A Puni, Maluna, Malalo, Me Ma!

(Sorry about the delay - I was traveling most of yesterday)

Lesson 12 in Judd's grammar introduces the complex prepositions, those which contain multiple words, similar to the English prepositon in front of. The majority of the English prepositions are composed this way, although the attrition of language has disguised the etymology of many English words. The preposition above, for instance, which appears to the diachronically blind as a straightforward two-syllable preposition of uncertain parentage, has a long history of prepositional accretion and linguistic erosion. The original core preposition was uf, the Anglo-Saxon form of up. Some speakers felt that uf alone was insufficient to express the up-ness they desired, and therefore attached an "on" to form ufan, "up on" Eventually that was deemed too weak, and be "by" prefixed itself to ufan to produce bufan "by up on". After the users of bufan had forgotten the intial suffixation of an to uf, they prefixed another an, creating anbufan "on by up on", which attrition wore down to the two-syllable word we use today.

The structure of all but two of the prepositions introduced in this lesson follow this analysis: ma- or i- prefixed to the core word, usually followed by the inalienable preposition o. The core word can be adverbial, such lalo "downwards", or a fully realized noun, such as uka "interior". Although the prepositions shown in the lesson all bear the prefix ma-, the choice between ma- and i- reflects the difference between the accusative and the ablative. In Latin, certain prepositions, such as sub "under", take the accusative or the ablative depending on whether the intent is to indicate motion or location; the same distinction applies to the Hawaiian prefixes. The inalienable preposition o is the usual third component; presumably one can replace o with a when appropriate. I must confess that the sources I have consulted on the o-a distinction have further perplexed me.

As for the exercise, the first appearance of the Hawaiian dog ('ilio) is notable. Hawaiian dogs were hairless and non-barking and bred for food rather than to chase game. The muteness of the breed was such a defining characteristic that the mythical dogs of Barking Sands recieved the "gift" of making noise from a god. I can relate to the chickens in Sentence 8, since on my recent trip to Kauai, I crept down a steep trail to a lovely waterfall (Kilahiwai Falls, or Wailele Kilahiwai). On the other side of the pool which lay at the base of the waterfall a family of chickens lived under a log (although it may not have been gray - it was covered in foliage). Kauai has been infested with chickens ever since a storm in the nineties, when the farmers let loose many chickens to ride out the storm and some never came back. There are no large predators on Kauai (which might explain the lack of hunting dogs), so the chickens multiplied.

(In case anybody was wondering, the post title was referring to this)


Lesson 12
1. Ke ike nei au i ka lio eleele.  I know the black horse.
2. Ke noho nei ke kanaka iloko o ka hale ulaula. The man sits within the red house.
3. Ua ike makou i kekahi mau manu keokeo. We have seen some (kekahi mau) white birds.
4. Ke ku nei ka ilio haeleele mawaho o ka hale keokeo. The brown dog stands outside the red house.
5. Ke paani nei na keiki mawaho o ka hale oma'oma'o. The children play outside the green house.
6. Ke holo nei ka puaa ulaula ikai. The red pig runs toward the sea. (Gadarene swine?)
7. Heaha ka inoa o kou lio huapala. What is the name of his chestnut horse?
8. Ke noho nei na moa ulaula malalo o ke kumulaau ahinahina. The red chickens live underneath the gray tree trunk.

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").

Kauai Tales

Most people, when they travel to exotic lands, collect knick-knacks such as clothing items or useless objects that soon are retired to a drawer and completely forgotten. I prefer to buy language-themed items, which is how I have come to own many Teach Yourself Language X books and dictionaries over the years. This time, when I went to Kauai with my family, I was looking around an antiques and Hawaiiana store in a Hanalei and discovered a book of Kauai legends and folktales. I already owned a Hawaiian dictionary (which I had forgotten, oh so foolishly, to bring with me to Kauai) and a book on the better-known Hawaiian legends, such as Maui and Pele, so I was excited to obtain a book with more provincial legends.


What particularly appealed to me about Kauai Tales was the glossary in the back that explained the meaning of the names in the stories. It pleased me not only as a practitioner of the "secret vice", but also as a student of myth and legend. The names in such stories, unless they are drawn from a historical person, are not chosen randomly; knowing the meaning of the name, therefore, illuminates the point of the story and may yield cultural information otherwise hidden. Many of the stories in Kauai Tales are aetiological, spanning form the time of night before the colonization of the Hawaiian islands to semi-historical periods. The author-collector is very careful to point out that this is a collection of stories from story-tellers, rather than genealogist-historians, and is intended to entertain first and be useful or historically accurate secondarily.

I devoured the tales in the first book so quickly that I returned to the shop to purchase the other two collections. The shop was still there, since it wasn't magical, and a book that appeared in the back of an antiques shop did not seem the sort of literature which would be easy or possible to find on a return voyage (I'm still kicking myself for not picking up the Adam Link collection in Many Waters bookstore in Northfield).

The second volume, Polihale, unfortunately lacked the comprehensive language index of the first volume, but it contained much more material. Now that I have returned home, I have access to my Hawaiian reference material. Much of Polihale appears to be derived from an Kauai oral epic involving several characters in a war between the chief of Kona (yes, the coffee place) and the chief of Wailua, near the sacred birthing stone of the chiefly class. It reminded of the Iliad and Odyssey, in that the cycle contained an overarching war narrative, personal narratives (from both sides), aetiologies, and stories about the aftermath of the war (involving a were-octopus).

I have not read the third yet, but I am looking forward to it.