5 ms·

Unfortunately you can't spell Hawaiʻi in ISO-8859-1.

• brianwawok 2y ago
  But does anyone not know what Hawaii is?
  • stagalooo 2y ago
    The island or the state?
• Aloisius 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
    The ʻokina is not an apostrophe.
    • Aloisius 2y ago
      It was originally represented with an apostrophe. It seems the apostrophe started to be inverted in Hawaiian in the 1940s.
      • NelsonMinar 2y 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.
        • Aloisius 2y ago
          In Unicode, U+0027 is marked "ASCII punctuation and symbols" and described as "neutral (vertical) glyph with mixed usage." While in English, the apostrophe is usually a punctuation mark, it is used as a letter, typically a glottal stop like the ʻokina, in dozens of languages as well as when writing certain English accents phonetically, like Glasgow or Cockney. Software does not particularly care about what unicode character you use and the switch to the inverted comma ʻokina began before unicode (or software) was a thing.