8 ms·
Are 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 c
by bloak 4y ago
Are 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.