The Death of Imagination

Pōʻalua "Momona" keia. Ua ʻai mākou i nā "pączki" ma ka hana. He mau malasada Pōlani nā pączki. Ua oha ka ʻahahui poʻe hana i ʻeono kākini, akā hoʻi pau i ka lilo. Ua kūʻai mai i mea ʻelua wale, hoʻokahi mea me ʻīkomo pukini a me hoʻokahi mea me ʻīkomo ʻapelekoka. Ua ʻai koke au i ka mea ʻapelekoka akā hoʻokoe au i kekahi. Manaʻo au e ʻai mahope aku, akā hāʻawi aku au iā kekahi kanaka. ʻO wai kēlā? He hoa hana punahele ʻoia. Ake nui noʻu e hoʻohui me ia, akā ʻena aku iaʻu. Ua hele mai ʻoia i ka waihona puke i keia lā a hō aku au i ka mea momona. Ua inu kope ʻoia a kamakamaʻilio māua. Ua hauʻoli loa au.

I'm continuing to make good progress in Hawai'ian: a couple chapters in Elbert every evening and several "lessons" every day on Duolingo. Memorising the numbers was far easier than expected given the problems I've had in other languages (I still don't know the native numbers in Japanese) and I'm fairly pleased with my vocabulary retention in general.

Of course, it hasn't taken very long for the limitations of my materials to reveal themselves. The textbook is--as mentioned before--fairly minimal in its treatment of grammar; to my surprise, the grammar isn't much better. It's curious, really; at some points it's very definite and at others it sounds like you're eavesdropping on the authors as they try to work it out. I mean, good that they wanna be descriptive but I thought one of them at least was a fluent native speaker?

And their grammatical descriptions can me odd sometimes, to say the least. Fortunately I was able to find a concise explanation of Hawai'ian relativisation in PDF format because I don't know I would have ever figured it out based on their account. They don't even call it that, they just talk vaguely of "combining phrases" or something.

Plus I'm beginning to recall why--besides the lack of explanations--I bounced off the textbook before: Even for something written in the 70s, it's heavy on the stereotyping. I think the issue is that Elbert wanted it to sound kind of "cool" so, given the milieu, that leads inevitably to...guys talking about women as capricious objects? Maikaʻi loa. It's also weirdly negative, with the teacher in the example dialogues openly berating students for their idiocy. (I haven't even bothered trying to memorise all the synonyms for "stupid" deployed.)

But I'm finally getting to the reading selections and, though they're somewhat insipid, hopefully they'll be a gateway to reading raw texts. Historically, I've never really made solid progress in a language until I've been able to do that.

Found my copy of Elbert's Speaking Hawai'ian last night on my third attempt. I started looking for it last week soon after arriving home with my newly-purchased pocket dictionary. A first, I tried all the obvious places and came up empty. Sunday I made a second attempt which involved uncovering, opening, and partially unpacking all the book boxes in the study and some in the library as well. I was getting desperate when I took another look and uncovered two more boxes in the library I'd overlooked before; it was in the second one.

It's not a great book for self-instruction. Like my similarly-named college Korean text, it was a product of the direct-method era and emphasises repetition of sentence formulations to the point of tedium. (The vocabulary is deliberately minimised in order not to distract from the focus on morphosyntax.) Explanations are sparse and terse, but that should be moot once the comprehensive grammar I ordered online arrives in the next couple weeks. (My dictionary supposedly arrived last night but I forgot to check.)

As a supplement, I'm doing Duolingo, which at least makes the repetition moderately more bearable with a colourful interface. We'll see what, if anything, sticks. After all, I was enthusiastically doing the Turkish and Hungarian modules a year ago and I don't know that I could spontaneously construct a sentence in either language. That's not really my goal, of course; I just want to learn some words and get a better feel for the grammar of Hawai'ian and Polynesian languages generally.

A lot of elements are familiar. Like Welsh and Irish, it's VSO and copular constructions seem to work very similar to those of Irish, with the twist that Hawai'ian lacks a copulative particle. (The one in Irish is optional.) But it also seems strongly V2 as evidenced by the way negation works: The negative particle (ʻaʻole) comes first and is followed by the subject rather than the main verb. My biggest issue so far seems to be remembering the object marker i (also a preposition meaning "in") before direct objects.

One thing I'm looking forward to reading more about is the use of possessed nouns where English prefers verbs. So, for instance, makemake can be used not only verbally to mean "want" or "like" (e.g. Makemake au i ka hala kahiki "I want the pineapple") but also with a possessive pronoun (e.g. ʻO ka hala kahkiki koʻu makemake lit. "The pineapple, my desire", i.e. "The pineapple is what I want"). Again, it somewhat reminds me of verb-noun constructions in Welsh but I'd like to see a more thorough explanation of the usage.

Speaking of possession, this is one of the most intriguing and trickiest parts of Polynesian grammar. My textbooks simplistically describe them as having a distinction between "alienable" and "inalienable". As usual with natural languages, the facts on the ground are quite a bit more complex. Elbert doesn't even bother trying to describe them this way, though he shies away from throwing up his hands and just dividing all nouns into "a-class" and "o-class". Again, there are parallels in Irish (ag vs le) but the devil is always in the details.