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Go makai

Where sea meets sky,

and Tom Winnett came up with:

Mauka is toward the MAUntains.

However, I use the terms left, right, north, south, east, and west. I don’t often use mauka and makai in this book, although I find myself increasingly thinking in those terms!

Do your best, with respect

Approach the language with respect, and give it your best shot. Then be prepared to hear local people pronounce it differently. Learn from them. Maybe it’s part of our jobs as visitors to inadvertently provide a little comic relief for those living and working here as opposed to just vacationing here.

Instant Hawaiian (see ssss1) is a useful booklet that’s a lot less frivolous than its title implies. It begins, “So you’d like to learn to speak Hawaiian—you should live so long!” I felt I’d come to the right place. Look for it when you get to Kauai.

ssss1Remember that Hawaiian evolved as a spoken, not a written, language. Authentic written Hawaiian uses two special marks to indicate other variations on pronouncing vowels in spoken Hawaiian. Those variations change the meaning of a word. One is the glottal stop, indicated by a single quotation mark (‘). It indicates that you should make a complete break in your voice before sounding the vowel that follows it. There really isn’t an English equivalent, though the break in “uh-oh!” is close. Another is the macron mark, which is a straight line over a vowel. It indicates that you should pronounce a vowel as a long sound instead of a short sound. For example, the Hawaiian long-a sound is “ah,” and the Hawaiian short-a sound is “uh.” We have the same sounds in English but don’t use special marks to distinguish between them except in dictionaries. Road signs, topographic maps, and this book don’t use glottal stops or macron marks.