We forgot how to build websites like this. Lost art. Even the page is encoded iso-8859-1 and not UTF-8.
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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.
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
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.