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'Oumuamua: An analysis of the debate regarding the first interstellar visitor
- Jimmc414 4y agoKatz's attempts to delegitimize Loeb as a scientist makes his argument less credible. Aliens or not, it's disingenuous to deny that some aspects of Oumuamua don't yet have satisfactory explanation.
- echelon 4y agoScientists are people subject to the same foibles as the rest of us.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 4y agoBut, the abstract promises a direct challenge: > one of them is Jonathan I. Katz who challenges Loeb’s hypothesis directly
- ProAm 4y agoIt's a passive aggressive funding fight. Just politics and business. I'm pretty sure Loeb isn't as crazy as his latest claims make it seem, but without outlandish bold claims no one will fund future observation and scientific work on it. At least that's been my take on Loeb's behavior.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jerf 4y ago"Doesn't yet have a satisfactory explanation -> Must be aliens" has a long history, long enough that the rest of us are entitled to draw the inductive conclusion that it's a weak argument very unlikely to be true. It is inductive, not deductive, so this bothers people laboring under the misapprehension that science deals with deductive reasoning. But science is ultimately inductive; we happen to sometimes get to deduce things within its framework but it all lives in an inductive framework.
- Finnucane 4y agoThat's just one step down from "Doesn't yet have a satisfactory explanation -> Must be supernatural.'
- david927 4y agoThis is an interesting paper and Oumuamua will remain fascinating for a long time. Maybe the answer to the Fermi Paradox (or 'Where the hell are they?') is that they're around and doing interstellar drive-bys and we're just starting to notice.
- newZWhoDis 4y agoMy pet theory is they’re using gravity waves for coms and we’re the dumb apes still looking around in the electromagnetic spectrum. Once we can reliably detect and generate gravity waves much of our knowledge of electromagnetic waves can apply. 802.11gr anyone?
- thriftwy 4y agoGravity is so many orders of magnitude weaker than electromagnetism that it is not even funny.
- buildbot 4y agoTrue, but you can theoretically format a gravity wave to not follow the inverse square law - these are called solitons (apparently, I just looked this up)
- jerf 4y agoYes. Now look into how you construct a soliton, and try to figure out what monstrous levels of control you'd have to exert over solar-system sized quantities of degenerate matter to create them, and how much energy it would take. Now compute how much laser light you can generate for, oh, let's say, 6 orders of magnitude less energy. And how tightly you'd expect a civilization that apparently can casually wiggle dozens of solar masses at multiple Hz, in a modulated manner no less (so just a several Hz orbit is not sufficent, we are wiggling these things under power), to be able to collimate such a beam. This is the problem with gravity waves. It isn't some sort of supreme cheat code of the universe for super awesome communication. It's transparently obviously idiotic. Like, not just, "well, it's not necessarily the best way, but even if it's not great someone may have tried it", like, you're burning dozens of orders of magnitude more energy per bit. Plural dozens, of orders of magnitude. Not dozens of times, ten to the power of dozens. This is not sensible no matter how advanced the civilization. We're talking levels of stupid that would greatly exceed spending the entire output of Earth's collective industrial civilization for all of history on a single pack of Skittles. This is not a bright thing to do, and it only gets dumber the smarter you suppose the aliens are.
- cmoscoe 4y agoHugged to death?
- babelfish 4y agoHere is the PDF linked by the page for those getting 'hug of death' http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1721987/FULLTEXT01.pdf http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1721987/FULLTEXT01...
- jacobsenscott 4y agoClearly we need to launch Bezos, Musk, and Branson toward this object so they can inspect it for us and radio back what it is.
- actionfromafar 4y agoThere's a joke in there somewhere about what they will radio in and what you will make of their reports... Bezos - it's wonderful! Something something wage suppression.. Musk - something something free speach... Branson - My God! It's made of stars!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- whycome 4y agoIs the mark "first interstellar visitor" universally agreed upon (as far as we know)? That alone is kinda cool.
- Rastonbury 4y agoI believe so, so far we only know of two
- edfletcher_t137 4y agoApparently (TIL!) it's three now, with a meteor that burned up in 2014 having been confirmed in just April 2022 as interstellar! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNEOS_2014-01-08 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNEOS_2014-01-08 And who was part of the team that first reported its existence? "CNEOS 2014-01-08 is an interstellar object reported in June 2019 by astronomers Amir Siraj and Abraham Loeb"
- pengaru 4y agoNot only is it kinda cool, it's also why it's particularly annoying we didn't get better data while it was near enough to do so. We missed what may have been quite an exceptional opportunity.
