I wanted to discuss a point about the pronominal system of Hawaiian which is connected to the previous post; I am, however, unwilling to violate the structural integrity of the former post merely to add a minor comment, even if I find it fascinating and instructive. This is an addendum to the previous post, rather than the second part of the originally planned post; that discussion will be posted next Monday and then I will return to the lesson-by-lesson format.
One of the features of the Hawaiian which had perplexed me is the contrast between second person dual 'olua and plural 'oukou, although the dual and plural of the first and third person are ma'ua and makou and la'ua and lakou. Situations such as this prove the usefulness of the methodology of comparative linguistics, which I have done below. Please note that the Rapanui plural derives from the dual, which is an unusual development, since the normal path to a singular-plural dichotomy is the marginalization of the dual and its eventual abandonment. In Homeric Greek, the dual is infrequent compared to the plural, but nonetheless a viable form; by the time of Pericles, the dual had practically vanished. In Latin, the dual survived only in the forms of the number two and certain forms of the pronouns, such as uter, which incorporated duality into their meaning.
Hawaiian Rapanui Samoan
1Sg owau/au ko au a'u/ou
2Sg 'oe ko koe 'oe/'e
3Sg oia/ia ko ia 'o ia
1DuI ma'ua ko taua ta'ua
1DuE ma'ua ko maua ma'ua
2Du 'olua ko korua 'oulua
3Du la'ua ko ra'ua latou
1PlI kakou - tatou
1PlE makou - matou
2Pl 'oukou - 'outou
3Pl lakou - latou
There are two possibilities for the discrepancy: either the Hawaiian 2nd person dual changed from -'ua to -lua under the influence of the Hawaiian number lua 'two' or the Samoan 2nd person dual has changed to 'oulua under the influence of 'outou. There latter seems more likely, given the Rapanui forms ko korua and ko ia which correspond to Hawaiian ('o) 'olua and 'oia (which is a contraction of 'o + ia, as I shall discuss in the next post. Samoan is more closely related to Hawaiian than Rapanui, but also more influenced by other closely related languages. A further suggestion that the 2nd person dual never fit the rest of the dual pattern is that the 2nd person dual is the only person in which the singular form could be connected to the dual and plural; the singulars au and ia bear no resemblance the dual and plural roots ka-, ma-, and la-. The Samoan alteration of the 2nd person singular forms 'oe and 'e provides an analysis of 'oe as 'o + 'e and the possibility of reconstructing 'olua from 'o + lua. If this be case, of course, then a similar simplification has occurred in Rapanui, which in turn implies that the assumption of the plural function by the dual forms in Rapanui occurred after the reanalysis of an ancestral dual kourua as the new dual korua.
Showing posts with label Rapanui. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rapanui. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Monday, December 21, 2009
The Two of Us, Part Two
If I'm going to call this blog "The Smartest Man on 8th Avenue", I have to be prepared to think deeply and to do some research. Originally, this post was intended to discuss two matters. The former is an update on the inclusive-exclusive distinction, and the latter is a more detailed look at the origins of the pronominal cases in Hawaiian. Since I have written at length on the inclusive-exclusive distinction, I shall save the origins of pronominal cases for the next post on the Hawaiian language.
I have failed so far to locate my wayward and worn Hawaiian dictionary, in order to clarify which forms are inclusive and which are exclusive. Fortunately, my South Pacific Phrasebook has provided the answer through the miracle of comparative linguistics. One of the benefits (for the Europeans, anyway) of the colonization of the Pacific was the close relationship to each other of the Polynesian languages. In many cases, the kidnapped natives of one island could speak, with moderate effort, to the inhabitants of another island. The relative closeness of Polynesian languages was a boon to the field of linguistics in the nineteenth century, even if there were aborted (and, in hindsight, absurd) attempts to connect the language to Original Language (which, naturally, was something similar to Biblical Hebrew).
I scoured the South Pacific Phrasebook for pronominal paradigms and found two (oddly, neither was under the Hawaiian section): Rapanui (Easter Island) and Samoan. In Rapanui, the menage à
trois of the grammatical number system appears to have collapsed into the rather prosaic singular-plural distinction. This is a common phenomenon, except in this case the dual (taua, maua, korua, ra'ua) survived as the new plural form rather than the more usual elimination of the dual. One advantage of Rapanui for comparative linguistics is the island's isolation which wrought its environmental Armageddon but beautifully preserved its isolation. The Samoan paradigm maintains the distinction between the dual (ta'ua, ma'ua, 'oulua, la'ua) and the plural (tatou, matou, 'outou, latou), and thus is a closer paradigmatic comparison to Hawaiian, but is linguistically more suspect due to a high level of interisland interaction. The deficiencies of one language balance those of the other; thus I can state with some confidence that the Hawaiian form (according to the 'okina-less orthography of Judd) kaua is the inclusive form of 'we' and maua is the exclusive form.
