Is It Your First Time Dualing This? I'll Be Gentle

(Apologies for the lack of macrons) 

There are many reasons to dislike the Green Owl, God of All of Languages, into which I was tricked in a contract (although it is merely a year, not seven or a billion), but some of his methodology is legitimate. Many linguistics concepts are challenging for learners, especially American monoglots or nigh-monoglots, and the American education system is designed to eliminate love of learning despite the best efforts of teachers. Most people do not think grammar is fun.

One of the concepts that Hawaiian ('Olelo Hawai'i) possesses and English lacks is that of the dual. The dual, as its name suggests, indicates exactly two. Anglo-Saxon, also known as Old English, had a dual which was lost between the Norman Conquest and the reemergence of the English language as a form of written communication, so the difficulty of the concept arises from unfamiliarity alone. The etymology of the dual in Hawaiian is transparently the number two (ua < lua), thereby demonstrating the dual can develop as well as disappear.

Another concept that Hawaiian possesses and English lack is that of clusivity. Old English does not use this, nor do Greek or Latin. Clusivity is a concept limited to the first person pronoun, I or me or my, There are two forms: inclusive and exclusive. The inclusive form includes the person addressed, thee or thou or you; the exclusive excludes the person addressed, but includes somebody else. The nature of clusitivy mandates the exclusion of the singular. This leaves the plural, and the dual in languages which have it - which Hawaiian does.

Both duality and clusivity are challenging concepts, and the beginning of any course bears a strong possibilty that the learner may drop out faced with too much terminology. The Green Owl, however, has found a solution. The introduction of two dual and two plural forms for "we" would be too confusing for English speakers. The initial forms presented in the language games are both inclusive, although this term is never used and only the dual emphasizes the inclusion of you (but only one of you) and me. The contrast, therefore, is between kakou, meaning "all of us," and kaua, meaning "you and me," an elegant streamlining of two non-intuitive concepts in a foreign tongue.

The Birth of the Cessative (An Encomium)

 It is long-established in the development of color that the first third way to emerge from the binary of black and white, light and dark, is red. From this point, all other colors flow. In the same way aspect begins as a binary: perfective and imperfective. The first views an event as that which is completed, while the second views an event as that which is ongoing. Aspect is decoupled from absolute time, but within this binary there is relative time: the imperfective is not yet perfective. Yet the only ground from which a new aspect can arise to form a trinity is the imperfective. The boundary, the borderlands where the imperfective and perfective touch, is not at the beginning, but the end of imperfective spectrum: it is meet, therefore, that a language with three core aspects would add the cessative rather than the inchoative. The cessative indicates 'to stop doing', an imperfective range on the marches of the perfective, which binds the binary aspects to a more temporal mode. Once the imperfective has borne the cessative, more aspects may come; but it is ironic that the aspect that begins a multiplicity of others should be the one associated with ceasing!

On the Nose ...

 Creole languages are often stereotyped as simpler than the languages from which they are derived (not simpler than the pidgin from which they evolved not the language which the audience happens to speak), but this does not rule out the retention or development of individual complexities. In the case of Haitian Creole, this complexity was attention to the nasality or orality of consonants or entire words. The Creole word janmen 'never' is transparently the French word jamais in which neither vowel is nasal but there is a nasal consonant. I am still not certain from what origin the verb renmen 'to like' possesses. This contrast of orality and nasality is particularly conspicuous in the definite article, whose nasality or orality depends on the commensurate nature of the syllables in the noun. There are five possible articles - a, la, an, lan, and the apparently rare nan, postposed rather than preposed. Examples are mesye a 'the gentleman', liv la 'the book', tifi a 'the girl', tigason an 'the boy', nant lan 'the watch', and dam nan 'the lady'. I do not yet fully understand the parameters of the fourfold (and occassionally fivefold) distinction, but there is no denying that it is more complex than the binary distinction of Continental French.

U Are Not Alone ...

 Haitian Creole is French as she is (was) spoke, which is a great relief to those who had to suffer through French conjugations. Even if one kept the distinction between singular and plural, the subtractive morphology, in which the plural contains a consonant absent in the singular, is unpredictable and complicated from the default direction of pluralization. The simplification of spelling is welcome, but it has one unanticipated side effect: the elimination of u as a singular vowel. In Creole, the solitary vowel u becomes i, as is the fate of most high rounded vowels. A learner who failed to distinguish between orthography and speech might miss this feature altogether.

