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May 09, 2003
Now It Can Be Told
It becomes clear to me why we in Hawai'i have so many problems with the "Lower 48." This story here says the town of Glassport, Pennsylvania did not recognize Alaska or Hawai'i as being part of the US. At least, as far as the flag they were flying was concerned. It seems no one got around to changing the flag hanging in the city counsel room since at least 1959. So, of course, the flag had only 48 stars.
Oh well, maybe sometime they'll get around to spelling the name of our state correctly. Hawai'i. That's an okina between the two "i"s in Hawai'i. Actually, I use the apostrophe because it's as close to the okina that I can find in the default character sets. If I could only figure out how to use the UTF characters there maybe something closer. Maybe someday when I have more time.
In any case, what's the fuss? No, this is not a case of being politically correct. The okina is a glottal stop used to show the proper pronunciation, and therefore the proper meaning of a word. You literally are misspelling a word if the punctuation marks are left out and if you misspell something (he says, while madly grabbing for the dictionary), you are not communicating effectively.
Will the world come to an end if you don't use an okina or apostrophe? No, but if you want to communicate well, you need to know how to spell.
Aloha!
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Comments
Believe it or not, this is being typed using a Hawai'ian input keyboard right now. I don?t know if that character was the okina or not, because I am not familiar with the typography of the okina (I used to assume it was just an apostrophe).
I use Mac OS X, and it supports Hawaiian as a language. The okina and kahak? are both supported. If the fonts and/or characters transfer, then that is what is used in this sentence.
Aloha!
Posted by: Ken Scott at May 9, 2003 07:45 PM
Looking at the results, after going through Moveable Type, that tells me that typing a "normal" apostrophe produces the okina. Both the okina and kahak? are rendered as a question mark by MT :(
Posted by: Ken Scott at May 9, 2003 07:46 PM
I bet any sort of separation is better than nothing.
Nothing meaning Hawai. Yep no okina, no second i either. Often used here that way.
(ps, I just picked up a Dutch-English dictionary and found Hawai'i isn't in it. Are you sure it still exists? ^__~ )
Posted by: sjon at May 12, 2003 06:34 AM