Request to add Makassarese in Translatewiki

I wonder if with the Bugis or old Makassar Script, representing the final glottal may be possible using the sign for the letter 'ka' (with its final a/schwa normally implied), with an additional diacritic to mark its elision). This could be the sign of an evolution of the language.

For example in the Bugis script you can change a 'ka' (two slanted lines on top of each other) into a 'kə' by adding the vowel diacritic for 'ə' (schwa). Ususally that schwa is normally pronounced as a true vowel, but there could be conventions to no pronounce it at end of words so the elision is implicit. If this is not true for the modern language, a variant of the 'ə' may eventually be used to mark its elision (similar to "halant"/"virama" in Indic scripts, which usually, but not always is represented by a dot added below the cluster).

In Bugis, the dot below is already used to make the diacritic changing the implicit 'a' into a vowel 'u', but may be the two diacritics for 'ə' (looking like an accent above the letter) and for 'u' (dot below the letter) could have been combined, if clusters like 'kəu' or 'kuə' are not used (at least at end of words), and could have been appropriate to mark a final glottal.

The same remark applies to the Old Makassar script. But as it is no longer used in the modern language, we would need to find evidences: did they wrote a plain 'ka' letter or a 'kə' cluster, or nothing at all?

Now for Latin, it is a recent introduction. Initiators of the romanisation of the language may have hesitated to the sign(s) to use for the final glottal. This may be now more a concern if glottals can also occur and be distinctive in the middle, or at start of words (possibly because of phonetic evolutions of the languages, where some initial 'k' would no longer be pronounced, but not the vowel following; or for other cases where more complex vowel clusters were introduced where that 'k' was elided and replaced by a glottal sign, possibly mute).

All this is typical of Indic abugidas scripts (like Bugis and Old Makassar) even if the Latin alphabet is foreign to those conventions and now just separates most vowels and consonnants (sometimes by using digrams containing a consonnant for some vowels, like 'on', otherwise using diacritics like 'õ'). But the representation of glottal-like consonants has always been a debate between "latinists" (some even prefering to use a less common consonnants like 'q').

As long as there's no clear academic source fixing the orthographic rule for Latin, you may find variants! So the ISO 639 standard, CLDR for now use an apostrophe (a curly one, not the ASCII apostrophe-quote), but some people may have difficulty with it on their keyboards.

Some languages also have multiple glottal-like consonnants (this is the case for example of Polynesian languages, or Arabic, whose romanization also knows multiple variants). This concerns as well the transcription to other alphabetic systems (e.g. Cyrillic or Greek) or syllabic systems. And finally history will fix the usage (but sometimes several standards depending on the region of use and what is perceived as the major dialect for the phonalisation of the language... up to the point that languages then split in separate branches).