In Your Eyes I See ...

 In Haitian Creole, aka Kre`yol, the official language of the Republic of Haiti, the words for 'man' and 'woman' are not derived from l'homme and la femme, as one might expect from something so deeply French. Instead, the words are gason and fi, an indication of the legacy of oppression. But if 'boy' and 'girl' have become 'man' and 'woman', what does one use for actual boys and girls? An application of the word ti from French petit produces tigason and tifi. This use of diminutives and pejoration does have one happy result: the Creole word for child is timoun, in which the moun comes from French monde '(entire) world'. If a child is one's entire world, perhaps that sentiment allays some bitterness of that country's history.

Heaven and Earth

 A feature of the myth of Dionysus which is likely to escape non-etymologists is the origin of the name Semele. Semele is an adaptation of the Thracian Earth goddess Zemele, cognate with the Greek word khthon, although it is not surprising the Greeks, hobbled by prejudice and the infant science of etymology, would not recognize it as such. Not only did the Thracian language lack the aspirated consonants (kh, th, ph) of Ancient Greek, but it was also a satem-language whereas Greek was a centum-language. This difference caused the sound which developed into kh in Greek to become z in Thracian. If Semele is Zemele, not a mortal but a god, then the union of Zeus and Semele is not a forbidden liaison between divine and mortal, but a union between heaven and earth, and Semele is the peer of Rhea or Demeter in the Bacchic rites by nature not merely by apotheosis.

Let's Talk About Ptolitics

A challenge often faced by linguistic neophytes is the mastery of clusters not found in their native tongue. In the case of English-speakers learning Ancient Greek, one such cluster is πτ at the beginning of the word. The Greeks themselves were not thrilled with this combination, if the development of πτόλις to πόλις is any indication. Internally, this cluster did not present a problem. Exempla even developed from the juncture of π and the first-person suffix yo in verbs such as πίπτω and κλέπτω. The average Greek was not a linguist, even a poor one, for comparative linguistic had not yet been invented, so the root was reanalysed as πίπτ- and produced both future πεσοῦμαι and infinitive πίτνειν through another round of affixation and cluster reduction. One of the words which kept the πτ was πτῶσις, falling, from which the word for case, the best grammatical invention of man, derives its name.

Despite the potential difficulty of pronouncing πτ, the original pronunciation was even more challenging: τπ. If this looks improbable, let us remember that the Proto-Indo-European root for earth was *dhghom-, so someone at some point deemed such clusters pronounceable. In the later evolution of the language, it is a bit surprising that the t did not become an s: PIE loves its s almost as much as Greek likes to drop it intervocalically. The rule which developed in Greek was this: in a cluster of two different plosives the first could not be a dental; or in layman's terms, τ, d, and θ could not be first. Greek, therefore, has πτ and κτ and lacks τπ and τκ. The earth is χθών not θχών. 

She Shall Be Called Woman ...

I've been brushing up on Biblical Hebrew lately, and experiencing sympathy pangs for those poor souls studying for their bar mitzvahs (bar mitzvot?).

The most common words of a language tend to preserve irregularities long past the death of their conjugational companions. In olden days, of course, these were not irregularities, but perfectly sensible in the systems of their birth. The erosion of the years and the reform of their now-wayword companions leave them orphaned and oddities which frustrate the beginning student and fascinate the linguistically savvy mind. From the multitude of en-dings for Anglo-Saxon plurals, only "children" remains a once-common "-en" ending, and throws an "r" in the mix for good measure. Seldom do comtemporary English speakers refer to "oxen", and even those who might use "brethren" are more likely to say "brothers".

It is no surprise that the Hebrew words for "man" and "woman" display such irregularities, The plural of  "ish" "man" is "anashim" and plural of "ishsha" is "nashim." The missing nun in "ish" and "ishsha" vanished through assimilation to the previous consonants, and the missing aleph in "nashim" proabably disappeared through its own weakness (I don't think the aleph is an addition, as some might, for reasons I explain below). The three-letter root, then would be aleph-nun-shin. If scholars who have dedicated their lives to the study of the Semitic languages cannot agree on the distribution of the various sibilants (s-sounds) in proto-Semitic, certainly I dare not do so. My suspicion is that the root originally meant "man or human being", and thus, according to the usual androcentricity of gender systems, declined as a masculine. The feminine meaning is probably derivative, and the bewildering multiplicity of "broken plurals" in Arabic, traditionally considered the most conservative of the Semitic languages, allows for odd plural patterns preserved in the much more orderly Hebrew. The root aleph-nun-"s", however, could extend much further back: the basic proto-Indo-European root for "man" is "H1ner", in which the "H1" represents one of the famous laryngeals, possibly a glottal stop, that is, an aleph. The speakers of Indo-European apparently treated "H1ner" as exclusively masculine, but struggled to make it fir into the later declensional patterns. In this case, at least, it seems that :"woman" really is called "woman" because she was created from "man"!

