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Sailing from Berkeley to Hawaii in a 19ft Sailboat

(potter-yachters.org)
143 points protonbob | 3 comments | 02 Apr 25 15:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.767s | source
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zbowling ◴[02 Apr 25 18:05 UTC] No.43559490[source]▶
We forgot how to build websites like this. Lost art. Even the page is encoded iso-8859-1 and not UTF-8.
replies(2): >>43559596 #>>43560208 #
NelsonMinar ◴[02 Apr 25 18:13 UTC] No.43559596[source]▶
Unfortunately you can't spell Hawaiʻi in ISO-8859-1.
replies(2): >>43559689 #>>43560515 #
Aloisius ◴[02 Apr 25 19:24 UTC] No.43560515[source]▶
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.

replies(2): >>43561046 #>>43563028 #
NelsonMinar ◴[02 Apr 25 23:32 UTC] No.43563028[source]▶
The ʻokina is not an apostrophe.
replies(1): >>43563109 #
1. Aloisius ◴[02 Apr 25 23:41 UTC] No.43563109[source]▶
It was originally represented with an apostrophe.

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

replies(1): >>43576391 #
2. NelsonMinar ◴[03 Apr 25 22:47 UTC] No.43576391[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>43585987 #
3. Aloisius ◴[04 Apr 25 18:18 UTC] No.43585987[source]▶
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.