Talk: Hawaiian language
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What is the consonant [']? It is not on the consonant page. And how does it relate to the spelling Hawai'i? --rmhermen
- Glottal stop, should be /?/. Also, that should be a backtick `, not apostrophe ' if I'm not mistaken. (Unfortunately I'm mislaid my "Let's learn Hawai`ian!" book for the moment...) Brion VIBBER 2002/03/14
- Actually it should be a single opening quote ‘
- But because the quote is a punctuation mark and computers don't like ambiguity, Unicode also provides similar-looking marks which count as actual letters ʻ. It's Unicode U+02BB, you can use ʻ in HTML.
- Because of a lack of either of these characters in the past, the backtick has been used on typewriters and computers. Note, however, that the Wiki software doesn't like backtick characters in links.
- Please see Kualono
- — Hippietrail 03:32, 25 May 2004 (UTC)
Looks like someone got a bit overzealous and 'okina'd everything in sight. :) The main consensus is that Hawai'i the place name is correct, but Hawai'ian the derived English adjective is not (technically, it would then be pronounced "hah-WEYE <pause> yun"...doesn't sound right). It's been discussed at length on Talk:Hawaii. Hope this helps. KeithH 06:31, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- HEY!! I say "havai‘ian"! :P There's no such thing as being overzealous in respecting ones birthplace. :) - Gilgamesh 09:01, 18 June 2004 (UTC)
- The word "overzealous" presupposes that zeal is worth evaluating relative to other considerations. Gilgamesh's statement implies that nothing can be as important as "respecting ones [sic] birthplace". If he truly believes that, i have a certain respect for his PoV, and don't think it necessarily makes him a bad person.
- That being said.... He may just be temporarily posturing for the sake of whatever that does for him. If not, he doesn't think the WP project is important enough to respect NPoV, and his editing of articles related to either Hawaii or Hawai‘i to avoid being a waste of his and others' time.
- --Jerzy(t) 18:50, 2004 Jul 15 (UTC)
- To be truthful, I don't give a damn if "Hawaii" gets more Google hits than "Hawai‘i". "Hawai‘i" is correct both as a noun and as a stem. I will not tolerate the irresponsible anglo-centric degradation of the Hawai‘ian language and its phonology. I really don't care how arrogant it sounds. To be brutally honest, I feel that it is POV to impose English habits on Hawai‘ian words just because the islands are under American sovereignity; I think it's perfectly NPOV to present words specific to a language in that language's most widely-accepted phonology, rather than in English. - Gilgamesh 09:19, 18 June 2004 (UTC)
- Don't get me wrong...I know the ‘okina and kahakō have their place in Hawaiian. Notice that when I edited I left all the instances of "Hawai‘i" alone. But, WADR, what I submit is you're doing the opposite...imposing Hawaiian orthography on an English word. Yes, Hawai‘i is the proper way of rendering the name in ōlelo Hawai‘i. But if it were as simple as tacking on a suffix to the native language form of the name to form Hawai‘ian, then we should be eating sashimi at Nihonese restaurants, kalbi at Hangukian restaurants...etc. There's a gray area in the case of Hawaii since the English form "Hawaii" and the proper Hawaiian form "Hawai‘i" differ only by the ‘okina. (Blame Captain Cook for his poor spelling, I guess.) Again, I have no problem of using the glottal stop in spelling Hawai‘i. But if you were going to form an adjective form in English, I submit you would add the suffix to the English form, not necessarily the native language form. One thing to note is that the Honolulu Advertiser is diligent in using ‘okina and kahakō where appropriate in Hawaiian words and names, but still spells the word "Hawaiian" as such. Food for thought. :) - KeithH 21:33, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- I think Keith is right. I've never seen Hawaiian as "Hawai'ian" here in Hawai'i. It is certainly never pronounced that way - Marshman 17:52, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Don't get me wrong...I know the ‘okina and kahakō have their place in Hawaiian. Notice that when I edited I left all the instances of "Hawai‘i" alone. But, WADR, what I submit is you're doing the opposite...imposing Hawaiian orthography on an English word. Yes, Hawai‘i is the proper way of rendering the name in ōlelo Hawai‘i. But if it were as simple as tacking on a suffix to the native language form of the name to form Hawai‘ian, then we should be eating sashimi at Nihonese restaurants, kalbi at Hangukian restaurants...etc. There's a gray area in the case of Hawaii since the English form "Hawaii" and the proper Hawaiian form "Hawai‘i" differ only by the ‘okina. (Blame Captain Cook for his poor spelling, I guess.) Again, I have no problem of using the glottal stop in spelling Hawai‘i. But if you were going to form an adjective form in English, I submit you would add the suffix to the English form, not necessarily the native language form. One thing to note is that the Honolulu Advertiser is diligent in using ‘okina and kahakō where appropriate in Hawaiian words and names, but still spells the word "Hawaiian" as such. Food for thought. :) - KeithH 21:33, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Is this right (from article)?: "...actually pronounced (using IPA): /ha.ˈvai.i/ .." I do not see a glottal stop? Actually, those unicodes just appear as empty boxes on my browser (IE). - Marshman 17:52, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Sorry, my mistake. Fixed. But you know, there are plenty of good Unicode fonts with IPA support. - Gilgamesh 00:56, 27 June 2004 (UTC)
- I'm not sure what your saying. I assume that the fact I see only an empty box is a failing of either Wikipedia or my browser. - Marshman 03:01, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Material removed from Hawaii#Language, where it was excessive detail. Perhaps should be integrated in this article:
- The ‘okina represents a glottal stop (written as Unicode character $2018). The kahakō stresses the sound of certain vowels.