- rwmj 4y agoProbably. But also it was detected within the first 10 years of operation of the Pan STARRS 1 telescope so perhaps similar things should be expected every decade or so?
- chongli 4y agoFirst confirmed interstellar visitor. Who knows how much interstellar dust and other small stuff we’ve run into over the eons.
- di456 4y agoPretty much every element from lithium and up came from another star's death. The fusion reaction of a star goes from H -> He -> and on up the periodic table until the star implodes and/or goes supernova, creating gold and other heavier elements. Most of the matter on our current planet has interstellar origins, including humans. We are all made of star dust!
- andrewstuart 4y agoI believe in aliens from a statistical standpoint. But I don't believe in interstellar travel at all. I don't think people grasp the distances between stars. The longest distance a human has traveled through space is to the moon. If, for scale, this was about 2 millimeters, then the nearest star would be another 200 kilometers/124 miles away. Here's a great video to illustrate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk IMO Oumuamua was a rock. However, it's fun to think about it being alien, and it's remarkably similar to Arthur Clarke's Rama story. Presumably the speed and trajectory of Oumuamua is known? Has this been traced back to give a potential origin if it is fro another star system? "Two of NASA's space telescopes (Hubble and Spitzer) tracked the object traveling about 85,700 miles per hour (38.3 kilometers per second) relative to the Sun. Its outbound path is about 20 degrees above the plane of planets that orbit the Sun." https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/comets/oumuamua/in-depth/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/co... If the distance to the nearest star is 40,208,000,000,000 then: 40,208,000,000,000 / 38 (km per second) / 3600 seconds per hour / 24 hours per day 365 days per year = 33552 years if it had come from closest star Do I have those numbers right? Maths isn't a strength.
- gfodor 4y agoAn interstellar object created by aliens arriving here doesn’t imply interstellar travel, if you meant that to mean “manned craft.”
- detritus 4y agoYeah, for me this is the sad reality of getting older and replacing somewhat essentially sci-fi fantasies of progression with bleak, mundane reality. Space is really big. Really, really big.
- coldpie 4y agoThe impossibility of interstellar travel is perhaps the only fact that I find so depressing that I simply refuse to believe it. The universe is just so much more interesting if FTL is possible. It helps that being wrong about this fact doesn't really impact one's life either way.
- czbond 4y agoOne of the author's conclusions to "find out more" (my paraphrase) suggest a rocket using a gravity well to go after it. Are there any options for using a Voyager 1/2 or radio based telescopes to observe it? (I'm a CompScience guy - not an Astrophysicist so that's my best way to describe my question)
- readonlybarbie 4y ago[dead]
- mhh__ 4y agoVoyager 1/2 are both basically EOL at this point so I think at best you could maybe turn the instruments back on for one last hurrah but they're an awfully long way away from Kansas now so even a suicide mission of sorts could overwhelm them.
- tablespoon 4y ago> Voyager 1/2 are both basically EOL at this point so I think at best you could maybe turn the instruments back on for one last hurrah but they're an awfully long way away from Kansas now so even a suicide mission of sorts could overwhelm them. I don't even have to look it up to be 100% sure that Voyager 1/2 are in the wrong place, going in the wrong direction, with the wrong instruments to observe Oumuamua. Their batteries are also nearly dead and they never had enough propellant to go anywhere except approximately where they're going now. The best they could ever do is make small corrections to slingshot off something else, and there's nothing to slingshot off of anymore. Also, I think they're almost out of propellant, too.
- terran57 4y agoI firmly believe that we're not alone in the universe, but advanced alien civilizations capable of interstellar travel would probably look at us like we look at mold - at best, with indifference and at worst, something to remove. But, it is fun to imagine how our belief systems would have been shaken up if scientists were able to show Oumuamua was an interstellar probe ("Rendezvous with Rama" anybody?)
- xmonkee 4y ago>but advanced alien civilizations capable of interstellar travel would probably look at us like we look at mold Why? An advanced civilization wouldn't have cultural curiosity? They wouldn't want to study us from all the different perspectives we study people and literature and philosophy and even biology and neurology etc etc?
