auli’i cravalho’s name

jinlinli:

for those of you having difficulty pronouncing her name, the apostrophe in her first name is not actually an apostrophe! its a bit of hawaiian punctuation called an ʻokina. because hawaiian tends to be very vowel-heavy and can have multiple consecutive vowel sounds with no consonants dividing them, the ‘okina serves an indicator of a pause between vowel sounds (a glottal stop if we’re being technical).

so auli’i would be pronounced like OW-LEE-EE rather than OW-LEE. cravalho is likely an anglicization of the portuguese surname, carvalho, which makes sense because hawaii has a pretty large portuguese population. (for example, i have a friend who’s last name, loui, is a messed up attempt at anglicizing the chinese name, liu).

usually the ‘okina is removed from hawaiian words outside of hawaii to avoid confusing people who are unfamiliar with the language’s conventions. for example, hawaii would actually be hawai’i, ohana would be ‘ohana, and luau would be lu’au (there’s actually supposed to be a straight bar above the first ‘u’ called a kahako, which lengthens and emphasizes the vowel, but im too lazy to try to format that lol).

and that concludes this linguistic primer on hawaiian punctuation, have a great day y’all.