forum

[Mia Kalish]

Hi, Keola, 

 

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? 

 

:-) 

Mia 

 

  _____  

From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Keola Donaghy
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 1:27 PM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] forum

 

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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