Keola Donaghy]

Aloha Mia. I don't know if the language scripts in Unicode have  
anything to do with sorting routines. When we worked with Apple to get  
the Hawaiian keyboard into OS X back in 1991 or 1992, we provided them  
with our preferred sort order (vowels, Hawaiian consonants with the  
glottal last among those, then the borrowed consonants). We also had  
to define the vowel-macrons as a secondary sort, so that if there were  
(and there are) words that differ only based on the presence of a  
macron over a vowel, the word with non-macron is first, then the  
macron vowel.

It took us several years of lobbying and it was only a chance meeting  
of a friend of mine who works at Apple's headquarters with some Apple  
system engineers that led to us getting Hawaiian support in OS X. They  
have since added may more languages. So we have the Hawaiian keyboard,  
a Hawaiian locale (which enables us to create localizations of OS X  
applications and have them automatically displayed if there is a  
localization available), as well as the custom sort routines and  
localized date and time strings.

When we created our HI fonts in the early 1990s, spell-checkers were  
also an issue. That is why we replaced the y-umlaut character ( ÿ )  
with the glottal (‘) and replaced the vowel - umlaut combinations with  
the vowel macrons. In the case of the ÿ, it also had the advantage of  
allowing us to sort properly (in most cases). Back then ClarisWorks  
and Word did not accept punctuation marks and other symbols within  
words, so we had to find a way to make it work, and settled on ÿ.

Office for Vista now handles custom spell-check documents with in  
Unicode fine. Office for XP and Office for Mac 2004 did not, which was  
an issue. I have not yet received a copy of Office 2008 for Mac so  
don't know if it can use spell-check documents formated in Unicode  
yet. We are working on such a document right now. At some point I'll  
have a single document that can spell-check both documents typed in  
our old HI font system as well as Unicode. I'll be a happy man on that  
day. ;-)

I'll look into the other Unicode glottal characters, perhaps someone  
here is more familiar with them than I. To be honest, I somewhat  
regret our decision to use the non-breaking character because it is  
available in so few fonts, however, that it was the one I was  
encouraged to use by people who knew better than I.

We're in a very strange transitional place right now in our adaptation  
of Unicode. Because of one particular application that we depend  
heavily upon, we have not been able to completely abandon our old  
custom fonts and go to Unicode. I'm hoping to have that issue taken  
care of by this summer.

I'll get back to you on the other glottal character(s).

Hope this help! Feel free to email if I can be of any other assistance.

Keola

On 15 Pep. 2008, at 4:26 PM, Mia Kalish wrote:

> Yes, this is exactly what I mean. I’m not familiar with U+02BB.  
> Hyphenation is not an issue in Athapascan; I don’t think I have ever  
> seen anything hyphenated. But, the glottal has to sort first, before  
> the vowels it affects, ‘a is a typical form and is actually the most  
> common glottalization of leading vowels, although other vowels are  
> glottalized in the same way.
>
> Also, since we don’t have Athapascan language and grammar, we have  
> to use English, so we have to fool English into thinking the  
> characters we are typing actually belong to it so we can use spell- 
> check.
>
> How do you do this in Hawaiian? I just looked at my language options  
> for Word, and Hawaiian is a recognized language, We don’t have this  
> luxury, and although there is now a language code for NAV and APA,  
> there are differences in the 6 Apaches, and only one language code.  
> Sigh. People are so stingy, aren’t they?
>



========================================================================
Keola Donaghy
Assistant Professor of Hawaiian Studies
Ka Haka 'Ula O Ke'elikolani             keola at leoki.uhh.hawaii.edu
University of Hawai'i at Hilo           http://www2.hawaii.edu/~donaghy/

"Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam."  (Irish Gaelic saying)
A country without its language is a country without its soul.
========================================================================



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