Marshallese (Ebon)
Ebon is the native name for Marshallese.
Here is the (current) alphabet as mentioned in Gritchka's writeup above:
A Ā B D E I J K L Ļ M M̧ N Ņ N̄ O O̧ Ō P R T U Ū W
A ā b d e I j k l ļ m m̧ n ņ n̄ o o̧ ō p r t u ū w
Only a couple of
fonts I know of are able to display all the letters somewhat
correctly:
Arial Unicode MS and
Code2000.
Even with Microsoft's very good
Unicode font, the
precomposed cedillas
under L and N look different to those under M and O, which require
combining characters. The
capital M with the
macron also looks quite poor. This is all due to the fact that these letters
are extremely rare and probably don't occur in any other alphabet.
This URL shows you what the alphabet should look like:
http://www.unicover.com/ecatimag/MI-C133-.jpg
This web site offers a Polynesian font pack which inludes Marshallese
letters. I suspect it is not a Unicode font:
http://www.matchfonts.com/pages/m_polynesian.html
Now here is the Hail Mary in Marshallese Unicode. Compare with the URL
in Gritchka's writeup to see how it should look with all the diacritics (accents) in place.
Io̧kwe eok Maria, kwo lōn̄ kōn
menin jouj;
Iroo ej pād ippam̧.
Kwo jeram̧m̧an iaan kōrā raņ im
ejeram̧m̧an ineen lo̧jiōm̧, Jesus.
O Maria kwojarar, jinen Anij,
kwōn jar kōn kem rijjerawiwi.
Kiiō im ilo iien
amwōj mej. Amen.
The first word you will learn is yokwe, which as Gritchka notes means hello and good-bye. It also means love. This is very similar to the usage of the word aloha in Hawaiian. You will also find the word written lakwe quite often. This may reflect different orthographies used for the language though I haven't been able to establish this as definite yet. I would not be surprised if the word io̧kwe in the above prayer is the same word.