How is the glottal stop used in some languages?

From: Arne Götje (高盛華) (arne@linux.org.tw)
Date: Tue May 08 2007 - 20:32:52 CDT

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    Hi list,

    I'm going to implement solutions to use Taiwan's Aboriginal languages,
    which are based on Latin script, in the free software world, mainly
    Locale, input method and fonts.

    All of the Aboriginal languages in Taiwan use the glottal stop, often
    displayed as apostrophe (').

    I saw, that Unicode includes a separate codepoint (U+02BC) for this usage.
    However, standard US keyboards will send U+0027 to applications when you
    hit the apostrophe key and not U+02BC.
    This can be confusing to the user, because both glyphs look alike and
    the technical difference might not always be clear to everyone (I
    suppose it won't be clear to most users, in fact).

    Is it appropriate to just use U+0027 as glottal stop character as part
    of the alphabet (and therefor in the Locale collation)?

    How do other languages handle this issue?

    The Amis language uses a circumflex (^) character to indicate a glottal
    stop and the apostrophe (') to indicate an epiglottal stop. This has
    been mixed up a log time ago already. For the circumflex character a
    similar question... is it appropriate to use U+006E or should rather
    U+02C4 or U+02C6 being used? Any existing implementations out there
    which have similar issues?

    Cheers
    Arne
    - --
    Arne Götje (高盛華) <arne@linux.org.tw>
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