hawaiian

Nouns

Pronouns

Possessive Pronouns

Adjectives

Adjectives follow the noun.

Articles and Determiners (Kaʻi)

Articles

he

a/an

ka/ke

the. One general rule for determining if ka or ke is used is by the word ke ao:the cloud. Words beginning with k, e, a, or o will most often pair with ke. There are some exceptions, such as ke ʻeke:the bag, which begins with an ʻokina, but is paired with ke.KLʻO ep1

kekahi

another.ʻŌO 0603V

ʻo

vocative marker, proceeds a person or a place.

Determiners

There are three determiners in Hawaiian.ʻŌO 0608V These are used in the pepeke ʻAike He, below.

1. kēia - this
2. kēlā - that far from me/us
3. kēnā - that near to you

Pepeke (Sentence Structures)

Pepeke are different sentence structures found in Hawaiian. Rather than try to match the structure with broader linguistic terms, they are taught in relations to the parts of aheʻe:octopus.ʻŌO 0800V

Thus, a pepeke has 3 parts: poʻo:head, piko:center, and ʻawe:tentacles. Each sentence structure below serves a different purpose and fits different parts of speech into each part of the pepeke.

Pepeke Painu (Descriptive Sentences)

This form is used for simple "X is Y" sentences.

For example, the poi is delicious.

Pepeke ʻAike He (Indicating a thing)

This form is used for "This/That is X" when X is not a person or a place.

For example, this is a man.

Pepeke ʻAike ʻO (Indicating a person or place)

This form is used for "This/That is X" when X is a person or a place.

For example, this is Lani.

Pepeke Henua (When or where something is)

When this form is used as a question, one may see the piko and ʻawe switch places.

This form could be broadly thought of as the "at" form, e.g "where you at?" or "when is it at?"

When used as a question when/where as listed in the ʻawe will be either āhea:when or i/ma hea:where. When it is a statement, ex. I am here, I and ma, without hea can be used interchangeably.KLʻO ep5

For example, Mokulēʻia is in Waiālua.

The ʻokina

It is important to note that the character that appears to be an apostrophe ' or ʼ is in fact a letter ʻ, called the ʻokina. It looks more like a raised, tiny number 6, and in fact, in the Unicode standard, is called a "modifier letter turned comma".

The ʻokina represents a glottal stop, most often heard in English as the "stop" between uh and oh in uh-oh.

Bibliography

• Ka Leo ʻOiwi, ʻOiwi TV, 2013.
• ʻŌlelo Online

Last Updated: 2020-05-02 17:32:39