Remix.run Logo
Remix clone Hacker News
new | show | ask | jobsGithub
▲ NelsonMinar 2 days ago

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

▲Aloisius 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

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 | parent | next [-]

> 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 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The ʻokina is not an apostrophe.

▲Aloisius 2 days ago | parent [-]

It was originally represented with an apostrophe.

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

▲NelsonMinar a day ago | parent [-]

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 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

▲brianwawok 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

But does anyone not know what Hawaii is?

▲stagalooo 2 days ago | parent [-]

The island or the state?