Hupo maoli wau!

One of the first things my smartass brother asked when I bought Elbert's Speaking Hawaiian on Sunday was how to say "My pencil is big and yellow." I left the book at monshu's and only picked it up on my way home last night, so it wasn't until this morning that I could waste a goddamn hour looking that up.

Finding the vocabulary was easy, learning how to express predicate adjectives and possession only moderately more difficult. But I have a surprising amount of trouble researching adjective coordination. The examples in the book are all attributive. I know nouns require a me (where me literally means "with"), but I can't figure out if adjectives do, too, or if you can just pile them up next to each other. So my guess is:

Nui melemele ka'u penikala

Literally, this is "big yellow my pencil". (Hawaiian has no copula.) But I reserve the right to revise that once I have a look at a comprehensive grammar.

The possessives are actually really interesting. All Polynesian languages have a variation on the alienable/inalienable distinction that's found, for instance, in many Amerind languages. Possessives with a are alienable, those with o inalienable. (For those who find this confusing, Hawai'ian has an out in the form of a "neutral" possessives, ku'u "my" and kō "your".)

My older Hawai'ian grammar has such contrasts as ko'u wahine "my woman [who works for me]" vs. ka'u wahine "my wife". Elbert doesn't have these, but he gives some other fascinating contrasts, such as ka'u mele "my song" (i.e. a song I wrote) vs. ko'u mele "my song (i.e. a song about me)" or ka'u ki'i "my image" (i.e. a picture or sculpture I created) vs. ko'u ki'i "my image" (i.e. a picture or statue of me).

Osage supposedly has a similar distinction (though details are bound to differ), but it's maddening trying to learn anything about it from Quintero's Osage grammar. In the appendix on kinship terms, she states that they all take the inalienable possessive prefixes. Fine--but I've been over the detailed section headings a dozen times and I can't find where she lists the alienable prefixes. (There's no index, of course.) I've come across many examples of possession in the text; the basic construction seems to be hta with pronominal prefixes after the possessed noun. (For example, hci ąkóhta "our house"; hci ðihta "your house".) She points out in passing that hta can't be considered a verb, since it doesn't take the same prefixes, but nowhere does she actually discuss the construction! All the examples have the inalienable prefixes, no matter what is possessed. (In some Polynesian languages, "my [inalienable] house" would be a house I built, rather than one I was just living in--though modern Hawa'ian seems to use ko'u hale indiscriminately, at least according to Elbert.) Does that mean that the alienable prefixes (whatever they are) are never used, at least with this construction? Why do I even have to guess?

iiðálana ska. I must be stupid.

Edit: Proof positive--edited to correct the Hawai'ian examples.

Perils of sunshine

Crap! My new "black" slacks are really navy blue!