I am very slowly learning ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, the native Hawaiʻian language. Note that this is different from and much rarer than Hawaiian Pidgin and not practially useful for a haole newcomer. It seems to me, though, that language often shapes culture so I’m hoping to refine my perspective of the society here.
There are also many, many place names, street names, and cultural concepts that are still named by their ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi words.
In any case, the written form of the language has two diacriticals.
kahako
Written as a is a macron over a vowel, as in ānuenue (rainbow). It is pronounced by drawing out the vowel and stressing (accenting) it.
ʻokina
The ʻokina serves as a consonant, always proceeds a vowel, and is pronounced as a glottal stop.
Notably, the diacriticals are often omitted in streets signs and texts, which can make it difficult to get the pronunciation of such names correct. For example, the words lanai and Lanai appear identical without diacriticals (notwithstanding capitalization). However:
- lānai - a covered porch or patio, two syllables
- Lānaʻi - a proper name for one of the main Hawaiʻian islands, three syllables, often mispronounced
Twoprops has tried to stay true to the proper spellings, and include diacriticals wherever appropriate, but it is trickier than it might seem. One might just use an apostrophe (’) for the ʻokina, but that’s not typographically correct. You can get closer by using the left single quote character (‘) which is quite similar to the proper glyph. Some texts use a grave accent or backtick (`) but that, to me, looks even worse than the apostrophe. The typographically correct glyph in Unicode, which is called a “modifier letter turned comma”, is represented by the hex code 02BB or, in HTML entities, ʻ.
The twoprops.net content management system (Quartz) uses Markdown, a markup language that is generally pretty readable in plain text. However, to do things properly, the plain text now has a ʻ in the middle of any word with an ʻokina, which really makes the source text difficult to read. Fortunately, Quartz will substitute a left single quote for apostrophes in text, and at least with my browser and fonts, the result is indistinguishable from a proper ʻokina but, alas, won’t be correct if you copy the text. Here is a screenshot from a temporary page I put up using Quartz showing how various attempts at typing the ʻokina render:
-=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=-
-=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=-
It also appears that Quartz will simply pass a proper ʻokina character on, but there is no easy way on my system (KDE) to generate the character. But rather than insert the cumbersome Unicode hex all over the place, I’m going to try just defining a KRunner shortcut to insert the “modifier letter turned comma” glyph wherever I need an ʻokina.
—2p