>It could just be that the term "hamza" was a glottal stop character (at
>least according to www.m-w.com). In Hawaiian we call it an 'okina, and the
>character used to represent it looks very much like an opening single
>quote. I looked around at the unicode home page at the arabic characters,
>and unfortunately none of them fit the bill for what I need. *sigh*
Well, there's a difference between the modified set of Latin characters
used for transliterated Arabic (and other languages) and the Arabic letters
themselves which are in an entirely different alphabet.
The hamza (as in qur'an, baha'i, da'ud) is indeed a standard glottal stop.
The ayn (as in shi'a, sa'ud, ba'th) is a more aggressive sound with no real
equivalent in non-Semitic languages. Sometimes you see it called a "reverse
glottal stop", which to me isn't very intuitive. Strictly speaking, it's a
voiced pharyngeal fricative, the one that looks like a backward dotless
question mark in IPA, but the actual sound in Arabic depends on the
dialect.
In Arabic transliteration, the hamza drawn with the curve to the right, and
the ayn is drawn with the curve to the left. Although it's true that the
word "hamza" can indicate just the sound of a glottal stop, it seems very
strange to me to ever use it to refer to a symbol that curves to the left.
Come to think of it, it also seems strange to me to *draw* a curve to the
left to represent a plain glottal stop, but it sounds like you're telling
me that's what they do in Hawaiian. I don't know Hawaiian, so I don't know
what the 'okina really sounds like, but it seems to me that the symbol is
usually drawn with the curve to the left.
I think the Unicode characters you are looking for are:
U+02BB ("modifier letter turned comma", looks like an single open quote but
with different line-breaking rules);
U+02BD ("modifier letter reversed comma", looks like Greek rough breathing
mark, or a single open quote in certain fonts which have the fat part on
top); or
U+02BF ("modifier letter left half ring", used for the ayn in Latin
transliteration of Arabic).
If you want the same symbols turned to the left, U+02BC and U+02BE are the
modifier letter apostrophe and right half ring. The phonetic glottal stop
characters are U+02C0 and U+02C1.
If your system and browser support Unicode, you can see these at
<http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/spacing_modifier_letters.html>. That site
has tons of information about Unicode as well as links to some nice font
utilities you can use to figure out what characters are available in a
given font.
mdl
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