![]() The reason for this seemingly unpredictable display of the ʻokina as an actual character is that its use was solely to remove any potential ambiguity of meaning: for example, “koʻu” (my) and “kou” (your) would look exactly the same if it were not for the intervening glottal character. ![]() ![]() In the days of the 1800s Hawaiian language newspapers, the glottal stop was sometimes indicated by either the apostrophe or by the use of a dash/hypen character. In the mid-1900s, long before personal computers and Unicode character sets, the apostrophe character was sometimes used to indicate an ʻokina. Prior to the 1970s, it was rare to actually write the glottal stop character, since competent speakers of Hawaiian can very easily tell where ʻokina come in words, much in the same way that an Australian or Cockney Engish language speaker would still pronounce “cat” with a glottal stop in place of the /t/ and an American English speaker would normally still replace the middle of the word “button” with a glottal stop despite the fact that the glottal has no explicit representation in either of these cases. ![]() The history of writing glottal stops in Hawaiian If you should be interested in an in-depth analysis of glottal stops and their use around the world in both written and spoken language, please read the Wikipedia article on the topic. To practice pronouncing the ʻokina, as well as to learn about how it is a “significant letter” in Hawaiian and where it should and should not be written, please refer to the practice lesson 0403P Pronunciation Practice For The ʻOkina. You should watch 0403V Pronunciation #3: The Glottal Stop to get a complete introduction to the concept of a glottal stop in Hawaiian if you are not already familiar with it. In this lesson, you will learn how to write the ʻokina and compare it to other characters such as the backtick / ` /, apostrophe / ’ /, and prime characters / ′ / which look very similar at first glance. The Hawaiian ʻokina character indicates a “glottal stop” (like the break in the middle of the English word “uh-oh”). ![]() Learn how glottal stops are represented in Hawaiian ![]()
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