I consider myself very fortunate to be working in the language towards which the web is biased, and I wish that there wasn't so much baggage preventing us from making a clean break and fixing things. It works, if your readers are willing to bother, but man, oh man, is it a pain to have to do this. Also, some sites, including this one, which provides the Unicode values for Hawaiian letters, also encourage the use of alternate fonts and plug-ins. I just don't know how well various browsers would behave. is currently presented in an ISO-8859-1 encoding, but if I switched to Unicode other things would become possible. Incidently, both the okina and the macron are available in Unicode. If I do happen to know one I'll probably use a carat or something like that. Not exactly a great set of solutions, are they? In most cases I don't know where the macrons go anyway, so I won't kick myself too hard. Some people drop this altoghter in HTML, and some use the carat character (^) over or type a tilde (~) after the lengthened vowel. The ‘okina is supposed to look like an apostrophe rotated 180 degrees.Ĭalled a kahako (with a macron over the o) or a mekona in Hawaiian, the macron is placed over a vowel to indicate the lengthening of that vowel. In some of my posts I have been using the foot character (') as a placeholder for the ‘okina, but I've noticed that Hawaiian language sites more commonly use the left single-quote (‘). The ‘Okina is the apostrophe mark and is a glottal stop or a brief break in the word. These two symbols change how words are pronounced. Creating neologisms for all those Hawaiian-named birds would be a huge can of worms and a great disservice to scholarship (see my longer comments below). The okina is actually part of the Hawaiian alp.
I've been inconsistent in my use of this symbol here, but it's considered a consonent in Hawaiian, a language that has precious few letters with which to convey pronounciation, so I'm going to try to use it properly. Two symbols appear frequently in Hawaiian words the ‘Okina and the Kahak. the okina is an upside-down apostrophe, aka raised turned comma or single left quotation mark.) As for Kauai Monarch, the last one of those was conquered by Kamehameha I in 1808. NV Access received a comment from a user that eSpeak-NG mispronounces the traditional spelling of Hawaii which uses the backward apostrophe (called okina hex code is 02BB) like so: Hawaii. The word "Hawaii" itself is properly pronounced with a glottal stop between the last two vowels, which is represented in Hawaiian by the ‘okina symbol, which is not available in HTML.