Frame and Fortune

On Wednesday night, I went to a talk at the Commonwealth Club. George Lakoff was promoting his newest book, The Little Blue Book, under the banner of a lecture about framing. Although I do vote as part of my civic duty, I prefer to keep my political views to myself and try to examine the world analytically, so my purchase of a copy of The Little Blue Book was more about getting an autograph of a man whose intellect I respect rather than any political allegiance, The fundamental argument of the book is that Democrats and Republicans use different frames. If two well-meaning people start with different premises, it is quite easy to talk past one another. It is alarming how facile human being can be at self-deception; yet the ability to imagine things as they might be rather than as they are is fundamental to the human capacity of planning and creativity. Here is the nub of the problem, as I see it (and as a fellow human being, I am as blind as anyone else who is reading this): human beings need frames and narratives to process the astonishing amount of information the world throws at us, but this coping mechanism is so ingrained that it is easy to forget it is a tool rather than the only possible representation of reality. The underlying assumptions are buried below layers of reasoning, and an amnesia to this truth leads even the best-intentioned to perceive those who oppose them as stupid or evil or both. Even worse, it blinds one to the assumptions of one's own argument. If you don't know why you believe what you believe, how can you figure out whether it is valid or how to argue pro and con? There's a reason, after all, that true debaters have to understand the opposition's argument as well as their own. Even where there are few facts, and the relevance of those facts are agreed upon, it is not possible for human beings to just look at facts rather than composing a narrative. Human beings are per se creatures of story, and the best we can do is examine how we construct the stories we tell from the world around us and the motivations which drive us.

Wandering Words

I've been thinking more about "separable prefixes," a truly bizarre phenomenon of German, Dutch, Afrikaans, and Hungarian (the last probably acquired the feature from German). The linguistics literati prefer the term "separable particle," which is more apt, since a prefix which wanders to the end of the clause would be a strange prefix indeed. This thing which is not a prefix could not be a clitic, either; a clitic could wander to the end of the clause, but a clitic must hang on some other word, and that is not required of the "separable prefix." Such confusion is not uncommon: the Greeks used the term "tmesis", "a cutting," to indicate a prefix which in certain cases could separate from the verb and go elsewhere in the line of poetry. In that case, however, the Greeks were looking backwards; since tmesis only occurs in forms of the language that tend towards archaism, the separation is actually a conjunction! English has adverbs and prepositions, but the use in a particular verbal phrase must be one or the other. Every grammar of a language is a snapshot, and therefore has features in transition; in the case of German, these features are the "separable prefixes" and a case system on the verge of collapse.

Trials and Tribe-ulations

A while ago, I purchased a small book on the "pidgins" of Oceania - I put "pidgin" in quotes because the languages in question are actually creoles, but pidgins often develop into creoles and retain the former name. Creoles have a characteristically simple grammar, such that a small book could thoroughly describe them; some languages, such as Quechua, are not so learner-friendly. Since all the creoles, except one, are English-based and derive from a common ancestor, the booklet read more as a comparative grammar than a guidebook. The phonologies were blessedly simple, all basic five-vowel systems, although the pronunciation of /o/ and /e/ varied from language to language.

My fascination with these creoles is honest, but the history of exploitation and racism has poisoned any discussion of these languages. This poison is exacerbated by the linguistic ignorance of most people, who automatically equate simple grammar with simple minds. I have to roll words on my tongue to truly absorb the vocabulary, grammar, and phonaesthetics, but whenever I do this with these languages, I am afraid of charges of racism.

Sehen Sie den "N"?

