It was originally represented with an apostrophe.
It seems the apostrophe started to be inverted in Hawaiian in the 1940s.
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.
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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.