Here's a sign I saw in Waimānalo the other day -- the bay just south of Kailua.
Here's a more or less literal translation of the words in all caps:
- Ke = The
- Kula = (I'll come back to this)
- Nui = Big
- O = Of
- Waimānalo = Waimānalo
Care to guess what the word "Kula" means? If you guessed "School" you guessed right! Kula is not even a native Hawaiian word. It's a loan word from the English "school." Here's what's happening:
Hawaiian only contains the following vowels: h, k, l, m, n, p, w, and the 'okina, which is a glottal stop (as in "Oh-oh"). In addition, every syllable in Hawaiian must end in a vowel. So when we take "school," here's the result:
- The initial "s" is dropped.
- We're left with the sound "kul."
- Finally we add an "a" on the end of the word in keeping with the rule about syllable endings.
In Latin, the word for "school" is schola. This comes from the Greek word scholē, which means something like "spare time, leisure, rest, that in which leisure is employed (as in learning)." Care to compare this with other Indo-European languages?
- eskola (Basque)
- escola (Catelan)
- skole (Danish)
- school (Dutch)
- escola (Galician)
- Schule (German)
- scuola (Italian)
- skole (Norwegian)
- escola (Portugues)
- escuela (Spanish)
- skola (Swedish)
Other loanwords in Hawaiian from English include:
- elepani (elephant)
- enemi (enemy)
- hapa (half)
- hē (hay)
- kala (collar)
- kehena (Gehenna)
- kope (coffee)
- liona (lion)
- paina (pine)
- pepa (pepper)
- puke (book)
- waina (wine)
Languages are so cool! 😉