German class last night! We studied the dative, and the bizarre dative plural -n. In general, German declension seems to be "tattered," filled with remnant consonants and half-declined adjectives which are driving my fellow students crazy. Dative is a hard concept for many English speakers, especially since den Mann is accusative masculine singular, but den Frauen is dative feminine plural. 'The young woman" is die junge Frau and "the young women" is die jungen Frauen, but "young women" is junge Frauen. And all adjectives in the dative have n - der jungen Frau, den jungen Frauen.

And then there are the pronouns! Sie and ihr (the Germans may use capitals, but you can't hear a capital letter) overlap a great deal, and ihnen only partially ameliorates this. In context, however, the meaning is usually clear.

Martin Buber's Bagel

 Those who know me well know that I have long had a fascination with clusivity, a highly useful grammatical feature. The two types of clusivity are inclusive and exclusive; which only appear in the first person and the non-singular grammatical numbers - or so I thought until recently. The first person inclusive means "I and you (but not other people)," whereas the first person exclusive means "I and someone else (but not you)." Thus, a Hawaiian translation of the title of Martin Buber's theological treatise I and Thou would be Kaua (first person inclusive dual) rather than Maua (first person exclusive dual). The logic of clusivity suggests a rigid limitation to the plural and whatever other non-singular forms a language may contain; clusivity by its nature is "I and X".

Language, however, is not logical; if it were, Zamenhof would not have needed to invent Esperanto. Clusivity distinctions is the standard for Polynesian languages, but formerly I had thought it well-behaved. Samoan is an ergative Polynesian language, a standard-bearer among linguists for its phonological transparency. Samoan has several form for each pronoun, but only a few concern us. The exclusive dual has forms ma and maua, while the inclusive dual has forms ta and taua (these forms are cognate with Hawaiian maua and kaua). The -ua component of taua and maua is related transparently to the common Polynesian word lua "two," so if one wanted to create a singular inclusive, the form ta would be an appropriate choice, but what would it mean? In Samoan, the first person singular inclusive is used when the subject ("I") has an emotional involvement in the verb.

Now let us apply this distinction to Martin Buber and a delicious lox bagel. If someone else saw Buber eating a bagel and heard Buber say "We (inclusive) are eating a bagel," the other person might think that Buber was sharing his bagel with God. If God can do all things, surely he can share lunch with one of his favorite theologian! If, however, Buber was aware that he alone was consuming the bagel, the dual pronoun acquires a different meaning. The bagel would be in the third person ("he/she/it"), and therefore cannot be the "X" of "I and X." The pronoun does not mask a reflexive; Buber is not eating himself! The first person inclusive singular indicates emotional involvement in the verb. Perhaps he was very hungry from thinking profound thoughts prior to devouring the bagel; perhaps this is the best (or worst) bagel he has ever eaten.

This seems bizarre, but there may be hints to its origin in other Austronesian languages such as Malay. When I was examining a basic Malay phrase book, I found an interesting phenomenon; a sentence which I would have translated as "I see you" was rendered as "We (inclusive) see" - kita, which contains -ta. The object of the sentence, in other words, had been incorporated into the subject. The verb "to see," however, is a transitive verb and therefore requires an object that is seen. The other sentence of this type which caught my attention was "We (inclusive) love," which meant "I love you." From this sentence it appears that the inclusive forms indicate emotional content if they accompany a transitive verb. This is odd but comprehensible from an Anglophone perspective. Apparently, the singular use of the inclusive has stripped away the plurality of the concept and left only the emotional core, a Star Sapphire of pronouns.

What A Complex Web We Weave ...

There is still a prejudice, broader and more pervasive in the past, that the languages of the "lesser races" are perforce simpler. This supposition, of course, is rank nonsense, as the description below illustrates.

The Hawaiian verb complex has many components. The order of the components, according to Judd, are:
1. Verbal Prefix
2. Verbal Root
3. Qualifying Adverb (any adverb, not just grammaticalized ones)
4. Passive Marker
5. Verbal Directives
6. Locative Particles, Participle Marker, or Relative Marker
7. Strengthening Particle
8. Subject
9. Object

Component 8 may or may not be valid, depending on the stress patterns of Hawaiian, about which I know little, but Component 9 is rank nonsense.

The Verbal Prefixes, which may be misnamed given the disinclination of VSO languages to prefixation, are tense/mood/aspect indicators such as ke, i, ua, and e. Ke is a marker of the subjunctive; i is the marker of the simple past; ua is the marker of the perfect; e is the marker of the nonpast or positive imperative.

