Two Gentlemen of Wailua

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.