Speaking English
In English, the spelling of a word confers its meaning. You can slightly mispronounce words and your audience will still understand you.
For instance, the word apple. Whether you say apple or lengthen the vowel sound and say a-a-pple, people may look at you funny, but they will understand that you mean the red crunchy fruit.
Why Speaking Hawaiian is Different
In Hawaiian, the vowel length or the stress placed on a vowel will change the meaning of a word completely.
In the Hawaiian language, words have short and long vowel sounds. Long vowels are held for a longer duration when speaking. To indicate a long vowel when writing, the letter is marked with a kahakō – a horizontal line over that vowel.
Stress can also be placed on a vowel when speaking. This is marked by a ʻokina before the vowel. An ʻokina is this symbol→ ʻ ←it looks like an apostrophe flipped around.
The distinction between long and short vowels or the stress put on a vowel is crucial in understanding and speaking Hawaiian correctly.
Dad or Surfboard
Consider the Hawaiian word papa. Pronounced with short vowels, the word can mean a board, for instance a surfboard. But pāpā pronounced with long vowels, can mean dad. The only difference in speaking is the length of time you hold the vowel.
Or how about the word kou. If pronounced as spelled without stressing the letter u, it can mean your. If you pronounce the word koʻu, stressing the letter u, the word can mean my.
Mispronouncing just those two words could mean your surfboard (kou papa) or my dad (koʻu pāpā). That’s a big difference in meaning.
Now imagine if you mispronounce an entire sentence or paragraph. You don’t just sound funny, you are unintelligible.
Be Accurate When Pronouncing Hawaiian Vowels
When you learn a Hawaiian word, pay particular attention to the subtleties of its pronunciation …so you don’t end up with someone else’s surfboard instead of your dad.
When writing in Hawaiian, I try my best to use the correct diacritical marks to convey the accurate meaning. But in this digital age it has been tricky.
When writing online or on a digital device, many fonts don’t have a proper kahakō or ʻokina. And many more fonts will mis-render them altogether, sometimes making them appear as weird squiggly lines or odd ascii shapes.
If you see that I have used a kahakō or ʻokina for a particular word on one page but not the same word on another page, it's most often just a typo on my part. Occasionally, it's also what happens when I try to use different fonts across many pages. Either way, I apologize in advance.
Also, most of the overall writing on this blog is in the English language and trying to inject hua ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian words) within English sentences are a conundrum.
As a grammatical compromise, I have tried to use the Hawaiian alphabet within Hawaiian spellings and the English alphabet within English spellings.
For instance the word Hawaiʻi. Most of the time, spelling it using the Hawaiian alphabet and utilizing the ʻokina is great. But attempting to make that word possessive is a problem in an English grammar sentence. In those special cases, I remove the ʻokina and just spell it with the English alphabet: Hawaii's. So confusing, yeah?!
Anyway, if you're kamaʻāina, you're smart enough to figure out what I'm trying to say.