The Verbal Root is the basic verb. Not much to say there, except that it need not be a single word.

The Qualifying Adverb is an adverb that modifies the verb. Although some adverbs have gained grammatical status, most are ordinary adverbs which may refine the meaning of the verb or may change it significantly.

The Passive Marker indicates that the subject of the sentence undergoes the action of the verb rather than causes it. Passive sentences are quite common in Hawaiian..

The Verbal Directive are an interesting quartet about which I have written much here
http://anglicanavenger.blogspot.com/2010/02/lesson-15-mai-aku-la-nei.html
These Verbal Directives are aku, mai, ae, and iho. aku indicates "away from the speaker". mai indicates "toward the speaker." ae indicates "on one side of the speaker." iho indicates "downwards," but can also be used as a reflexive. An example of a perhaps pleonastic distinction is ua haawi aku oe i poi i ke kanaka "You have given the poi to the man." The Verbal Directive aku is probably not necessary to describe the giving motion of haawi, but it is true that giving involve moving the gift away from the giver. In the case of hele, however, i hele aku au means "I went" and i hele mai au means "I came," which receive separate verbs in languages that lack Verbal Directives.

Component 6 can be the Locative Particles (nei and la), the Participle Marker (ana), or the Relative Marker (ai). nei indicates here-and-now. la indicates there but not not-now. It worth noting that the form which Judd introduces as the present tense, ke ... nei, is really the subjunctive Verbal Prefix ke tied to the here-and-now by the Locative Particle nei. The Locative Particle la often appears in questions as a contrast to the certainty of nei. ana changes the verb into a participle, but Hawaiian does not care whether it is passive or active. The order of ana and the Verbal Directive shifts the category of the phrase; hele mai ana is a participle; hele ana mai is a gerund. ai changes the verb into a relative form; this maneuver is necessary since Hawaiian lack a relative pronoun and does not seem to love subordinate clauses of any kind..

The Strengthening Particle is no. This is a useful device, but I have little more to say about it.

The Giving Grammar, Part I

Hawaiian is classified as a VSO (verb-subject-object) or VAP (verb-agent-patient) language. Thus a word order of VSOI, where I = indirect object, is the default order. The sentence
(1) Ke haawi aku nei au i keia ia oe (VSOI)
means "I give this to you", without emphasis on any of the nouns. If the important noun is the agent  ("I"), au moves to a position before the verb complex ke haawi aku nei and receives the common emphatic particle o - the w of owau is an excrescent consonant inserted for ease of pronunciation. The sentence
(2) Owau ke haawi aku nei i keia ia oe (SVOI)
means "I give this to you." This transformation is fairly straightforward. If, however, the important noun is the patient ("this"), i keia moves to a position before the verb and receives the emphatic particle o, but this does not produce
(3a) *O keia ke haawi aku nei au ia oe (OVSI)
as "I give this to you." The patient cannot travel to the other side of the verb without the agent (a travel agent, perhaps?). The agent changes from the nominative case form au to the possessive case, a-class form ka'u; thus the phrase O keia ka'u means "This is mine." O keia may be the important noun here, but it is still not the agent, so Hawaiian change the verb complex ke haawi aku nei to the "infinitive" form e haawi aku nei. When the patient is the important noun, the sentence
(3b) O keia ka'u e haawi aku nei ia oe (OsVI)
means "This is mine to give to you," or, more simply, "I give this to you." One benefit of this structure is the clear delineation of the role of each noun. If the indirect object ("you") is the important noun, oe moves to a position before the verb and receives the emphatic particle o. There is a hitch, however, in this part of Hawaiian grammar: both objects, direct and indirect, receive the preposition i and ia. This similarity probably aids in greater flexibility, but it also creates difficulties. If one treated the direct object and indirect object identically in syntax, the sentence
(3b) O keia ka'u e haawi aku nei ia oe (OsVI)
could also mean "I give you to this" as well as "I give this to you." This is not acceptable to Hawaiian syntax. The agent travels with the indirect object to the land before the verb (in the infinitive form); the indirect.object receives the emphatic particle, and the nominative form of the agent, au, becomes the phrase ka mea a'u; a'u is a genitive case, a-class form. ka mea means "the person," "the thing," or "the cause," so it is well-suited to express the agent. The sentence
(4) O oe ka mea a'u e haawi aku nei i keia (ISVO)
means "I give this to you." The phrase ka mea is not a grammatical fossil: "They give this to you" in this structure would be
(4b) O oe na mea a lakou e haawi aku nei i keia (ISVO), with na, the plural definite article rather than the singular form ka. The grammatical ability to distinguish between possessive and genitive cases seems very important in the last two structures.

