Okina

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This article deals with the orthography of the glottal stop in many Polynesian languages, where it is properly represented by a glyph identical to an opening left single quotation mark, that is, with the appearance ( ‘ ). The name of the Hawaiian island group itself includes the mark, thus, Hawaiʻi.

The glottal stop is used in many Polynesian languages and known under various names as for instance:

AREA	VERNACULAR NAME	LITERAL MEANING	NOTES
Hawaiʻi	ʻokina	separator	officially formalised ^{[citation needed]}
Tonga	fakauʻa (honorific for 'fakamonga')	throat maker	officially formalised
Tahiti	ʻeta	ʻetaʻeta = to harden	no official or traditional status, may use ' or ‘ or ’
ʻUvea (Wallis)	fakamoga	throat maker	no official or traditional status, may use ' or ‘ or ’

1 Encoding and displaying the Polynesian glottal
- 1.1 Old conventions
- 1.2 The new standard and transitional problems
2 External links

[edit] Encoding and displaying the Polynesian glottal

[edit] Old conventions

In plain ASCII the glottal is sometimes represented by the apostrophe character ('), ASCII value 39 in decimal and 27 in hexadecimal, which in most fonts currently used renders as a straight, data-processing, typewriter apostrophe as is also specified in Unicode. But in some older fonts, especially those used on Unix-like platforms and related platforms and on an MS-DOS screen, it renders as a right single quotation mark (which is the wrong shape). A hypercorrect (but actually incorrect) method for plain ASCII text is to use U+0060 grave accent (incorrectly termed "back-quote character" (`), which in some older fonts does display a glyph similar to a left single quotation mark. However, in most newer fonts, it has a pronounced lean to the left and can look inappropriate. In addition, when a wordlist is alphabetically sorted, the '`' often comes after the 'z', instead of being ignored as it should be in almost all Polynesian languages. It is still useful as a fallback when words are to be entered into a database with limited character-set ability to have the character distinct from the apostrophe.

[edit] The new standard and transitional problems

The official Unicode value for the glottal is the Unicode character U+02BB MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA ( ʻ ) which can be rendered in HTML by the entity ʻ (or in hexadecimal form ʻ).

But lack of support for this character in older fonts (and many newer fonts) along with the large amount of legacy data and expense in time and money to convert has prevented easy and universal use of the new character. As for now (2006) Apple Mac OS X based computers have no problem with the glyph, but Microsoft Windows especially when using Internet Explorer still has. U+02BB should be the value used in encoding new data when the expected use of the data permits.

This character is also a proper one for a Latin-letter transliteration of the Hebrew letter ʻáyin and the Arabic letter ʻayn. They are sometimes also rendered by a superscript half ring with the opening to the right ( ʿ ) or even, as a typographical fallback, a superscript c ( ^c ).

[edit] A display work-around

Because this character is not found in many fonts, it may not appear properly on all computer systems and in all configurations. Accordingly, where U+02BB should properly be used, the Unicode punctuation character U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, ‘, represented by the HTML entity ‘, is sometimes used instead. It is nearly identical in appearance to U+02BB, but is treated as a punctuation mark rather than a letter by applications. In practical terms, this only matters with regard to page breaks, hyphenation, and capitalisation; these usually cause few problems. This symbol is also used instead of the recommended turned comma letter symbol in transliterations from Semitic languages to assure proper display on the widest number of browsers.

[edit] A work-around problem

Nowadays many word-processors are equipped with 'smart quotes', which automatically change the straight apostrophe (') and the straight quotation mark (") into curly ones. If a quotation mark occurs after a space, it is assumed to be an open quote (the left quote), if elsewhere a close quote (the right quote). This policy also allows the apostrophe to be dealt with in the same way. Clearly this is not the behaviour one wants for the glottal. One would end up with text full with 'drunken' glottals, some pointing left, some pointing right. If a special Polynesian keyboard layout is not available, a workaround to the workaround is to insert a ‘dummy’ space before typing the quote (thus making it a left, open quote), then delete the space.

[edit] Another problem

In some sans-serif fonts non-bolded and at normal size, the left single quotation character does not appear distinctly different from the straight apostrophe or from the right single quotation character. If glottals in this article appear as straight typewriter quotation marks to you, you may need to enlarge the font display in your browser. In Hawaiian, where only one of these curly quotation forms is used as a letter, this matters little. It is more problematic in displaying transliterations from Semitic languages where both left-quotation and right-quotation characters are used with different meanings.