Kamakawi Word of the Day

or

tavatava

• (n.) a bunch of bananas

Hava ei i tavatava a.
“I’m eating a bunch of bananas.”

Notes: Hooray for backposting again!

So “yesterday” was just the one banana, and today’s the bunch. It’s a full reduplication, and so you generally write it by doubling the glyphs, but since the iku itself looks like a bunch of bananas, you can just user the basic line determinative to mean “a bunch of bananas”. I don’t know if I can guess which is more common… Probably the latter with the determinative.

Hey, I’m caught up! Now time to do today’s word of the day. I wonder what it will be (and if it will somehow be related to bananas…).

Tags: culture, food, land, natural, plants

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2011 at 12:00 am and is filed under Dictionary, Hikuiku, T. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.