Further confirmation of this conclusion, other than the unaltered form of maua, comes from the two registers of Samoan. A register is a social level of language selected for the appropriate degree of sollemnity or familiarity. The clearest example in the United States of different registers is the young woman who uses ethnically appropriate urban slang with her friends and family, but "business English" when she is answering the phone at the office. In Samoan, there are two registers: the t-style and the k-style, of which the former is formal and the latter familiar. The t-style is the one in which the words in the phrasebook are written, but a visitor might hear phrases in the k-style as well when they visit the Kingdom of Samoa or the American territory. Notable features of the transformation from t-style to k-style are the eponymous conversion of t to k and n to g (pronounced as ng in sing); I leave out the pronunciation of r as l because that distinction was a missionary innovation, whereas pre-colonial words have minimum pairs contained t and k, and n and g. These two transformations are particularly interesting because the linguistic evolution of Hawaiian derives contemporary k from ancestral t (as in Samoan) and n from both n and ng (the opposite result, but the same conflation as Samoan). One of the features of the Kauai dialect was the continued use of t while the dialect of the other islands had switched to k; there was no extensive conflation of k- and t-words, however, since the change from t to k was part of a linguistic change which included a change of k to the 'okina, the apostrophe which seems to be arbitrarily absent in Judd. This absence of the linguistic change in the Kauai dialect may explain the mockery which the peasants of the interior Waimea canyon received for alleged overuse the 'okina. Cook first landed on Kauai at Waimea, and therefore introduced the forms ti and taro into English, rather than the official Hawaiian forms of ki and kalo. Since borrowed words usually do not include personal pronouns, kaua is the Hawaiian form of taua (except on "Tauai").
I have failed so far to locate my wayward and worn Hawaiian dictionary, in order to clarify which forms are inclusive and which are exclusive. Fortunately, my South Pacific Phrasebook has provided the answer through the miracle of comparative linguistics. One of the benefits (for the Europeans, anyway) of the colonization of the Pacific was the close relationship to each other of the Polynesian languages. In many cases, the kidnapped natives of one island could speak, with moderate effort, to the inhabitants of another island. The relative closeness of Polynesian languages was a boon to the field of linguistics in the nineteenth century, even if there were aborted (and, in hindsight, absurd) attempts to connect the language to Original Language (which, naturally, was something similar to Biblical Hebrew).
I scoured the South Pacific Phrasebook for pronominal paradigms and found two (oddly, neither was under the Hawaiian section): Rapanui (Easter Island) and Samoan. In Rapanui, the menage à
trois of the grammatical number system appears to have collapsed into the rather prosaic singular-plural distinction. This is a common phenomenon, except in this case the dual (taua, maua, korua, ra'ua) survived as the new plural form rather than the more usual elimination of the dual. One advantage of Rapanui for comparative linguistics is the island's isolation which wrought its environmental Armageddon but beautifully preserved its isolation. The Samoan paradigm maintains the distinction between the dual (ta'ua, ma'ua, 'oulua, la'ua) and the plural (tatou, matou, 'outou, latou), and thus is a closer paradigmatic comparison to Hawaiian, but is linguistically more suspect due to a high level of interisland interaction. The deficiencies of one language balance those of the other; thus I can state with some confidence that the Hawaiian form (according to the 'okina-less orthography of Judd) kaua is the inclusive form of 'we' and maua is the exclusive form.
Further confirmation of this conclusion, other than the unaltered form of maua, comes from the two registers of Samoan. A register is a social level of language selected for the appropriate degree of sollemnity or familiarity. The clearest example in the United States of different registers is the young woman who uses ethnically appropriate urban slang with her friends and family, but "business English" when she is answering the phone at the office. In Samoan, there are two registers: the t-style and the k-style, of which the former is formal and the latter familiar. The t-style is the one in which the words in the phrasebook are written, but a visitor might hear phrases in the k-style as well when they visit the Kingdom of Samoa or the American territory. Notable features of the transformation from t-style to k-style are the eponymous conversion of t to k and n to g (pronounced as ng in sing); I leave out the pronunciation of r as l because that distinction was a missionary innovation, whereas pre-colonial words have minimum pairs contained t and k, and n and g. These two transformations are particularly interesting because the linguistic evolution of Hawaiian derives contemporary k from ancestral t (as in Samoan) and n from both n and ng (the opposite result, but the same conflation as Samoan). One of the features of the Kauai dialect was the continued use of t while the dialect of the other islands had switched to k; there was no extensive conflation of k- and t-words, however, since the change from t to k was part of a linguistic change which included a change of k to the 'okina, the apostrophe which seems to be arbitrarily absent in Judd. This absence of the linguistic change in the Kauai dialect may explain the mockery which the peasants of the interior Waimea canyon received for alleged overuse the 'okina. Cook first landed on Kauai at Waimea, and therefore introduced the forms ti and taro into English, rather than the official Hawaiian forms of ki and kalo. Since borrowed words usually do not include personal pronouns, kaua is the Hawaiian form of taua (except on "Tauai").
