by Leilehua Yuen
I recently came across a stack of articles and posts from years ago, which I have the vanity to think might continue to be of interest to readers. One of the readers of a column I wrote posted this to me:
“I was just on Kauai and remember reading that Kauai Hawaiian was different from that on the other islands. Something about “t” being preserved from the older Polynesian languages, where the other islands’ Hawaiian used “k” instead, for example in the name of the island itself.”
Kinda sorta but not quite. I’m going to answer this one in chunks as I have time.
Come, Sherman, let us enter the Wayback Machine.
Way back when the ancestors of today’s Hawaiian people were sailing all over the Pacific, they found an isolated group of islands. Over many generations, successive waves of immigrants came to these islands and settled. The different waves spoke different languages and dialects, but many were mutually intelligible to some degree. Some of the families which came were of simple settlers looking for homes, land to farm, and reefs to fish. Others were warrior societies, and came looking for conquest.
Eventually, about the middle of the 1200s, the great inter-archipelago voyages ceased and the people of these islands began to develop a distinct culture of their own. It was highly stratified, as well as geographically separated. While most of the islands are quite close together, Hawai`i, on the south end of the chain, is separated from the rest by the `Alenuihaha Channel, the most dangerous navigable channel in the world. To the north, Kaua`i and Ni`ihau are separated from the rest of the chain by the Kaʻieʻie Waho Channel, which is so broad that the canoes traversing them must be prepared for condition of both the open ocean and channel crossings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channels_of_the_Hawaiian_Islands
The difficulty of regular commerce with the rest of the chain caused Kaua`i and Ni`ihau, smaller, older islands than the rest, to look even farther north, toward the islets and archipelagos which string across the Pacific toward the Aleutian Islands, for resources. Even today, my ancestors’ temples and shelters remain on those tiny islands.
The ocean has always been our highway, and land travel on the Hawaiian Islands was difficult until the middle of the 20th Century.
Continuing our voyage in the Wayback Machine:
Kaua`i and Ni`ihau developed a somewhat different social structure and dialect than what was found in the rest of the chain. Less socially stratified than the other islands (not as many settlers ended up on those islands, so a relatively small group of chiefly families predominated. The yet earlier inhabitants spoke their own language and did not mingle with the Proto-Hawaiians, so I will not bring them into the discussion), the language was more homogeneous.
I expect that Hawai`i Island, the largest and geographically most diverse in the chain, had the greatest dialect variance.
Now, let’s add the Missionaries. They were actually late-comers to the social scene. Military and mercantile ships had been coming to the islands for over 40 years, since 1778.
But no one in the islands had seriously tried to create a written grammar or record the language on paper. To spread the Word of God, the Missionaries determined that they needed to do so. They were greatly aided in this by a dictionary written by some young Hawaiian men who were being schooled in New England. One, Henry Opukahaia ( from Kona), on his deathbed, begged the church which had educated him to send Missionaries to Hawai`i.
So, when the Missionaries arrived in Hawai`i, their ear already had been trained to the dialect of the Leeward side of Hawai`i Island. When they landed there, they primarily associated with the “upper classes” of the Kona people. Thus, when they first began transcribing the Hawaiian language to create a written form, they based the written form on what a New Englander’s ear heard of the North Kona / South Kohala dialect of the upper class of that area.
It would be somewhat as if a Hawaiian went to New England and wrote down the speech of the Kennedy and Bouvier families and declared, “This is the language of Americans!” Well, yes. But then again. . . .
The Roman Catholics who transcribed the Hawaiian language have a somewhat different phonology.
So, for specific sounds:
T, K, and in some cases S, are interchangeable. Much depends on the preceding vowel sound. In general, the T sound will predominate in the northern islands, and K in the south, but not always.
P and B can sometimes interchange. The actual sound is somewhere in between, and leans one way or the other depending on regional variance. B tends to be associated with loan words.
L, R, and to a lesser extend D form more of a spectrum than distinct sounds. To my ear, “proper” Hawaiian uses a sound about midway between the L and R, with the hard D used for loan words.
W and V also form a spectrum, and the Hawaiian I grew up uses a sound about midway between the two.
We often say that the T and W are “older” variants, but I’m not so sure that is true, as the sounds are preserved the length of the chain, just to different degrees. I would say the T and V sounds are more “formal” as we tend to shade the accent that way in the more formal chants.
Check out his video to hear a reconstruction of Proto-Austronesian sounds: