Mele Kalikimaka

Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say
On a bright Hawaiian Christmas Day
That's the island greeting that we send to you
From the land where palm trees sway
Here we know that Christmas will be green and bright
The sun to shine by day and all the stars at night
Mele Kalikimaka is Hawaii's way
To say "Merry Christmas to you."

OK, to say I've been listening to too much Christmas music is like saying that William Shatner is too dramatic. But when it's forced upon you for 10 hours a day it begins to sink into your brain like listening to Jim Jones on a subliminal track. I'm freaking DREAMING Christmas music. I don't even decorate my house anymore because to live in Christmas 24 hours a day would surely be called cruel and unusual punishment by the supreme court. Not that I don't like the holiday, not that I don't believe in the holiday, but I just don't believe that 99% of people actually KNOW What the holiday is about.

But that's just not what this Blog is about. The above song is for one ABSOLUTELY HORRENDOUS. And for two it just makes me wonder about the Hawaiian language. It all sounds the same....So of course I had to find out why.

To start with, Hawaiian is a Polynesian Language that took it's name from the largest island of the chain that became known as the State of Hawaii. It originally had no written language other than petroglyphical symbols. The modern Hawaiian alphabet, ka pīʻāpā Hawaiʻi, is a variety of the Latin alphabet. Hawaiian words end only in vowels, and every consonant must be followed by a vowel. The Hawaiian alphabetical order has all of the vowels before the consonants, as in the following chart.

Aa Ee Ii Oo Uu Hh Kk Ll Mm Nn Pp Ww ʻ
/a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/ /h/ /k~t/ /l/ /m/ /n/ /p/ /v~w/ /ʔ/

This writing system was developed by American Protestant missionaries during 1820–1826. It was the first thing they ever printed in Hawaiʻi, on January 7, 1822, and it originally included the consonants B, D, R, T, and V, in addition to the current ones (H, K, L, M, N, P, W), and it had F, G, S, Y and Z for "spelling foreign words". The initial printing also showed the five vowel letters (A, E, I, O, U) and seven of the short diphthongs (AE, AI, AO, AU, EI, EU, OU).

In 1826, the developers voted to eliminate some of the letters which represented functionally redundant allophones (called "interchangeable letters"), enabling the Hawaiian alphabet to approach the ideal state of one-symbol-one-sound, and thereby optimizing the ease with which people could teach and learn the reading and writing of Hawaiian. For example, instead of spelling one and the same word as pule, bule, pure, and bure (because of interchangeable p/b and l/r), the word is spelled only as pule.

Interchangeable B/P. B was dropped, P was kept.
Interchangeable L/R. R was dropped, L was kept.
Interchangeable K/T. T was dropped, K was kept.
Interchangeable V/W. V was dropped, W was kept.

A modern Hawaiian name for the symbol (a letter) which represents the glottal stop is ʻokina (ʻoki 'cut' + -na '-ing'). It was formerly known as ʻuʻina ('snap'.

For examples of the ʻokina, consider the Hawaiian words Hawaiʻi and Oʻahu (often simply Hawaii and Oahu in English orthography). In Hawaiian, these words can be pronounced [hʌˈʋʌi.ʔi] and [oˈʔʌ.hu], and can be written with an ʻokina where the glottal stop is pronounced.

As early as 1823, the missionaries made some limited use of the apostrophe to represent the glottal stop, but they did not make it a letter of the alphabet. In publishing the Hawaiian Bible, they used it to distinguish koʻu ('my') from kou ('your').In 1864, William DeWitt Alexander published a grammar of Hawaiian in which he made it clear that the glottal stop (calling it "guttural break") is definitely a true consonant of the Hawaiian language. He wrote it using an apostrophe. In 1922, the Andrews-Parker dictionary of Hawaiian made limited use of the opening single quote symbol, called "reversed apostrophe" or "inverse comma", to represent the glottal stop. Subsequent dictionaries have preferred to use that symbol. Today, many native speakers of Hawaiian do not bother, in general, to write any symbol for the glottal stop. Its use is advocated mainly among students and teachers of Hawaiian as a second language, and among linguists.

Not sure if all that helps any at all? I actually had to read through most of it twice to fully understand. Just a quick comment, the glottal stop thingy. Is basically when you bounce the back of your tongue off your uvula and it makes a sort of pause in sound. So Hawaii sounds like Hawai-EE. So basically for all the grief the English language takes for how to properly spell and pronounce words because of the way they are written, they tried to fix those issues with the Hawaiian language....yet we still managed to push our American ways into their language and screw it up. Oh well, three more weeks until Christmas and then I wont have to listen to this dreadful music any more.