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Desolation On My Mind
Those who know me well are aware of my morbid predilection with movies portraying totalitarian societies or post-apocalyptic wastelands (yes, I include 1970's New York in that category), so they will not be shocked that I watched The Road (even though I found the idea of reading the book too depressing even for me) and am reading Collapse by Jared Diamond (the Silver Age successor to Steven Jay Gould).
The Road is based on the book of the same name by Cormac McCarthy, whose Southwestern novels I have read; I am not a fan of that genre. I did once read a Louis Lamour book once, but it did not compel me to pick up any others, and Western movies never grabbed me, even though I watched plenty of Paladin as a young kid. The Road, on the other hand, seemed like the bleak despairing movie I would enjoy, even if it did not seem appropriate for popcorn and a soda: the 2008 cut was not issued because it was too bleak and depressing. I suppose modern movie goers have not been inoculated with enough Ingmar Bergman. Viggo Mortenson was a good choice for the Man (as usual, someone of whom I had never heard played the juvenile lead), but the flashbacks and the tacked on feel-good ending presented problems. I suppose that the flashbacks served much the same function as the "satyr play" of a tragic trilogy, namely, to provide a brief respite to the sense of doom. The ending of the movie was marginally hopeful, which is the best one could expect from such a depressing setting. The inclusion of certain analogues to the Boy makes some sense, but the other companion of the adults at the end stretched credulity.
After I had finished Memoirs of a Geisha, I started reading Jared Diamond's Collapse. Reading it is a bit like reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant if Lord Foul had won: every time you think the book could not become more depressing, it exceeds itself (someone actually lived on Henderson?). The general results of ecological abuse seems to be same: ecological genocide, a barren wasteland, and near or total extinction of the human population. The horrifying aspect of these tales is that these were not people who were using intentionally destructive practices and just didn't care, but rather people who were just trying to feed themselves and their families.
I've never been to Iceland or Easter Island, but I have seen the effects of overpopulation, deforestation, and overgrazing firsthand in Malta, right before it surrendered its currency to the Euro. Malta is not a wasteland (it's actually quite lovely), and was never isolated in the way of Easter Island or Greenland, but it is a far cry from the "low wooded isle" with streams it presumably was in the days of Odysseus. In addition to the usual rainwater problems of a Mediterranean island in a dry climate, the remaining topsoil is so precious that it is recycled from site to site, vexing the archaeologists, and there are no permanent lakes or rivers.
The Road is based on the book of the same name by Cormac McCarthy, whose Southwestern novels I have read; I am not a fan of that genre. I did once read a Louis Lamour book once, but it did not compel me to pick up any others, and Western movies never grabbed me, even though I watched plenty of Paladin as a young kid. The Road, on the other hand, seemed like the bleak despairing movie I would enjoy, even if it did not seem appropriate for popcorn and a soda: the 2008 cut was not issued because it was too bleak and depressing. I suppose modern movie goers have not been inoculated with enough Ingmar Bergman. Viggo Mortenson was a good choice for the Man (as usual, someone of whom I had never heard played the juvenile lead), but the flashbacks and the tacked on feel-good ending presented problems. I suppose that the flashbacks served much the same function as the "satyr play" of a tragic trilogy, namely, to provide a brief respite to the sense of doom. The ending of the movie was marginally hopeful, which is the best one could expect from such a depressing setting. The inclusion of certain analogues to the Boy makes some sense, but the other companion of the adults at the end stretched credulity.
After I had finished Memoirs of a Geisha, I started reading Jared Diamond's Collapse. Reading it is a bit like reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant if Lord Foul had won: every time you think the book could not become more depressing, it exceeds itself (someone actually lived on Henderson?). The general results of ecological abuse seems to be same: ecological genocide, a barren wasteland, and near or total extinction of the human population. The horrifying aspect of these tales is that these were not people who were using intentionally destructive practices and just didn't care, but rather people who were just trying to feed themselves and their families.
I've never been to Iceland or Easter Island, but I have seen the effects of overpopulation, deforestation, and overgrazing firsthand in Malta, right before it surrendered its currency to the Euro. Malta is not a wasteland (it's actually quite lovely), and was never isolated in the way of Easter Island or Greenland, but it is a far cry from the "low wooded isle" with streams it presumably was in the days of Odysseus. In addition to the usual rainwater problems of a Mediterranean island in a dry climate, the remaining topsoil is so precious that it is recycled from site to site, vexing the archaeologists, and there are no permanent lakes or rivers.
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