There is one last sentence structure which Hawaiian uses to place emphasis on the agent. In this structure, the nominative case au moves to a position before the verb and changes to the dative case, a-class form na'u; keia accompanies au, losing the i but not acquiring the the emphatic o , because it is not the important noun. The sentence

(5) Na'u keia e haawi aku nei ia oe (SOVI)
means "By me this is given to you" or more simply, "I give you this." Once again, all three roles are clearly marked.by position and grammatical case.


 

Conditional Love

I'm writing this in response to a comment about my post très romantique on Facebook, since there is much confusion between the imparfait, the futur, and the conditionnel. I recieved a lesson on the conditionnel on Thursday, and there is no better teacher than explaining it to others.
The imparfait is formed from the first plural present root (the third plural present works most of the time, but not always - the imparfait of of aller is allait, not *vait) and the endings -ais, -ais, -ait, -ions, -iez, and -aient. Since this is French, the first three endings and the last are pronounced identically (for a long time, I have wanted to ask a typologists about French). So, if we take the verb danser (which, I am ashamed to admit, I misspelled in the post), the first plural present is nous dansons and the root is dans-. If we attach the imperfect endings, we get:
L'Imparfait
je dansais
tu dansais
il dansait
nous dansions
vous dansiez
ils dansaient

The futur, on the other hand, is formed from the infinitive and endings drawn from the present form of avoir: -ai, -as, -a, -ons, -ez, and -ont. Some endings, of course, are homophonous; in this case, the first and fifth, the second and third, and the fourth and last. If we attach these endings, we get:
Le Futur
je danserai
tu danseras
il dansera
nous danserons
vous danserez
ils danseront

The conditionnel is formed from the infinitive and the imparfait endings. So, one conjugates the conditionnel thus:
Le Conditionnel
je danserais
tu danserais
il danserait
nous danserions
vous danseriez
ils danseront
 

The irregular verbs are a source of confusion for the conditionnel. The imparfait of il va is il allait, the futur is il ira, and the conditionnel is il irait. These four forms have distinct pronounciations. In the first person singular, however, the forms are je vais, j'allais, j'irai, and j'irais. The futur and the conditionnel have the same pronunciation but different spellings. Homophony in spoken language is more common than many realize, and does not significantly inhibit comprension, but the overlap of the forms of the futur and the conditionnel illustrates the conceptual connection between the conjugations. The forms of aller are laid out below:
Le Futur
j'irai
tu iras
il ira
nous irons
vous irez
ils iront
Le Conditionnel
j'irais
tu irais
il irait
nous irions
vous iriez
ils iraient

The tense structure of a conditional clause is a bit bizarre to those of us accustomed to Latin and Greek. The conditionnel is not used in the protasis (the if-clause, the clause which actually establishes the condition), but in the apodosis (the then-clause). The French protasis uses the imparfait. Thus, Si j'avais d'argent, je voyagerais à Hawaii means "If had had money (but I don't), I would have gone to Hawaii." My professor anthropomorphizes this match between the imparfait and the conditionnel as les temps qu'ils s'aiment, "the tenses which love each other."

The other use of the conditionnel is one that my professor did not describe as conditional, but certainly seems so to me: the phrase au cas où, "if it be the case that," establishes a condition. The verb after au cas où must be conditionnel. So, the sentence J'ai acheté les etiquettes au cas où tu voudrais voir l'opéra means "I have bought the tickets in case you would like to see the opera."

 

I hope that clears up any confusion.

Hawaiian Grammar Review, Part 2

Judd's pseudo-Latin approach leads him to construct a table pronominal declensions. This table is limited to the singular; at this point I can only speculate that the duals and plurals do not have “cases.” Judd might have said that the dual and plural forms in all “cases” are identical, congruent with the nineteenth century belief that English was a marginal case language because the pronouns distinguish subject, object, and possessive.

