The glottal stop is used in many Polynesian languages and known under various names as for instance:

Hawaiian is the ancestral language of the indigenous people of the Hawaiian Islands, the Hawaiians, a Polynesian people. ... Tahitian, a Tahitic language, is the official language of French Polynesia and is spoken throughout Oceania. ... Uvean (Fakauvea in the vernacular) is the Polynesian language spoken on Uvea (also known Wallis Island), and it was therefore known as Wallisian in colonial times. ...

Encoding and displaying the Polynesian glottal

Old conventions

In plain ASCII the glottal is sometimes represented by the apostrophe character ('), ASCII value 39 in decimal and 27 in hexadecimal, which in most fonts currently used renders as a straight, data-processing, typewriter apostrophe as is also specified in Unicode. But in some older fonts, especially those used on Unix platforms and related platforms and on an MS-DOS screen it renders as a right single quotation mark (which is the wrong shape). A more pedantic and ultra-correct method for plain ASCII text is to use the grave accent or back-quote character (`), ASCII value 96 in decimal and 60 in hexadecimal, which in some older fonts, especially those used on older Unix-like platforms, does display a glyph similar to a left single quotation mark. However, in most newer fonts, it has a pronounced lean to the left and can look inappropriate. It is still useful, however, when words are to be entered into a database to have the character distinct from the apostrophe. In addition when a wordlist is alphabetically sorted, (may depend on the program's preferences), the '`' comes after the 'z', as it should be in Tongan (but not in almost all other Polynesian languages, where it should be ignored for the sorting). For other uses, see ASCII (disambiguation). ... An apostrophe An apostrophe (French, from the Greek αποστροφος προσωδια, the accent of elision) ( ’ ) is a punctuation and sometimes diacritic mark in languages written in the Latin alphabet. ... The decimal (base ten or occasionally denary) numeral system has ten as its base. ... In mathematics and computer science, hexadecimal, or simply hex, is a numeral system with a radix or base of 16 usually written using the symbols 0–9 and A–F or a–f. ... This Smith Premier typewriter, purchased around the end of the 19th century, was found abandoned in the Bodie ghost town. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Guide to Unix Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... The grave accent ( ` ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek until 1982 (polytonic orthography), French, Catalan, Welsh, Italian, Vietnamese, Scottish Gaelic, Norwegian, Portuguese and other languages. ... A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. ...

The new standard and transitional problems

The official Unicode value for the glottal is the Unicode character U+02BB MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA ( ‘ ) which can be rendered in HTML by the entity ʻ (or in hexadecimal form ʻ). Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... A piece of HTML code with syntax highlighting In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages with hypertext and other information to be displayed in a web browser. ...

But lack of support for this character in older fonts (and many newer fonts) along with the large amount of legacy data and expense in time and money to convert has prevented easy and universal use of the new character. As for now (2006) Apple Mac OS X based computers have no problem with the glyph, but Microsoft Windows especially when using Internet Explorer still have. U+02BB should be the value used in encoding new data when the expected use of the data permits. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Microsoft Windows is a series of popular proprietary operating environments and operating systems created by Microsoft for use on personal computers and servers. ...

This character is also a proper one for a Latin-letter transliteration of the Hebrew letter ‘áyin and the Arabic letter ‘ayn. They are sometimes also rendered by a superscript half ring with the opening to the right ( ʿ ) or even, as a typographical fallback, a superscript c ( ^c ). Hebrew (עִבְרִית ‘Ivrit) is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by more than seven million people in Israel with the West Bank, the United States, and Jewish communities around the world. ... Ayin is the sixteenth letter in many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic. ... The Arabic language (Arabic: ‎ translit: ), or simply Arabic (Arabic: ‎ translit: ), is the largest member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. ... Ayin is the sixteenth letter in many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic. ...

A display work-around

Because this character is not found in many fonts, it may not appear properly on all computer systems and in all configurations. Accordingly, where U+02BB should properly be used, the Unicode punctuation character U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, ‘, represented by the HTML entity ‘, is sometimes used instead. This punctuation symbol is also used instead of the recommended turned comma letter symbol in transliterations from Semitic languages to assure proper display on the widest number of browsers.

Another problem

In some sans-serif fonts non-bolded and at normal size, the left single quotation character does not render distinctly different from the straight apostrophe or from the right single quotation character. If glottals in this article appear as straight typewriter quotation marks to you, you may need to enlarge the font display in your browser. In Hawaiian, where only one of these curly quotation forms is used as a letter, this matters little. It is more problematic in displaying transliterations from Semitic languages where both left-quotation and right-quotation characters are used with different meanings. In typography, serifs are the small features at the end of strokes within letters. ...

External links

• The correct Unicode values and HTML entities for Hawaiian in Unicode
  • Kuolono: Unicode on the Web
  • Luakini o ka ‘Uhane o Aloha!: Hawaiian Alphabet
• Apple Compatibility with Hawaiian added in OS 10.2
  • Apple Computer Includes Hawaiian Language Support With Latest Operating System.
  • Honolulu Advertiser (September 2, 2002): I mua! Macintosh 'speaks' Hawaiian
  • Starbulletin (September 16, 2002): Macs upgrade to isle punctuation
  • SFGate (September 9, 2002): Hawaiian language advocates applaud new Mac operating system.
• Honolulu Advertiser (June 28, 2004): Hawaiian spellings catch on, but slowly. (On slow progress in using proper Hawaiian spellings instead of makeshift English spelling.)
• Ulukau: The Hawaiian Electronic Library: Browser information for viewing Hawaiian characters