Wikipedia:Macrons

Nō Wikipedia Māori

[discussion moved from Wikipedia:Kōrero to this separate page in June 2005; small rearrangements and new headings or levels for easier chronological following]

Rārangi kōrero

[edit] Which option for long vowels?

What will the Maori Wikipedia's policy on spelling Maori words be? Particularly, how will we represent the long vowel sounds?

The title of this page Wikipedia:Kōrero currently uses "ö" for the long "o", which is fairly common on the internet.

The Maori Language Commission, by contrast, prefers a macron, giving "ō". That's the preferred method in print, it seems.

Another possibility (more common in educational circles) is simply to write the vowel twice.

that leads to complications with compound words Robin Patterson 02:47, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

As such, this page could be Kōrero, Kōrero, or Koorero. I've used the macron, myself, but the umlaut option seems to being used too. We should probably establish which convention we'll be following now, when there are only a few articles - it'll be easier than going back and changing everything later.

Any thoughts? -- Vardion 07:03, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Parliament has occasionally used a double vowel but is now moving towards macrons, though not with 100% consistency. :Robin Patterson 22:50, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)


The reason why the diaeresis (eg: ö) is more used than the macron (eg: ō) on computers is due to historic reasons: several years ago computers didn't support unicode, and the 8bits encoding commonly used in English operating systems (be it iso-8859-1 or windows-1252) doesn't have any macron letter; the use of the diaeresis was simply the less bad choice possible.
However, if the correct usage (in print, when handwriting; what is defined by the language authorities) is to use the a macron, then macrons should be used here (things changed a lot, and while it wasn't possible to use a macron some years ago for most people, nowadays the majority of operating systems fully support unicode (at least for the letters involved here), wikipedia uses unicode encoding internally too, so it isn't a problem either, I think everybody should be able to see them on screen without problem; if the problem is typing, then the list of involved letters could be printed on the samll text displayed near the edit box of a page, so people can just copy and paste them if they haven't figured out how to type them directly on keyboard (Spanish wikipedia for example does that) Srtxg 14 Mar 2004

[edit] Macrons (tohutō) to help with editing

I've asked someone how we get a line of tohutō (macronned characters) below the edit box in the same way as other languages do (as our Belgian friend Srtxg suggested above); no reply in last 24 hours; it must be possible, even if it needs a developer to be dragged in for a few minutes. - Robin Patterson 10:02, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)

To add macronned characters below the edit box, edit MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning. See de:MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning for an example. Angela 20:42, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Angela, you are worth your weight in gold. I've attended to that, thank you. I added the "stub" message code to the box of characters, to save even more time - someone may now tell me what Māori wording would be best in the actual stub message! Robin Patterson 02:27, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)


[edit] Progress - clickable macrons from metawikipedia

Ngā tohutō just by clicking. Hooray! (I had to edit MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning, of course). Robin Patterson 00:31, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)



[edit] Macrons are now the policy

  • MACRONS it is. Robin, 27 April.
  • Anyone is welcome to change diaeresis/umlauts to macrons, but some Maori websites still use and/or display diaeresis/umlauts (or nothing --see Ngai Tahu's main page, for example) and, despite the optimism noted above, not all displays render macrons properly (eg on mine at home, I can see them in the edit box but in the articles and sidebars every macronned character is just a rectangle), so I see no hurry to change. Use of macrons in all new material is pretty easy now that I have followed up on the Srtxg suggestion. Robin Patterson 23:03, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
    • And still easier (for some months now) since I incorporated the characters groups from other WPs, with macrons moved to the start. They can be either clicked or copied for pasting. Robin Patterson 06:40, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Page names with macrons

To minimise irritation caused by edits that contain macronless links intended to target pages with names that have macrons, and vice versa, it is desirable to create the page name with NO MACRONS first, then MOVE it to the fully-macronned version. That leaves the plain version as an automatic Redirect (and a handy target for interwiki links), while the real article will be named in the officially-approved manner. We had a few of these moves in previous months. (If one creates the macronned page first, it's possible but more fiddly to create a plain one as a Redirect.)

The above, now that I have fully worked it out and explained the reasons, will explain some of my recent flurry of creations and moves! (I'll add a bit of this to the Style page.) Robin Patterson 06:09, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Other language solutions; Unicode

In my native language (Southern Min) we also use the umlaut to represent the macron (which we use as a tone mark), on top of which we use a hacked font to force the umlaut to display as a macron (but it's still an umlaut really). Now that Unicode is (slowly) maturing, and since everyone still agrees only the macron is correct, we are encouraging the use of the Unicode macron whenever possible. Often this means educating the speakers and encouraging them and helping them to upgrade old tools, because in the end many believe computers must serve people, not the other way around. A-giâu 08:50, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)