Aloisius 2 days ago

That's what html entities are for.

Though I'm not sure who decided the ʻokina needed its own character rather than the traditionally used apostrophe. It's a pain to type without a Hawaiian keyboard.

Besides, the Hawaiian diacritics are not part of English orthography, so the name of the state (and the big island) is just "Hawaii" in English. In Hawaiian, it's Hawaiʻi.

  • dmoy 2 days ago

    > Though I'm not sure who decided the ʻokina needed its own character rather than the traditionally used apostrophe. It's a pain to type without a Hawaiian keyboard.

    I dunno, the glottal stop sounds pretty different from normal English usage of apostrophe. If anything it's closer to - than ', like in uh-oh.

    French uses both grave and acute accent marks, and they sound very different.

    Makes sense to me

  • NelsonMinar a day ago

    The ʻokina is not an apostrophe.

    • Aloisius a day ago

      It was originally represented with an apostrophe.

      It seems the apostrophe started to be inverted in Hawaiian in the 1940s.

      • NelsonMinar 12 hours ago

        It's not just the shape of the glyph. An apostrophe is a punctuation mark. An ʻokina is a letter. In Unicode, U+0027 is marked "Other Punctuation". U+02BB is "Modifier Letter". This matters to software.