Editing Hawaiian language (section)

====History====
As early as 1823, the missionaries made some limited use of the apostrophe to represent the glottal stop,<ref>{{Harvcoltxt|Schütz|1994|p=143}}</ref> but they did not make it a letter of the alphabet. In publishing the Hawaiian Bible, they used it to distinguish ''koʻu'' ('my') from ''kou'' ('your').<ref>{{Harvcoltxt|Elbert|Pukui|1979|p=11}}</ref> In 1864, [[William DeWitt Alexander]] published a grammar of Hawaiian in which he made it clear that the glottal stop (calling it "guttural break") is definitely a true consonant of the Hawaiian language.<ref>{{Harvcoltxt|Schütz|1994|pp=144–145}}</ref> He wrote it using an apostrophe. In 1922, the Andrews-Parker dictionary of Hawaiian made limited use of the opening single quote symbol, then called "reversed apostrophe" or "inverse comma", to represent the glottal stop.<ref name="Schütz 1994 139-141">{{Harvcoltxt|Schütz|1994|pp=139–141}}</ref> Subsequent dictionaries and written material associated with the Hawaiian language revitalization have preferred to use this symbol, the ''ʻokina'', to better represent spoken Hawaiian. Nonetheless, excluding the ''ʻokina'' may facilitate interface with English-oriented media, or even be preferred stylistically by some Hawaiian speakers, in homage to 19th century written texts. So there is variation today in the use of this symbol.