Lesson 15: Mai, Aku, La, Nei

The completion of Lesson 15 yielded no interesting grammatical gems (or even semantic), so rather than complain about the high level of ambiguity in Hawaiian particles (what can you expect from a language which has so few phonemes?), so I'll take the opportunity to explain a feature of Hawaiian unfamiliar to most English speakers: deictic particles. What is a deictic particle? It is simply an "adverbial" word that indicates direction. The old English words "where, whither, whence" illustrate a pronominal use of directionality, since the meanings are "at which place, to which place, from which place". Greek has a "deictic iota" or "deictic i" in its dramatic register. The abundant use of the deictic iota arises from the lack of stage directions (or even  indications of change of speaker!) in Greek drama. The absence of stage directions as we know them does not mean that the plays were not blocked - Greek tragedy does derive from a choral performance, after all. So where could the dramatist put the directions? He incorporated them into the text. In some cases, the direction was explicit, if one of the characters already on stage announced he could see the king approaching, but in other cases, the dramatist tacked the deictic iota onto the noun of his choice. The addition of the deictic iota indicated a "hey pay attention to this" response to the part of the players and the audience.

So far, the most striking Hawaiian deictic particles are mai, aku, la, and nei. The particle mai indicates movement away from the speaker; thus, whether the topic of discussion is coming or going does not determine the use of mai. The particle aku is the counterpart of mai, and can indicate temporal distinctions as well as physical ones - but I have not progressed far enough to say any more on the temporal uses. The particle la is a general indicator, and seems to be some sort of pan-Pacific, pan-East Asian deictic, since it is found in that use from China to Ni'ihau. In Hawaiian, la appears to be the antithesis of nei, a particle which is used quite vigorously in Hawaiian, but seems to indicate a high degree of immediacy, intimacy, and affection. I suspect that the intimate aspect of nei explains not only the use of nei as part of the present tense (what could be more relevant than what you are doing right now?) and the past with aku (only slightly less relevant than the present), and its absence when aku is used to indicate future time (irrelevant if you're an Australian Prime Minister and have just been eaten by a shark). This overlap of temporal and spatial terms is typical of natural human languages, although I am unsure what that indicates about human perception. These four deictic particle (there are others) provide additional information to allow the addressee (2nd person) to place the topic of discussion (3rd person) within a physical framework.