Open NelsonMinar opened 1 year ago
There already is a keystroke sequence for the ʻokina, in modletters, though I will very quickly agree that it's a pretty lousy one if you type it frequently. ʻOkina is Unicode U+02BB MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA, which can be accessed with Multi_key exclam numbersign grave
. (The modletters-base file is intended to give general access to Unicode "modifier letters", at least some of them, and my bizarre mnemonic is !#
on the grounds that as modifier letters, they are "not numbers.")
An actual Hawaiʻian speaker (writer) would want a better binding, sure, but not sure how helpful an xcompose file would be, and they might do better customizing on their own (I have my own personal XCompose bindings on my computer too; not everything is worthy of dotXCompose), or more likely using a normal Hawaiʻian-language keyboard driver. Multi_key grave grave
is currently bound to “
, U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK, which is also a sensible binding for it.
Similarly, consider this quote from the TeXBook (source at https://ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/knuth/dist/tex/texbook.tex):
TeX has no regard for the glories of the Greek tongue—as far as it is concerned, Greek letters are just additional weird symbols, and they are allowed only in math mode. In a pinch you can get the output τεχ by typing \$\tau\epsilon\chi\$, but if you're actually setting Greek text, you will be using a different version of TeX, designed for a keyboard with Greek letters on it, and you shouldn't even be reading this manual, which is undoubtedly all English to you.
(Quoting The Joy of TeX by Michael Spivak, 1982)
It'd be nice to have a standard key sequence for the ʻOkina, a character used to write Hawaiian. The question is what key sequence.
I'm personally using
<grave> <grave>
. It's easy to type and mnemonic. Unfortunately that's already defined in this repository to be U201C. I don't know how people would feel about redefining something: there are other definitions that also input U201C.The Hawaiian input method on Windows rebinds the apostrophe to mean ʻOkina. That'd be an argument to use the apostrophe key somehow.
It'd be smart to get suggestions from folks who write Hawaiian regularly. I'm not one.