Spelling & Sounds
This part of the article by Schutz talked mainly about the Hawaiian alphabet. Missionaries started getting serious about the Hawaiian language and alphabet in 1820. Their main goal was to convert eh Hawaiians to Christianity. This could only be done if the Hawaiian people could read the Bible in their own language.
The first system that came about was the 3s & 8s. Missionaries teamed up with a group of Hawaiians studying at the Foreign Mission School in Connecticut and this is what they came up with. I can't really give a good description about this part because it confused me big time.
Then it went on to talk about the Hawaiian alphabet. The missionaries basically broke everything down phonemically to write down words. This came out to be a problem because there were words that had no difference in the way you pronounced them. For example, Kamehameha was first spelled Tamehameha.
t-k b-p l-r-d v-w
These sounds seemed to vary at random. With this system, there was too many letters to choose from to write down a single word. This was fixed by a solution to use fixed spelling for common words. By choosing one letter from each group for common words, this helped make the writing system more efficient.
The rest of this part of the article talked about the Okina (glottal stop) and Kahako (vowel length)
The Hawaiian Alphabet can be viewed here: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hawaiian.htm
*** i found this part of the article hard to read. maybe it was because of the font used. Right now, I don't even know what i'm talking about
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2 comments:
Thanks Teddy for the short summary of part of the Schutz reading. I found the reading to be very informative and very detailed in describing the Hawaiian language. The section about the 3’s and 8’s explain the first system that was used to express the sounds that were formed in the Hawaiian language. If you look at figure 4: Webster’s Numbered Vowels, you can see that 3 is the pronunciation of “a” in the word “hall,” and 8 is the pronunciation of “u” in the word “truth.” So basically “l8n3” is said “luna” with the sounds from the word “truth” and the word “hall.” I am not sure if that helps at all, but I am pretty sure that that is what Schutz is trying to explain. The reading in general covered the basic foundation of the Hawaiian language such as the official alphabet, the sound system, words, grammar, parts of speech and sentence formation. I have a slight advantage when reading this article because Hawaiian language is my major, so much of what is written by Schutz are things that I have been studying for the past few years. I feel that Schutz does a good job in giving a quick snap shot of the language and its rules.
What I basically got out of this section is that the Hawaiian language consists of five vowels, seven consonants, a glottal stop, and vowel length. The five vowels are a, e, i, o, and u. The seven consonants are h, k. l, m, n, p, and w. Furthermore, the sounds can be interchangeable. For instance, "k" is sometimes pronounced "t", and "w" is sometimes pronounced "v". The glottal stop or 'okina is represented by a backwards apostrophe. Vowel lengh or kahako is represented by a macron symbol. Because I took hula, I was able to produce the correct sounds for most of the examples. I was and still am confused about diphthongs, so I'll probably bring it up tomorrow in class.
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