Polynesian Languages - Orthography

Orthography

Most Polynesian languages have five vowel qualities, corresponding roughly to those written i, e, a, o, u in classical Latin. In the tradition of orthographies of languages they were familiar with the missionaries who first developed orthographies for unwritten Polynesian languages did not explicitly mark phonemic vowel length or the glottal stop. By the time that linguists trained in more modern methods made their way to the Pacific, at least for the major languages, the Bible was already printed according to the orthographic system developed by the missionaries, and the people had learned to read and write without marking vowel length or the glottal stop. This situation persists up to now in many languages. Despite efforts of local academies at reform the general conservative resistance to orthographic change has led to varying results in the different languages and several writing systems co-exist. The most common method, however, is the one where a macron is used to indicate a long vowel, while a vowel without that accent is short. For example: ā versus a. The glottal stop (not present in all Polynesian languages, but where present it is one of the most common consonants) is indicated by an apostrophe. For example: 'a versus a. This is somewhat of an anomaly as the apostrophe is most often used to represent letters which have been omitted, while the glottal stop is rather a consonant which is not written. The problem can somewhat be alleviated by changing the simple apostrophe for a curly one, taking a normal apostrophe for the elision and the inverted comma for the glottal stop. The latter method has come into common use in Polynesian languages.