Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say on a bright Hawaiian Christmas Day. Thus spake Bing Crosby
and a whole load of artists who covered his song.
It's not that Hawaiian has a completely different word for Christmas -- it's just that Kalikimaka
is the closest that Hawaiian can possibly get to the word Christmas.
You see, Christmas is a very English word. It's actually from Old English. Cristes mæsse,
the festival or mass of Christ. But the Hawaiian language, along with a lot of Polynesian languages,
uses only a few consonants and has much more restrictive phonotactic rules. Phonotactics
are the way that languages put sounds together -- so, nought, sought, wrought, and bought
are all possible English words... but ngought isn't. You can end an English word with ng
- ring, sing, thinking... but you can't start one. It's not allowed. It sounds non-English.
English speakers stumble over words from languages with less restrictive phonotactic rules, so
we convert them to be easier to say. It's the bane of anyone whose surname is Nguwen.
Which I've probably still mispronounced. Hawaiian does the same. So how does Merry Christmas
become Mele Kalikimaka?
Well, like this. First of all, Hawaiian doesn't allow more than one consonant together. No
Kr or sm. So Christmas becomes Karisimas. The T has vanished, because, let's be honest
here, when was the last time you said ChrisTmas? Now, every time there's a consonant, there
must be a vowel after it. So, Karisimasa. This is what gives Polynesian languages their
distinct sound -- and it's why the Hawaiian state fish is the wonderfully-named humuhumunukunukuapua'a.
Hawaiian has a much smaller alphabet too. It only has eight consonants. That last one,
by the way, is the glottal stop -- that's the ? sound that English speakers make in
the middle of uh-oh, or bu?on.
You'll notice that there's no R in there. In Hawaiian, /r/ and /l/ are interchangeable
-- actually, they're the same sound -- and they're written as L. So now we have Meli
Kalisimasa. There's no /s/ either - the closest sound is /k/, so switch those over, and there
we go: Mele Kalikimaka.
Every language has complicated phonotactic rules. Hardly anyone who speaks them knows
what they are, but all understand them intuitively if they grew up with that language. And if
want to see what happens when someone really plays about with this, check out Skwerl by
Karl Eccleston and Brian Fairbairn. It's cleppy ancretest and leery setmes ha your ped.
Goobilt!
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