Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> > > BTW, what special characters are needed in Hawai'ian?
> > This site gives you the repertoire of "special" character needed for
> > a lot of languages written in Latin or Cyrillic alphabets.
>
> I hope it told you you were right the first time!

No (see
http://www.eki.ee/letter/chardata.cgi?lang=hawa+Hawaiian&script=latin). It
also lists vowels a, e, i, o with a macron (to mark, I guess, long vowels)
and Unicode character U+02BB("MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA"). The latter is
simply a sort of apostrophe, looking like an opening single quote.

But I think this database is designed with defining optimal computer
coverage in mind. It does not explain the usage scope of these characters,
or whether there are alternate orthographies that avoids them.

What I noticed with my own language, Italian, is that the database defines
as "required" a at least a character, "ó", that almost never occurs in
everyday orthography (it is only to be seen on dictionaries, and does not
even exist on Italian keyboards).

But, of course, one may wish to write a dictionary on a computer...

_ Marco