Information AboutOkina |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT OKINA | |
| hawaiian language | |
| okina | |
| hawaiian english | |
| languages of tonga | |
| uncommon latin letters | |
|
The glottal stop is used in many Polynesian languages and known under various names as for instance: ENCODING AND DISPLAYING THE POLYNESIAN GLOTTAL 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 platforms and related platforms and on an MS-DOS screen it renders as a right single quotation mark (which is the wrong shape). A more pedantic and ultra-correct method for plain ASCII text is to use the Grave Accent or back-quote character (`), ASCII value 96 in decimal and 60 in hexadecimal, which in some older fonts, especially those used on older Unix-like platforms, 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. It is still useful, however, when words are to be entered into a database to have the character distinct from the apostrophe. In addition when a wordlist is alphabetically sorted (may depend on the program's preferences), the '`' comes after the 'z', as it should be in Tongan (but not in almost all other Polynesian languages, where it should be ignored for the sorting). The new standard and transitional problems The official Unicode value for the glottal is the Unicode character U+02BB MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA ( ‘ ) 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 have. U+02BB should be the value used in encoding new data when the expected use of the data permits. Until such a time that the majority of the computers will have no longer a problem in displaying the character (it may appear as a box: ʻ ), one can use the { {okina} } template to avoid to have to type in the Unicode value. This character is also a proper one for a Latin-letter transliteration of the Hebrew letter ‘yin and the Arabic letter ‘ayn . They are sometimes also rendered by a superscript half ring with the opening to the right ( ) or even, as a typographical fallback, a superscript ''c'' ( c ). 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. This punctuation 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.Another problem In some Sans-serif fonts non-bolded and at normal size, the left single quotation character does not render 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. EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|