Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 January 1894 — HAWAIIAN NAMES. [ARTICLE]

HAWAIIAN NAMES.

Some Hints in Regard to Their Proper PronunciationSeattle Post Apropos of the question of the pronunciation of Hawaiian names, a baief statement of the principles of the language governing this matter may be of interest to many. In 1820, when the American missionaries landed at Kailua, Hawaii, there was no written language, and their first literary work after learning the spoken language was to reduce it to writing. They adopted the following Roman letters as representative of the simple sounds they found: The fivq vowels, a, e, i, o, u, having the following sounds, a, as in father; e, as in fete; i, as long e when spoken quickly, as in mete, or passing in usage into the shorter sound of short i, as in pin; o, as in old; u, as oo in food; or u, as in rude. The five consonants, k, 1, m, n, p, the aspirate h, and a vocalic w. Pure Hawaiian knows no diphthongs though to our clumsier An-glo-Saxon ears and tongues it seems to. There are, therefore, as many syllables Tn a Hawaiian word as there are vowles, and no syllable ends in a consonant. Where two or more vowles follow each other, with no intervening consonants, there is a crasis, or commingling of the sounds that produce what seems to a stranger a foreign element in the pronunciation For example, the name of the island upon which Honolulu is. situated, Oahu (O-a-hoo), producing a sound not unlike O-wa-hoo, which was, indeed one way of spelling it in early times. There is, to foreign ears at least, notable exception to the law of no diphthong, name, in the combination of ai, as in Hawaii, Ha-wi-i, which, though structurally incorrect, is the common pronunciation. Hence we have Ho-no-lu-lu, Li-li-u-o-ka-la-ni, with the accent on the penult in each case. What the law of acentuation may be, if there is any, I cannot say.