Digital Hawaiian

Moving to the islands is often an exercise in culture shock. Hawai'i may be a state within the USA, but there is a great deal that is different about the islands. Hawai'i is the one state in the nation where Caucasians are a minority, the culture is a rich stew of Polynesian, Chinese, Filipino, traditional American and many other peoples. This adds a extra dimension to the experience of living in the islands.

One of the challenges is the Hawai'ian language. The language is to be heard in daily conversation as well as the source of most names on the map, from towns to street addresses. While the pronunciation rules for Hawaiian are fairly straightforward, it often does not come easily to someone whose speech center is trained in the European languages. I stumbled through Hawaiian pronunciations for months before they began to seem natural. I still occasionally mangle a word or two.

Learning a bit of Hawai'ian can be enjoyable, the language has some great words that are used in everyday conversation. Pau, puka, mauka, makai and many other words are mixed liberally with English by those who have lived in the islands for any length of time. Even reading the local newspaper requires adding a few words of Hawai'ian to your vocabulary. Here on Darker View is is place names you will see regularly, some of these are quite challenging. A great many place names use very similar letter combinations, a result of using the same root words to build these names. Thus names starting with the same prefixes like Wai- or Kap- abound. Many Hawaiian place names are descriptive, actually a short phrase in place of a name. This leads to very long names with a mouthful of syllables... 'Aneaho'omalu bay is found just down the hill from us, Nohonaohae'iki is a small Pu'u I drive past each day near the Saddle Road intersection.

In writing this blog I hope to pass some of the unique Hawaiian experience along, making an effort to be as accurate as possible. I have had to consider how I will handle the language here on Darker View, making decisions in how I will record the spellings and diacritical marks. I include these marks most of the time, but technical issues keep me from using them everywhere. These special characters give search engines and browsers some difficulty, thus I do not generally use them in posting titles or URL's (see the title of this article!). Each author must decide when and where they will use the diacritical marks. For example, I almost always spell out Hawai'i with the diacritical, but often neglect it for the term Hawaiian.

I do make an effort to include correct diacritical marks in the article bodies here on the blog. This is often made more difficult as many sources do not correctly use the marks. Far too many drop the diacriticals altogether, spelling the word using only standard Latin characters. Sometimes a few web searches are necessary to find the correct spelling of a Hawai'ian word.

Fortunately for those of us who desire to include non-standard latin characters into our documents the computer industry has given us a solution. The Unicode character set allows any of thousands of characters to be used, representing most of the world's languages. It takes a little more effort to include characters not found on the keyboard into documents, all you have to do is learn how. Most modern computer applications now support Unicode, this includes word processors and web browsers, allowing us to use these expanded character sets. There are Unicode characters throughout this document, used as examples to this discussion.

There are several non-standard characters needed to properly render Hawai'ian words, of these the most troublesome is the 'okina. This is not a simple accent, but a character in its own right, as necessary to the language as a, b, c, d... It is used to produce what linguists call a glottal stop, a pause in the pronunciation of a word. This is not only troublesome to learn to use when pronouncing Hawai'ian words, but troublesome when putting it into a electronic document.

What character on the keyboard do you use for the 'okina? There two to choose from on a standard keyboard layout and several more choices in the extensive Unicode character set. A character you sometimes see used in place of an 'okina is the backquote. This character is on standard English keyboards, found on the upper left corner for most. This character looks right in some fonts, and is a poor representation of an 'okina in many others. Another problem with the use of the backquote is that many applications treat the character as punctuation, not as a character. Some apps will break and wrap lines at a backquote and not select the whole word when performing replacement or searches. The backquote is a poor choice for the 'okina.

According to the Unicode 5.1 standard, the accepted character for the 'okina is the character #x02BB. But this also has some issues. Many computer character sets render this mark badly, some even omit it. More than once I have found an unintelligible character marker where the 'okina is supposed to be when using this code.

With those choices I have decided to use the plain old apostrophe in place of the 'okina, not quite right, but more reliable. The apostrophe is treated as part of the word by applications, not as punctuation. An added benefit is that an apostrophe is at least on the keyboard, available as you type without any digital gymnastics. If you are producing printed material and can test all parts of your system, from layout to printing the true Unicode 'okina is probably the best choice. If you are creating web pages or other electronically distributed documents, with no control of the environment used to display the document, the apostrophe may be the safer choice to consider.

There are a number of other diacriticals that appear in written Hawai'ian. These are the kahakō, or macrons, seen as a line over a vowel. These are used to create the long form of the appropriate vowel. There are a couple ways to include these characters into your documents, be they HTML webpages, blog posting or simply word processing documents.

The character can be directly inserted into the text through use of a Unicode character. Simply copy the character or word from a source that already includes the correct characters. To aid in this there are some tools hidden in your computer... The Windows utility Character Map can be found under Programs->Accessories->System Tools in the Windows XP Start Menu. This little utility provides a complete set of characters in a small window that can be copied to the clipboard, then pasted into a document. Keeping the utility open beside the main document can provide a quick shortcut to any of the needed diacritical and many other special characters. MacOS includes a special character feature found in the edit menu that provides the same functionality.

For HTML and blog entries there is another method, as long as the document supports Unicode encoding, all of the special characters can be included using a character sequence. This code is translated to the Unicode character at the same time HTML tags and other codes in the text are translated upon display in the browser. This code is formed by an ampersand, a descriptor, then a semicolon. The descriptor can take several forms, a text description of the character, a decimal number, or a hexadecimal number. The diacritical characters as well as other special characters like the degree sign and Greek letters can also be inserted this way. The sequence ° results in the ° symbol. The code can also be in decimal or hexadecimal numbers, thus ° or ° will also result in the ° symbol. All that is then needed is a decent reference of all the codes. If the sequence is not correctly formatted it will not interpret and will be shown in the text unchanged.

On Windows computers special characters can also be typed directly by using the alt key. Holding the alt key down and typing a number will generate a Unicode character using the same numerical codes. Thus Alt 0176 directly produces the ° symbol in your text. The major drawback is that this only works with the keypad, not the numeral keys along the top of the keyboard. Laptops or other small keyboards without a full keypad can not easily access this method. This method does not seem to work with higher numbered Unicode characters like the 'okina and macrons on some operating systems.

A final method of handling special characters is to use a keyboard remapping utility such as KeyTweak. This allows you to reassign keys of the keyboard to another function, such as using alt-a to produce the ā character. This is very helpful for those who need to type regularly using non-keyboard characters, but can be an issue if you regularly use several different computers.

A language purist may deride the decisions that most authors use when writing Hawai'ian words. But our usage of the language also has to make allowances for limitations in the technology and what is practical. We may aspire to completely proper usage, but I suspect we will also fall short. At least make an effort to tackle the issue and to understand the issues of rendering the characters.