Re: Hawaiian glottal in Unicode?

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Tue Nov 20 2001 - 14:42:42 EST


Deborah asked:

> I've seen recommendations to represent the Hawaiian glottal (ʻokina) in
> Unicode as U+02BB. This seems odd since this character is bidi neutral;

Actually, it isn't. See UnicodeData.txt:

02BB;MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA;Lm;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;
02BC;MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE;Lm;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;

(Those are the entries from UnicodeData-3.2.0d4.txt, but these
characters have had stable properties since Unicode 1.1.5.)

Both of these are reasonably common *letters* in various orthographies.
And they have an "L" bidi directionality, which matches their use
predominantly with the Latin script.

> it seems like you would get strange results if you mixed Hawaiian and
> Arabic, for example. U+2018 is also not right since it's punctuation,
> and you get incorrect double-click behavior, among other things.

U+2018 is clearly not the correct answer.

--Ken

>
> Any comments?
>
> Deborah Goldsmith
> Manager, Fonts & Language Kits
> Apple Computer, Inc.
> goldsmith@apple.com
>
>
>



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