Displaying macrons on TKI
Te Taura Whiri The Māori Language Commission encourages the use of macrons to display a long vowel sound in Māori.
Te Kete Ipurangi uses Unicode characters to display macrons. These characters should display correctly using recent versions of web browsers and operating systems.
For example: these characters should display correctly when using Internet Explorer 5.0 and above, or Netscape 6.0 and above, on Windows 98 (Service Pack 2), Windows 2000, Windows XP or Mac 0SX (Jaguar and above).
If you are seeing squares or question marks instead of vowels with macrons you may need to reconfigure your browser:
- Internet Explorer – go to the View menu and select Encoding. Then select Unicode (UTF-8) or Auto-Select.
- Netscape Navigator – go to the View menu and select Character Set. Then select Unicode (UTF-8).
Entering macrons (for Windows 2000, or Windows XP)
To enter macrons into documents, email, or web forms, you need to install the Microsoft Māori keyboard definition, which can be downloaded free.
Macrons can then be encoded using the tilde (~) key followed by the vowel.
History
Before the arrival of the Pākehā, the Māori language was primarily oral, possessing no formal written code. Early missionaries, keen to have the scriptures written in Māori, developed a system using 10 consonants and five vowels. From a linguistic perspective, the system was very good however its one major shortcoming was its inability to mark the vowel length. Consequently early writings in Māori did not distinguish vowel length.
Vowel length in Māori is phonemic, that is. vowels are either pronounced short or long. Meanings of words can alter dramatically depending on which vowels in the word are or aren't lengthened. Correct pronunciation can only be learnt if the correct vowel length is displayed using macrons in a consistant manner on written Māori language..
The lengthened vowel was first displayed in the keywords of Williams's Dictionary For Māori Language in its fifth edition, published in 1917. The symbol that was used was a short line or bar over the vowel signifying a long length and an absence of the bar signifying a short length.
The selection of this symbol has caused frustration in the ensuing years as typewriters and early computers could not reproduce the symbol easily. Furthermore the five symbols for the lengthened vowels do not appear in a standard 8 bit ASCII character set. Fortunately this is not a problem with today's computers. Virtually all computers in use today, when supplied with a few simple software tools, can easily display and easily type the correct macron symbol to signify the lengthened vowel.
This convention of displaying the lengthened vowel with a macron character is one that has been encouraged by the Māori Language Commission. It is the convention that is used in the overwhelming majority of educational institutes and it is the convention that is supported in this web site.