Latin glottal stop in ID in NWT, Canada

[Marcel Schneider]

Amidst the (wise) silence on the precise subject of this thread, Iʼm good to point out that the use of uppercase glottal stop in home country newspapers is certainly for spectacularityʼs and legibilityʼs sake. Would it be a good idea to contact the editors, pointing to the Unicode Mailing List, and forward their advice to the List?

For a more accurate bit of glottal stop encoding history than in my yesterday’s mail: While the uncased original 0294 LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP is a part of Unicode since the dawn (1.1), uppercase 0241 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER GLOTTAL STOP joined up for 4.1 in support of NWT communities and made U+0294 its lowercase, but this fortunately regained autonomy one year and version later when lowercase 0242 LATIN SMALL LETTER GLOTTAL STOP was born, thanks to Canada (SCC) and Ireland (NSAI) Standards bodies.[1] This was still right before the deadline of the reference subset at the creation of a widely used font shipped with Windows (so there should be no problem on font side).

To date, about half of Canadian Aboriginal languages (e.g. in NWT) use cased glottal stop, while the other (e.g. in SK) use monocameral. One of the latter uses digit seven instead. ‘7’ for ‘ʔ’ is no problem on road signs, while Iʼm not sure whether the same applies in text processing. I donʼt believe neither that in the other languages, this translation to ASCII would be less offence than the actually enforced replacement of glottal stop in ID with a hyphen-minus.

I wonder whether NWT officialdom didnʼt propose to put an apostrophe for the glottal stop till they get the missing software updates :) After all, these IPA and then Latin Extended letters are thought to be basically an enlarged curly apostrophe. The curl isnʼt even required, as the same sound looks like a styled ASCII apostrophe when it occurs in a number of warmer countries (A78B LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SALTILLO, A78C LATIN SMALL LETTER SALTILLO).

The thread about how to call non-ASCII characters on the whole, was a very good idea. Would anybody please send a link to NWT authorities? I think it would be fine to support the courageous mum in the lawsuit! In case this link will be useful, here it is:
http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2015-m09/0125.html

In case of trouble typing glottal stops, the best solution is probably to change for a fully Unicode supporting keyboard layout. This typically has a Compose key, which can be implemented on [AltGr]+[Space]. (Put the no-break spaces into the Shift and Shift+AltGr shift states.) 
Here are sequences for glottal stop:
{Compose}{'}{7} → ʔ
{Compose}{'}{T} → Ɂ
{Compose}{'}{t} → ɂ
([T] is used because it is not far from [7] and “T with acute” doesnʼt exist. To remember, read “gloTTal sTop”, and note a slight resemblance between '7' and 'T'.)

We hope that the full range of first names will be successfully implemented, so that any person bearing a name with glottal stop and his/her relatives will never encounter any trouble again.

Best wishes,

Marcel 

[1] http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2962.pdf
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