- simonh 4y agoBear in mind we study mould. It’s some people’s life’s work.
- Karawebnetwork 4y agoWe even use slime mold on representations of maps to see if it would have done things the same way we do. For all we know, perhaps we are in a galactic petri dish and the entire point of our existence is to test out the growth of life for some great universal scientist! (tongue in cheek comment) https://www.livescience.com/8035-slime-mold-beats-humans-perfecting-traffic-networks.html https://www.livescience.com/8035-slime-mold-beats-humans-per...
- bee_rider 4y agoIt would be sort of funny. So we put some humans on this planet. Now, keep in mind, they don’t possess any group consciousness — they have some limited ability to communicate information by vibrating the air around them, but they don’t have anything like the globalmindnetwork that we experience. But look: over many generations they create these little pathways, to ship goods from population center to population center. It isn’t obvious how, somehow despite lacking any overall coordination, they manage to perform these complex emergent behaviors…
- IAmGraydon 4y agoIf Oumaumau is in fact of extraterrestrial origin, it could be the only evidence of life outside of earth that will ever pass through our solar system. We'll never know.
- distortionfield 4y agoLet's slingshot a probe to it and find out! I'm only half-kidding. I think it would be super worthwhile to do, though. Especially to attempt to solve the mystery of why it sped up by 17 m/s for no visible reason.
- PM_me_your_math 4y agoThey have modeled an acceleration via outgassing. It is quite possible and even likely.
- distortionfield 4y ago[dead]
- 1970-01-01 4y agoConsider the statistics of it being an alien probe. Now consider the statistics of it being a rock. It's a rock.
- daveslash 4y agoStand back, this guy/gal's using Occam's Razor! They'll cut you!
- david927 4y agoWhat is that called? Occam's Blindfold? We don't know it's a rock. We don't really know what it is, other than it's the first thing we've picked up from an interstellar trajectory, is bizarrely shaped, didn't reflect the pull from the sun, swung by the Earth and then accelerated away.
- monkeydreams 4y agoIt's Occam's Razor. In order for it to be an interstellar rock, you require no other assumption because there is little evidence to suggest it isn't. If you believe it is a probe you must assume an alien civilisation. Occam's Razor suggests fewest assumptions win.
- twawaaay 4y agoExcept the whole discussion is still here exactly because there is evidence to suggest it isn't a rock. Supposedly it accelerated a bit, inconsistent with what we know about how rocks move through space.
- david927 4y agoI made a “play on words” to convey the notion of discarding data in the insistence on coming to a conclusion rather than simply holding ambiguity. No decision needs to be made. We don’t know if it’s a rock or anything else and that’s ok.
- DennisP 4y agoYou don't have to believe it's an alien probe to accept the substantial evidence that it's not a simple rock.
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- Balgair 4y agoAside: I want to point out the currently known composition of the universe: ~5% matter. Most of this is H and He though, bit of Li in there too. And it's all mostly burning in a star's gravity well. Like, 99.99999% of it. The stuff you and I are made of (C, N, P, Fe, etc), that we would wish aliens would be made of too, is really rare. ~25% dark matter. We know a little about it. We know that it falls down and doesn't like to touch just about anything. But that's really kinda it. ~70% dark energy. It falls ... up (?!). We know pretty much nothing about it. And it's the large majority of 'stuff' in the universe. If there are friends out there, then we may want to look at stuff that is a bit more common than ourselves too.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoInteresting. It's not the vast size of the universe that matters. It's the concentration (or not) of particular elements that's (likely) the metric that matters. Good to know. Thx.
- gus_massa 4y agoNitpicking: Instead of Li, you probably mean He. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elem... > Hydrogen and helium are estimated to make up roughly 74% and 24% of all baryonic matter in the universe respectively. Despite comprising only a very small fraction of the universe, the remaining "heavy elements" can greatly influence astronomical phenomena. Only about 2% (by mass) of the Milky Way galaxy's disk is composed of heavy elements.
- andrewflnr 4y agoI don't know if they corrected their comment, but there's definitely some primordial Li out there along with the H and He. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_lithium_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_lithium_problem
- gus_massa 4y agoMy guess is that I made a mistake and I skipped the "He" in the GP comment.