I added a table representation of the characters so readers get a clearer picture of what the letters look like using the okina and kahako. --Gerald Farinas 18:15, 15 Jul 2004 (UTC)
‘okina [ ‘ ] kahakō variants [ ā ] [ ē ] [ ī ] [ ō ] [ ū ]
Questions
I finally got around to looking at this page and I have some questions.
No 't' sound in Hawaiian? As I understand it, the t and k sounds blur into each other, with a t pronunciation being more common on Kaua'i and a k pronunciation on the Big Island. Which is why some explorers wrote about Tamehameha, etc. Ditto r and l, which is why we see Honoruru in older books. The reduction of the language to written form and then the drastic reduction in Hawaiian speakers has meant -- so I'm told -- that more Hawaiians speak a Hawaiian that's artificially shaped by reduction to writing, as well as by the English language environment and teachers who learned it as a second language.
I'll put that into the article, if no one has any objections.
Also, the 162 possible syllables figure seems too low. Is that counting all the possible variations with long and short vowels? It's late and I'm too tired to drag down my concrete math text and think about combinations and variations ...
Other interesting features of Hawaiian aren't mentioned. It has two forms of possessive, right? Like Tongan? A and o? A dual? Extensive use of possessives? Inclusive and exclusive we?
One final thing -- at least in Tonga there are alternate words for speaking to or about people of different status. An arm is nima, but God's arm (or the king's arm) is a to'ikupu. I've always thought that there must be something equivalent in Hawaiian, common and elegant words, but I've never seen any mention of it.
Oh, and we should probably mention kaona, yes?
Zora 09:51, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- Actually, I'm not sure where the 162 came from. I count 90: 9 initials (h, k, l, m, n, p, w, 'okina, plus no consonant) by 10 finals (5 long vowels, 5 short vowels) = 90. But then there might be more if you include diphthongs like ai, ae, ou, etc. KeithH 02:36, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)
What about japanese? Does it have more syllables than hawaiian? Also, I have heard about one obscure language with very few syllables/phonemes somewhere.
Woo-woo interpolation
Someone new to Wikipedia spent some time working on the Hawaiian alphabet section, adding some completely inaccurate info claiming that Hawaiian used to be written with symbols (as in petroglyphs) which no one now can read, and then segued into a bizarrely off-topic addition about missionaries destroying Hawaiian culture and killing off Hawaiians. I have deleted all this. A severe reaction, to be sure. If the person who added the bit about petroglyphs wants to do some real research and contribute an article about petroglyphs, we may find room for that POV there, as in "some people claim that these petroglyphs have meanings now lost". Zora 08:36, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Unicode clarification
Regarding the discussion of the ‘okina, we consulted with the Unicode consortium back in 1998 before determining that U+02BB was the correct character for two reasons - 1) it will not allow a break after the character (you cannot hypenate a Hawaiian word after a consonant, and the ‘okina is considered a consonant) and 2) it is generally accepted by spell check dictionaries which will not accept similarly shaped characters which are considered punctuation marks. After much discussion with members of this group, they strongly urged us to use this character and lobby for its broader inclusion in fonts. Those are also reasons we chose to replace ÿ with the ‘okina in the custom 8 bit "HI" fonts which we used for many years. It had the added benefit of alphabetizing correctly (the ‘okina being the final consontant of the Hawaiian consonants).
I tend to use the single left curly quote in web pages for display. As was mentioned in a previous posted - many fonts do not have a character at U+02BB and will display a box within the web browser.
I should not that in Apple Computer's built-in Hawaiian support for OS X, most of their fonts have the correct character at U+02BB, and this is the character generated by the Hawaiian Unicode keyboard included with OS X (see this page for [| information on Mac OS X support for Hawaiian]).
Regarding Hawai‘ian, Keith is correct. Hawaiian words do not end with consonants, so this is not a Hawaiian word, and the glottal is not written in English. We could get into the nasty habit people have of adding 's' to Hawaiian words (leis, keikis, wahines), but don't have time for a discussion of that at the moment.
As for the single "straight" apostrophe vs. a back tick, both are wrong but are deemed acceptable when the correct character is unavailable. We (Hawaiian Language Center, UH-Hilo) don't consider either to be preferred over the other. For non-speakers it might be easier for them to differentiate the the 'okina and apostrophe with text that contains both English and Hawaiian words, but for those who can speak and read the language, either is readable.
Keola Donaghy, Asst. Professor of Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Hilo
