Unlike ‘l’ and ‘r’, those two sounds don’t seem to have much in common (you wouldn’t generally mistake one for the other in a dark alley). Why does ‘s’ become a ‘k’? From an Indo-European viewpoint this seems fairly inexplicable. Leaving aside the extra syllables (which is mostly due to the Hawaiian’s syllable structure and its phonotactics), we come to a bit of a baffling mystery. In other languages, such as Japanese, ‘r’ and ‘l’ are conflated, so that speakers don’t recognize a meaningful difference if ‘ me ri ku risumasu‘ (‘Merry Christmas’) is pronounced ‘me li ku lisumasu’ (even if they can detect a sound or accent difference).īut, more intriguingly, what about the second word in the phrase- kalikimaka? Looking at both words side by side, we can see a couple of unusual sound changes emerging that don’t seem to make sense. In English they happen to be phonemes, which means the sounds are used meaningfully to distinguish between different words, such as ‘ lad‘ and ‘ rad‘. It makes sense, as ‘l’ and ‘r’ are strongly related sounds. In the change from ‘merry’ to ‘mele’, the ‘r’ sound is replaced with ‘l’. This Language Log post sums it up nicely. So how did “Merry Christmas”, a familiar expression for most of us, enter Hawaiian as “Mele Kalikimaka” and just what linguistic curiosities does this reveal? It also demonstrates one of my favorite facts about Hawaiian and its special status among the languages of the world. Made famous in 1950 by Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters, “Mele Kalikimaka” is indeed how the phrase “Merry Christmas” was borrowed into Hawaiian.
0 kommentar(er)