- Geee 4y agoThere was an earlier interstellar object in 2014, and it hit earth. They are planning an expedition to retrieve pieces of it. https://www.space.com/2014-meteor-first-interstellar-visitor-oumuamua https://www.space.com/2014-meteor-first-interstellar-visitor...
- aceazzameen 4y agoInteresting! Why do meteors become classified and then not?
- jcrawfordor 4y agoThe issue in these cases is typically not the actual information but the methods of collection. When astronomical or other information is collected by an intelligence system, it can be time-consuming or even theoretically difficult to "sanitize" the data so that it does not reveal information about the design, capabilities, and specifications of that system. For example, imagery collected by intelligence satellites for purposes like wilderness firefighting is usually kept classified and distilled into summary maps instead, because the images themselves could be analyzed to reveal the resolution, sensitivity, and wavelength filtering of the sensor used... Valuable information to an adversary designing countermeasures.
- xp84 4y agoSometimes you run across a comment that contains more insightful knowledge than entire articles. Thanks for this! I would never have considered this but it makes perfect sense!
- bagels 4y agoYou could also reveal the location or number of sensors as well, which they may not want to reveal.
- aceazzameen 4y agoThis was very insightful and something I have to keep in mind! Thank you!
- jrvarela56 4y agoAfter reading all sorts of arguments in this thread, I am extremely excited by the possibility of an alien probe passing by. Heck, even if it’s the most horrible kind of alien race - you have to agree - it would be pretty fucking epic to witness the end of mankind in a real-life, sci-fi movie. And if it’s the loving kind of alien race, that’d be awesome too. Either way, enjoy while it lasts!
- jvanderbot 4y agoI'm happy to live in boring, peaceful times.
- hugs_vs_toph 4y agolol odds of nuclear warfare never been higher since decades
- sandebert 4y agoI, for one, welcome our alien overlords.
- zshrdlu 4y agoThey'll likely bring interstellar guns, germs, and steel. And bibles/qur'ans.
- hzay 4y agoYou don't sound like you have kids or grandkids.
- jrvarela56 4y agoJust had a kid, hope she gets to see aliens in her lifetime.
- ss108 4y agoEven if in the context of them nuking us out of existence or worse? Ok bro
- unrealp 4y agoif an intelligent civilization needs to find if there is another intelligent civilization, it might send out an object like that. If the object gets trapped, someone intelligent is there so check it out. If not, its a pass. Its cheap. Its safer since it doesnt accept or deny that originator is intelligent.
- Faark 4y agoIt's also incredibly slow. It also needs a way to send back the data, unless you expect it to slowly return to somewhere "civilized". So there is either tech on board or they have tech capable enough to pretty much just observe us directly. Maybe as some first contact protocol, by dropping the rock outside a candidates solar system. But again, i'd expect them to have so much better ways to observe. We humans really have a tendency to see pattern in things. Even after having having seen the decompiled game code being basic RNG, a part of me was still looking for ways to improve my drop chance by me doing things slightly different :D
- unrealp 4y ago"having tech on board" - yea but it reveals that the probe came from intelligent civilization. "expect it to slowly return to somewhere "civilized"." - this one looks good.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoAn advanced civilization that can send out a probe like that also likely has tools to cloak its existence to us. You could very well have a situation where the mothership docks outside of a solar system, cloaks itself, and sends out a probe, and the probe eventually makes it back to the mothership. I really think we are limited by our imagination and anthropomorphism. A civilization a million years ahead of us in development is likely capable of things we can’t even imagine. I always like to remind myself that our own civilization is at most only 10k years old. If we survive, I can’t imagine what we would be like in 10x more time.
- euroderf 4y ago
- Isamu 4y agoAvi Loeb at Harvard is the one advocating for interpreting this as an alien probe. He writes a very large number of very short papers, sort of idea papers, and he views himself as providing stimulating ideas. The object was interesting in that it wasn’t just a sphere, it had a non-spherical shape. And beyond that is speculation, the actual shape is not well established, let alone whether it has a shape that suggests aliens.
- colordrops 4y agoHe also talks about how it had no contrail and accelerated without ejecting mass. One of the only things we know of that could do that is a solar sail.
