Talk:'ōlelo Hawai'i
From Wikipedia
Aloha kaua, e Tauleonui,
- Whatever you do, do not stop working on the Hawaiian language Wikipedia. You are doing a great job so far, and my comments here are only meant to help you. Please, do not stop your work after reading my constructive criticism.
I corrected the grammar from your Hawaiian language article, though I haven’t edited any of the information. First, I’ll talk about grammar. I edited the phrase under the picture of the wa‘a kaulua to say “He wa‘a taulua e ho‘okele akula,” removing “ana” because ‘ana’ and ‘Dir-la” cannot occur together, and the edit that I made produces a pattern showing greater distance in time and/or space, which I thought was appropriate for the picture. La/ala/nei/ana/ai occupy the same position in the sentence and cannot happen together. I changed “kele” to “ho‘okele” because kele actually means ‘able to be reached by sailing,’ not ‘to sail.’ I changed most of the situation emphatic sentences because they emphasize something other than what the flow of the article showed me that you were trying to get across. I changed most the occurrences of “leo” to “‘olelo” because I felt that “leo” was being overused. You also use the phrase “wale no” to mean “singular/ the only one,” such as in the sentence “Ma ia Kulanui no ho'i ka polokalamu wale nō ma 'Amelika hui pū 'ia no tetahi 'ōlelo maoli,” which actually means “At this college there is something which is nothing more than a mere program which is for an indigenous language in the United States of America.” For class-inclusion sentences you write “O_____he_____,” which is closer to English than the usual class-inclusion sentence. I find that it is okay to use that kind of sentence when you want to place the emphasis on something, but I would write it "O______ , he _____ no ia." Still, this kind of sentence pattern should not become too much of a habit, since it makes less common patterns more widespread than necessary.
All in all, the grammatical mistakes were minor, nothing to worry about. However, I noticed that you use ‘T’ a lot in the Hawaiian language Wikipedia, which is fine, if you actually speak a dialect that uses the ‘T.’ It has come to my attention that a few beginning Hawaiian students are using ‘T’ and ‘R’ in their speech and writing to try and make themselves sound special. However, what this really does is dilute the language and spread misinformation. No serious Hawaiian language speaker would do this.
Also, I disagree that the Hawaiian language decline resulted because the missionaries told the older generation to refrain from speaking Hawaiian. The drop in the number of people who could speak Hawaiian resulted from several other factors. For more information, please look at the Hawaiian language article in the English Wikipedia written by AgentX.
I have some gripes about using the word “kūkahekahe” for “discussion,” since the word actually means to chill out and talk story, not to engage in serious discussion as kūkākūkā would be used.
- Again, do not stop what you are doing here after reading my criticism. Keep learning Hawaiian and keep writing. You are doing a great job, and have undertaken a tremendous task. I admire that very much. Keep up the good work.
