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[Keola Donaghy]

Aloha Mia. I'm not sure what you mean by the glottal needed to be a  
real character, you mean treated as a letter and not punctuation or  
other symbol? There are several similarly shaped characters in the  
Unicode spec. I consulted with the Unicode consortium back in 1998 or  
so to determine which was best for our purposes. They suggested and we  
use U+02BB, which is 1) treated like a letter and 2) does not allow  
hyphenation after it. Since the glottal is considered a consonant in  
Hawaiian and we can't hypenate after a consonant that was chosen.

That has caused some issues for us as that character is not common in  
a lot of fonts, though is found in those that I posted earlier. When  
doing web pages I tend to use a different, identical character to  
assure that most viewers will see the glottal properly, but when doing  
word processing I use U+02BB, which is the character generated in the  
Hawaiian keyboard included with OS X, and with the Win keyboard I  
developed for Win users. I believe there is at least one other glottal  
character in the unicode spec which is treated as a letter as well,  
but forget which one it is off the top of my head.

Nice to hear from you as well. Sending aloha from chilly Dunedin, NZ!

Keola

On 15 Pep. 2008, at 9:12 AM, Mia Kalish wrote:

> It doesn’t work for rising tone, nasalized Athapascan vowels,  
> especially the “i”, because you end up with a dot and a high tone  
> mark, which is incorrect. It doesn’t work well for the glottal,  
> either, because beyond representation, you need to have the glottal  
> function as a real character. If you take a shortcut and use the  
> apostrophe, Word and sorting algorithms see it as a punctuation  
> mark, and represent the word incorrectly.



========================================================================
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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