	First Singular	Second Singular	Third Singular
Nominative	owau au	oe	oia ia
Genitive	a'u o'u	au ou	ana ona
Possessive	ka'u ko'u kuu	kau kou	kana kona
Dative	na'u no'u	nau nou	nana nona
Accusative	ia'u io'u nei/la	ia oe i ou nei/la	ia ia i ona la
Ablative 1 (Agent/Means)	ma o'u nei/la	ma ou nei/la	ma ona nei/la
Ablative 2 (Separation)	mai o'u aku/mai	mai ou aku/mai	mai ona aku/mai
Ablative 3 (Accompaniment)	me au	me oe	me ia
Ablative 4 (Agent with Passive Verb)	e au	e oe	e ia

The Genitive, Possessive, Dative, and Accusative cases are conflations of the simple prepositions a/o, ka/ko, and na/no with a following pronoun, with the exception of the 'affectionate' possessive first singular form kuu. The alienable/inalienable distinction percolates through these forms. The separation of Genitive and Possessive is a marginal but understandable feature of Indo-European languages (my/mine, vester/vestri/vobis). The surprising feature is the four types of ablative, since the first two types are merely a simple preposition plus an alienable Genitive, and the last two are a simple preposition plus the nominative form (nei and la, aku and mai are particles called directionals, and are not limited to these pronominal structures).

Prepositions, in all languages have both simple and compound forms. The compound forms in Hawaiian have this structure: ma/i- + a grammaticalized noun + o (the alienable genitive). This structure is, in essence, no difference from the English compound preposition because of, which is derived transparently from the phrase be the cause of. The diminution of the locative forms from three to two is not surprising, since the Ablative (mai) is always the first to be sacrificed on the altar of Simplicity. The usual choice of o rather than a as the connecting preposition is logical; if an object (e.g., a spearhead) that is inside you must be specified to be inside you, it is probably not an inherent part of your body! If it is an inherent part of your body, you could just use a possessive. Thus, Ke ike nei au i ka pahi maloko o ka maka a ke kanaka, "I see the knife in the eye of the man," in which the knife does not belong in the eye, but the eye is an intrinsic part of the man.

The article in Hawaiian has two allophones (variants), ka and ke. The determination of which one to use differs in Judd from modern sources, but that could be the result of local variation; the differences have never caused me any problems in identifying the article. I have laid out Judd's distribution below, in which # indicates the beginning of the noun, and C indicates that a noun begins with a consonant (except k or p), which receive their own entries. Most entries in the first column use only one form, although three use both, either for euphony or semantic distinction.

	Ka	Ke
#a	x	x
#e	x
#i	x
#o	x	x
#u	x
#C	x
#k		x
#p	x	x

Hawaiian articles come in three flavors: definite (the), semi-definite (a certain, some), and indefinite (a).These articles have only two grammatical numbers, singular and plural. Do you notice that something is missing? In languages with dual number (such as Greek and Hebrew), the dual is often absent outside of the pronominal system and the plural provides for singular and dual. The definite singular articles, ka and ke, you have already met. The definite plural is na, which occurs the name Na Pali, the Cliffs, a particularly scenic royal preserve on Kaua'i.
The semi-definite plurals are kekahi, kahi, hookahi, and wahi. All of these forms are based on the increasing compound of wahi. One of the compound prepositions is kahi, "there where," a conflation of ka wahi. kekahi prefixes the definite article, while hookahi adds a primarily verbal prefix.
The indefinite singular article is he; there are four different indefinite plural articles, the distinctions of which Judd does not describe, consistent with his purpose of instilling basic comprehension of the language. They must have different connotations, however, because the example sentences use a variety, both alone and in combination.

	Singular	Plural
Definite	ka ke	na
Semi-Definite	kekahi kahi hookahi wahi
Indefinite	he	mau poe pae puu

Hawaiian Grammar Review, Part 1

In anticipation of my upcoming trip to Hawaii, I powered through the chapters of Judd's Hawaiian Grammar up to the point where I stopped last time. If I were planning to speak Hawaiian, I would not have done so and would have switched to some modern online course; my interest, however, is more grammatical and historical, and in the historical records the macron is manqué and the 'okina is optional. Judd will serve my purpose well.

Here is what I have done: I have summarized the grammatical information of the first fourteen lessons in sensible chunks.

First, the pronouns. There are three grammatical numbers (singular, dual, plural), three grammatical persons (first, second, third), and two degrees of clusivity (inclusive, exclusive). I have concocted some tricks to remember the pronominal distinctions. The plurals all end in -kou; the duals except olua (2nd person dual) end in -aua. What about clusivity? An inclusive first person pronoun includes the addressee, whereas an exclusive one excludes the addressee. The easiest way to remember the difference in Hawaiian is that the exclusive pronouns begin with m- for 'me', since the function of the exclusive pronoun is to remind the addressee that he is not part of this 'we'.

