#SupportHMAHonoraria

Hawaiʻi Museums Association (HMA) hosts its museums’ conference each spring, addressing important, relevant, industry themes. It is an exciting opportunity to come together and hear from our fellow colleagues from across the islands, and sometimes abroad. This years’ theme is ACCESS, and we plan to bring 25 industry leaders and community members to join us in discussion about how we can continue to make museums and related repositories more accessible to a broader and more diverse public. Knowing the significance of having museum professionals share these themes is invaluable and HMA strives to be a catalyst for the exchange of information and ideas by promoting ongoing programs of training and networking. We believe it is important to be able to acknowledge participants with a small gesture of kokua by providing a modest honorarium for their contributions. Knowing that our lowered conference fees will not support this goal, in this campaign, our realistic goal is to raise $2,175. Help us to support honoraria and share this link. Mahalo

EXPLANATION OF HAWAIIAN LANGUAGE

Written Hawaiian uses two diacritical markings as pronunciation guides:

  • The ‘okina, which is typographically represented as a reversed apostrophe. In spoken Hawaiian, the ‘okina indicates a glottal stop, or clean break between vowels. If your browser supports this display (and it may not, depending on browser type and settings), an ‘okina should look like this: ‘. If browsing conditions do not support this display, you might be seeing a box, a blank space, or odd-looking character instead.
  • The kahako, or macron, which is typographically represented as a bar above the letter, as in ā (again, you will see it correctly only if your browser delivers it correctly). The macron on a vowel indicates increased duration in pronunciation of the vowel that it appears over.

Web browsers sometimes have difficulty reproducing these markings without the use of graphics, special fonts, or special coding. Even correctly authored Web pages that use Unicode coding may be transmitted through a server that displays the symbols incorrectly or the browser may use a replacement font that displays these incorrectly.

Since most browsers can and do display the ASCII grave symbol (‘) as coded, this site uses the grave symbol to represent the ‘okina. We do depict the correct ‘okina on all pages in the title graphic because it is embedded in the graphic and not displayed as text.

The kahako/macron is more problematic. Given the problems with displaying this with current technology, some websites resort to displaying these with diaeresis characters instead, as in ä, which will appear in most browsers (but not all) as an “a” with two dots over it. However, this is not a desirable solution because it doesn’t work uniformly in all browser situations. Until Unicode fonts are more universally displayable, the site reluctantly omits the kahako from most text.

For up-to-date information on how to display the Hawaiian language on websites, visit http://www.olelo.hawaii.edu/enehana/unicode.php by the Kualono Hawaiian Language Center of the University of Hawaii. General information on these issues can also be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E2%80%98Okina and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macron.