Then you (and many of the participants in this thread) don’t quite get it.
The tick mark or apostrophe (or whatever it’s called) in Hawaiian should be treated as an ordinary letter. It stands for one of the 13 phonemes of the language and thus should be treated just like the others.
We tend to think of it as different because (1) we use the same (or a similar) symbol in English for a non-phonemic purpose and (2) we don’t have the same sound in English except in a couple utterances (uh-oh and uh-uh[sup]1[/sup]) that are more like grunts than words. Spelt, on the other hand, looks fine to me.
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Just another minor difference in spelling between the US and Britain. There’s several hundred of them. No big deal.
[sup]1[/sup] uh-uh is actually pronounced like either two Ms or two Ns, each preceded by a glottal stop. (It indicates negation; I’m sure most people are familiar with it.) How this spelling got attached to that utterance is beyond me.
Actually, there are several words in English that have the same sound–depending on where one lives and talks.
Western Pennsylvania is notorious for pronouncing mountain as moun’n and similar pronunciations are associated with fountain, captain, wanton, and other words where a /t/ sound is preceded by a nasal or (bilabial?) plosive and followed by a nasal and where the accent is on the first syllable. (I suspect that a lot of people to the North of Western PA do, as well, since I heard that a lot growing up in Michigan.)
How do you figure this? Maybe you pronounce it differently, but I pronounce “uh-uh” with the “u” sound as in “bus.” Sometimes, it’s “Nuh-uh.” There’s also “mm-mm” which can indicate negation and “mm-hmm” which can indicate aggrement.
I always wondered where I got that. My parents grew up in Eastern Penna and I definitely say moun’en, mi’en (“mitten”), won’en (wanton), foun’en. For “capten” I pronounce the t. A friend from Minnesota claims that all Easterners drop their t’s.
Now if I could just figure out why I say “tawk” for talk but “cah-fee” for coffee.
No! It’s not a diacritical mark! The okina is a letter in the Hawaiian alphabet. The fact that it doesn’t look exactly like a letter in the Roman alphabet does not mean it’s not a letter.
Nuh-uh. The okina is a letter that represents a specific sound, a glottal stop. Most haoles probably don't recognize it as a consonant in its own right, since it's not really a phoneme that exists in English. But it's a consonant just like K or H or any other consonant used in Hawaiian. Two vowels in a row do not always have a glottal stop between them.
What are you even talking about with regard to Chinese?
I must confess that I put this idea out there first before changing my language to say it’s a letter. Initially, I didn’t think diacritic could be used this way, but some Hawai’ian language pages convinced me otherwise, although incorrectly, it seems.
What is the sound in between the vowels? That’s the glottal stop. That’s what I’ve always said. I was under the impression that dtlique was saying that “uh-uh” was pronounced as “mm-mm” or “nn-nn” (with glottal stops in between) rather than “uh-uh.”
That’s bizarre. I have no idea why they would get something like that wrong on their website. The kahako definitely is, but the okina simply isn't. A diacritic is a mark added to a letter to indicate something about its sound, but an okina is not added to another letter at all. Perhaps they’re just reflecting common confusion about the issue - it might be that whoever designed that page simply isn’t aware of the difference.
That’s the way I say mountain, and I grew up in New England.