- 93po 4y agoI would then wonder the accuracy by which we measure those two things, since it seems like an inaccurate measurement is the most likely answer
- colordrops 4y agoI'd trust a chair of Harvard physics over a anonymous HN commenter on this one. Not to appeal to authority, but there really isn't any other option here.
- 93po 4y agoI trust their domain expertise. I don't trust their incentives. Success in academia seems to be largely based on making bold claims (sometimes through questionable statistics applied to questionable research methods). And Avi Loeb is definitely demonstrating this desire because he literally wrote and sold a book on Amazon based on his views and it's quite successful and popular. Also let's just apply some common sense: Oumuamua is traveling at 315,000 km/hr. It came from the direction of Vega, which is 25 light years away. A light year is 9.46 trillion kilometers. That's 3,428 years of travel time to reach us. It doesn't make sense to me that an alien presence capable of traveling for 3,428 years straight would be doing so at a speed that slow and would pass so close to us but also not interact with us at all. Also if we're going to appeal to authority: the academic community consensus is that it's a natural object. Avi Loeb is in the very small minority to suggest it isn't, and most people actively disagree with him.
- throwawayalie 4y agoAdvanced aliens could only do space travel and they have no interest in us nor our science. Something they may need and we have is resources but it's not rare at all in the universe. I bet they need a habitable planet or they are some kind cult like evangelical chritivans have to spread their religious bullshit everywhere.
- geysersam 4y agoThese kinds of assumptions are just too strong. What we consider "resources" they might consider peanuts. Maybe the most rare and fascinating thing to them are our minds, our cultures, and the unique combination of senses and biases that form our semi-consistent conscious perception of the world.
- codezero 4y agoI like thinking about why something that survives interstellar travel might be elongated and off the top of my head I think of what analogous shape is familiar. The best way to penetrate mass is with length and density and of course space is “empty” but not over long time scales, and not when you add up interstellar medium over long distances. A big feature of such a shape assuming some stability is a small cross section and the length comes as a side effect of the necessary mass. It makes some sense that an object would be shaped like that but I do wonder what might provide the stability to maintain a small cross section rather than having a more chaotic rotation about some axis other than the radial one. I don’t think we know enough about Oumuamua to say whether this wondering is even relevant to it, but it’s fun to speculate, it could also be Darwinian in a sense. Its stability about a long rotation axis over long periods of time is why we end up seeing it on a long, long, long journey, or it’s something totally different :).
- BeefWellington 4y agoGiven its shape and size appears to have changed substantially as it passed through the solar system[1], it seems like the comet theory is the best to explain what it was. In terms of its shape, the article also suggests that was misleading and it may have been much more flat and at least one, possibly two orders of magnitude smaller than originally believed. [1]: https://www.space.com/interstellar-object-oumuamua-pancake-shape-pluto-like-planet https://www.space.com/interstellar-object-oumuamua-pancake-s...
- codezero 4y agoMakes sense! Thanks for sharing. I studied comets quite a bit but have been out of academia for a while so I’m no longer as wired into the reality of wild space shit :)
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agohttps://revelationspace.fandom.com/wiki/Lighthugger https://revelationspace.fandom.com/wiki/Lighthugger
- lamontcg 4y ago
- AlexanderTheGr8 4y agoSlightly off-topic but I find it incredible that people in the comments think interstellar travel is impossible (or almost impossible) A couple centuries ago, the brightest minds thought that humans flying in the air would take a million years. How can humans travel to the other part of the earth within a month? Today, it takes 16 hours (4 of which are airport security). A century ago, almost everyone thought that stepping on a divine body like the moon is absolutely impossible for humanity. We did it less than 80 years after inventing aircrafts. A century ago, everyone thought it was impossible to fling a tiny device to blow up an entire city. Hiroshima and Nagasaki... Now, we think that it would be impossible to travel very long distances in space. Well, this challenge seems a piece of cake compared to flying in the air, walking on the moon, or generating unimaginable energy from atoms. My layman solution to interstellar travel is constant acceleration using controlled nuclear fusion. We can use interstellar dust for necessary matter for our nuclear fusion (lots of hydrogen in interstellar dust). Even if we can't use interstellar dust while travelling, we can certainly carry enough from our solar system. I read somewhere (don't remember where) that if a ship constantly accelerates in space, it can reach another star system in a few decades and another galaxy in less than a century. It's definitely a trivial challenge for humanity compared to what we have accomplished in the last 2 centuries. What do you think?
