Hawaiian Rhythms

        Holualoa. Kamehameha. Aloha kakahiaka. Mahimahi. Ukulele, which isn't pronounced "yook-a-LAY-lee,' but "oo-koo-LEH-leh."

        The paucity of consonants and preponderance of vowels in the Hawaiian alphabet—seven consonants (h,k,l,m,n,p,w), the usual five vowels—force a syllabic repetition that falls on the ear like the rhythms of the Hawaiian landscape—the endless drum of surf, the incessant warble of birds, palm trees curling and uncurling in the wind. The swirl of syllables is as constant and repetitious as the tunnels of waves surfers ride, as the endless summer of Hawaiian weather. Like hula dancing, like ukulele music, the language partakes of the landscape in Lotus-land repetitions, beautiful rhythms of words that croon a spell of Hawaii.

        Forbidden by Hawaii's conquerors and missionaries to be spoken, the language survived in hula dancing, which, according to internet research, depended more on the chant that accompanied it than it did on the movements of hips and hands. Chanting the words kept them alive. Now there are Hawaiian immersion schools, at least for the first three years, and although only one person I asked (and I asked a lot of people) knew any Hawaiian, and although she said she only knew a little, I found the language everywhere.

        Place names and road names were inevitably Hawaiian. "Henry Street" sounded like a foreign language. Reading signs everywhere I went, I practiced the sounds of the language, working out its rules: Pronounce every letter. Make a glottal stop at an apostrophe. Extend the sound of a vowel with a macron (long mark) over it. Accent the penultimate syllable. There are never any consonant clusters, though there are vowel clusters galore: "kamamaina" (native-born), "aloha'auinala" (good afternoon).

        The repetition of syllables makes the words difficult to remember. Was the word for children "keiki" or "kieki"? Was the word for help "kokua" or "kukoa"? I was caught in a whirlwind of syllables, always a vowel at the end of a word, always a vowel following a consonant, but which vowel in which syllable? Seeing a word in its component parts made it easily pronounceable: see "Kamamaina" as "kamama" (accent on the penultimate syllable), followed by "eena": kamamaina. The famous humuhumunukunuku'apua'a (trigger fish) looks intimidating, but following the rhythms smooths it into pronounceability:  humu, humu, nuku, nuku, a pua'a (remembering always to accent the next to the last syllable and to mimic waves). Rolling it over your tongue, you feel the rhythms of the deep in which the fish swims.

        When I stepped off the plane into the open-air (roof but no walls) airport of Kona, I heard my first two Hawaiian words: the ubiquitous "aloha" and then "mahalo," "thank you," at the end of the usual airport announcement about gate and boarding. The other Hawaiian phrases I had learned were never needed, though I did call Mike my ku'uipo (sweetheart) while we were there. I never found the opportunity to tell his grandchildren that they could call him "kuku pane" (grandfather), which is a pity because I think any child would love the chance to call an adult "kuku pane." It was useless to have learned "O wai kou inoa" (What's your name?), as I did for one item of my 75x75 project (see post on January 24, 2019), but learning to count to 75 (100, really) in Hawaiian enabled me to mumble house numbers as I walked down a street. That was as useful as it got.

        Although I never heard any more Hawaiian than "aloha" and "mahalo," I saw a lot of Hawaiian. Besides street signs and place names, I occasionally found long paragraphs written in Hawaiian, as on a large mural at a shopping center. In that way I learned that "aloha" means "love" as well as "hello" and that "aloa" means "sacred," and "pa'aloa" "very sacred," along with other scattered phrases and words.

      Finally, at the Tropical Botanical Gardens gift shop, near Hilo, I found a Hawaiian phrase book. I bought it, even though I was leaving Hawaii the next day, so I could keep the language at my fingertips and, to some extent, on my tongue. Therefore I know that, at this moment of writing this blog post, on this particular auinala (afternoon) at my hale (house), there is uila and hekili (lightning and thunder) outside, though it's just an iki 'ino'ino (a small storm) with some kauanoe (misty rain). Speaking the words takes me back to Hawaii, to its endless surfs and winds, its repetitions of waves and flowing scents, its cooing doves, chirping tree frogs, and endlessly swimming, brilliantly colored tropical fish.