Secondly, the verbal structure so far. The pseudo-Latin analysis rings false, but I wonder how much of that analysis was born of ignorance, and how much of convenience. The indicative present is formed by ke V nei N, where V is the verb and N is a noun or pronoun; thus ke hana nei au means "I work" The indicative past is formed by i V N: i hana au, "I worked." The indicative perfect is formed by ua V N: ua hana au, "I have worked". The indicative pluperfect tense is formed by ua V e N: ua hana e au, "I had worked." The indicative future tense is formed by e V au: e hana au, "I will work."

Thirdly, the prepositions. Given the Verb-Subject-Object structure of Hawaiian, prepositions are expected. There is a three-way distinction in the locative prepositions: mai, "from", ma, "at", and i, "towards." The preposition i also functions as a direct object marker. me means both "with" and "and". e is the preposition used for the agent of a passive verb (I suspect that this is a misreading of ergativity, but I have chosen my sourcebook). The remaining prepositions, a/o, ka/ko, and na/no, have alternating forms depending on alienability. a indicates inalienability, o alienability; thus kana papale means "her hat (made by her)", an origin which cannot be changed, but kona papale means "her hat (purchased by her)", a condition which could change if she decided to sell the hat or give it to her friend as a present.

The substantial 'declension' table for singular pronouns, compound prepositions, and the difficulties of articular allophony are subjects for Part 2 of this review.

Post Rojak

It seems apropos that I completed Lesson 23  of the online Malay course before a potluck. The twenty-third section seems a bit late to introduce such an important part of Malay culture, but the vocabulary is rich. At the nadir of my Bahasa Malaysia knowldedge, all I could say was "Saya hendak beli ikan" ("I would like to buy a fish"). The example sentence introduce the words for husband and wife - suami and isteri, respectively. These words look more Indian than Austronesian to my linguistic eye, although no doubt other words for such a basic relationship exist. The word for cheese, keju, is manifestly Portuguese, and the author of the lesson provides a warning against the consumption of pork in the company of Muslims. Rojak, a medley of individual foods, recieves mention, as does its linguistic equivalent, Bahasa Rojak, the bastard child of linguistic crossroads. The insertion of linguistic terminology relates to something further down the page. The list of fruits (buah-buahan) is extensive - many fruits seem to have no parallel name in English. Among these fruits is durian, the delicious and fragrant fruit. Imagine the smell of growing up in an durian orchard! The section on meal names discriminates between dinner (makan malam) and supper (makan lewat malam), something which Americans often fail to do.

For a linguistic desert, my old love clusivity recieves a clear explanation. Kami is inclusive we (I plus you) and kita is exclusive we (I, but not you). The lack of this distinction in the Indo-European languages is rarer than its presence, but I have read somewhere that the two forms of 'we/us' in Proto-Indo-European is relic of clusivity. You might call the forms relic-clusives! In Bahasa Rojak, however, the inclusive form kami is replaced by the specifically Bahasa Rojak form kitorang, from kita orang, 'we people'. If my hunch is correct, this is a reflection of the use of inclusive forms to reinforce ethnocentric bonds, since my Quechua-speaking ordained acquaintance used a similar example to illustrate clusivity in his mother tongue.

Turkey Day Tumpang

I was relaxing from Thanksgiving setup by finishing the current lesson in the online Bahasa Malaysia course - I'd wanted to practice some hieroglyphics, but I'd already put away my notes on where I last ended in Chapter XXXII of the Book of the Dead. The subject of Lesson 21 was 'di mana' ('where?'), and, more generally, locative expressions. The Bahasa Malaysia words for left and right ('kiri' and 'kanan', respectively) must be a nightmare for folks like me, who often confuse left and right! But the most relevant word for the holidays is 'tumpang', which can be used in three ways: 1) in phrases such as "boleh saya tumpang tanya?" "do you mind if I ask you a question?" 2) "to stay at a relative's or friend's place for the night" 3) "to get a lift in a car", possibly from a friend or relative. This polysemy speaks volumes about Malay and Malaysian culture, and serves as a friendly warning about one-to-one translation!