- HyperSane 4y agoInterstellar travel is downright easy on time scales of hundred to thousands of years. We just need to make humans last long enough.
- AlexanderTheGr8 4y ago[1]> According to wikipedia, interstellar travel at 1G would take approximately 1 year + the distance in lightyears. Proxima Centauri (4.2 light years) for example would take 5.2 years. This^ is from the traveller's standpoint. I am not completely sure about how long it would take from the perspective of someone on Earth. But this definitely seems plausible if we can solve the other problems with constant acceleration such as sufficient fuel and protection from interstellar dust (at close to light speed, dust would hit with unimaginable force). [1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/840/how-fast-will-1g-get-you-there https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/840/how-fast-will-...
- mahaloz 4y agoAyyy I know this article is about the actual thesis, but it’s super cool to see Hawaiian on a top article title here. Although I don’t believe it was coined by a Native Hawaiian, it’s still fun to see Hawaiian make its way into science!
- dudeinjapan 4y agoSeems HN has ruled out aliens but have we given any consideration that 'Oumuamua may have been sent back in time by a future human civilization? That may explain the rather phallic shape.
- ss108 4y agoHyperion enjoyer?
- sai_c 4y agoThere is only one point around the whole Oumuamua topic for me, that makes me a bit sad. Extraterrestrial or not is not it, but that we had no means to just fly there (with or without humans) and checkout what it is. Even worse, it seems no one in the scientific community (please correct me if I'm wrong) stepped up and said "We need to change this!". And it seems we will not have those means in the coming years/decades. Honestly, if we can't do this in our own neighbourhood, because we simply lack the will power and consensus to do it, it says a lot about the future of space exploration.
- colordrops 4y agoAvi Loeb stepped up and he's getting shit on left and right for it, despite very strong credentials.
- a2800276 4y agoOn the other hand, he's likely the only astrophysicist apart from Neil Degrasse Tyson any non astrophysicist has ever heard of.
- adastra22 4y agoHawking? Einstein?
- JPLeRouzic 4y agoThose are not astrophysicists but theoretical physicists?
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoImagine the solar system as a guitar, now imagine a gravity rich "visitor" (like a ejected jupiter/saturn) plunging through, plugging on the gravitational relations string set. How long could you hear that sound revebrating, and could you untangle it if it happened multiple times? Could such a "visitor" suspend the gravitational shielding by the outer gas giants? It should actually be doable with a de-convolution operation, once you compute the gravitational "click" accoustics of the solar system.
- nathell 4y agoNitpick: it's ʻOumuamua, not 'Oumuamua. The initial letter is the ʻokina (U+02BB), representing a glottal stop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOkina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOkina
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deepsun 4y agoWell, they don't write Hawaiian, so there's no correct representation. More clear example would be to write some name a non-latin script at all. You'd have to nitpick that Athena is not correct, and they should've written Αθηνά.
- bloak 4y agoAre there any proposed orthographies for Hawaiian that represent the glottal stop in a different way? Seeing as the Hawaiian language has only 5 vowels and 8 consonants it seems a shame that they couldn't find a way of writing it with the Latin alphabet that didn't require adding a character which, to the uninitiated, doesn't look anything like a letter. And, in fact, for the purposes of capitalisation, it is not treated as a letter: the following vowel gets capitalised instead. Meanwhile, there seems to be more than one system in use for lexicographical ordering of the ʻokina. Of course there's no immediately obvious alternative: H is perhaps a natural choice for a Latin letter to represent a glottal stop, but if H were used for the glottal stop in Hawaiian then a different letter would have to be used for the sound currently written with H: seeing as the currently orthography has been in use for some time one would want to avoid an incompatible change. So J, Q, X or Y instead of ʻokina? Hm... Of course I'm aware that there's probably no point in thinking about alternative orthographies for Hawaiian, that probably there's no demand for a "solution" for this "problem" ... but it seems like an interesting thing to think about for a few minutes anyway.
- f137 4y ago> Open Access in DiVA > fulltext(1312 kB) > 0 downloads well... either their counter is broken, or nobody needs to read the article to take part in our fruitful discussion
- alephnil 4y agoIt should be at least one, since I downloaded it, so the counter is broken or delayed.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]