My son, who went off his meds and got my ex-wife to buy him a one-way trip to Hawaii, informed me that the “’” in Hawai’i denotes a “glottal stop”. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop Phonetic sound glottal stop Symbol (font) ʔ Symbol (image) IPA–number 113 Entity (decimal) ʔ Unicode (hex) U+0294 X-SAMPA ? Kirshenbaum ? Sound sample “The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English the feature is represented for example by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or Ê»okina in HawaiÊ»i among those using a preservative pronunciation of that name.”
So it should really be u’ oh. I always wondered how that sound should be represented.
Now if you figure out how to spell a raspberry let me know. lol. (The crazy things a person thinks about when they can’t get to sleep... lol)