Kamakawi Word of the Day

futi

• (n.) ilex (succulent vine with white flowers)

…tiu ape o futi.
“…with boughs of holly”

Notes: Well, not quite, but holly is a type of ilex, and it does seem to be the season… So here’s a picture!

I have a very particular vine in mind, though. It suits the climate, I think.

fau

• (n.) petrified tree

Ipe i fau.
“That’s a petrified tree.”

Notes: Okay, I know there must be some reason this word exists. I remember I really liked the idea for the iku, but it couldn’t have just been that. I must’ve come across it in a dictionary somewhere… Either that or I was reading up on petrified trees—something. I know I wouldn’t have made a basic term for “petrified tree”—and an ikuiku to boot—without some very clear, very real excuse.

That’s my excuse. For the time being.

fa’e

• (v.) to boil
• (adj.) boiling

A fa’e lelea.
“The water is boiling.”

Notes: Today’s iku may look familiar. It’s the iku for mate turned on its head.

Oh, shoot, wait a minute… Actually, maybe it’s the iku for novu with steam rising off the top, and mate is the iku for fa’e turned on its head. Darn!

I guess it kind of depends what order these glyphs were created in. Surely the word for “boil” would precede the word for “soup”, because you couldn’t have the latter without the former. Or could you…? Oh, but wait a minute: that’s not at issue. The iku for novu (“soup”) certainly preceded the iku for fa’e, whether or not the words were coined in that order. What’s at issue is the order of fa’e and mate (“pour”). Seems to me the latter word would come about first, but that doesn’t mean the iku would’ve come first… I’m going to go out on a limb and say that fa’e came first, and mate is fa’e turned on its head.

So, yes. Revise what I said above. Revise, I say!

fotu

• (n.) husband (formal term)

Ea, ipe i fotu oi’i.
“Yes, that’s my husband.”

Notes: Pretty sure I’ve heard my wife say that once or twice.

Today’s word is a counterpart to yesterday’s word tuli, which means “wife”. The common word for “husband” is hopoko, the word for “man”. This one only shows up in formal situations (or when one is mad with the other).

The iku for fotu is based on the iku for hopoko, but it has a line above it like the iku for ei, which means “I”. That line used to have more of a function in the olden days; now it shows up in just a few iku. This is one of them.

fatoi

• (n.) bulbul

Mata ei i fatoi!
“I see a bulbul!”

Notes: I came across the word fatoi today while looking through my dictionary, and looked at the definition and thought, “What the heck is a bulbul…?” Then I looked at the spelling (the Kamakawi spelling, that is) and realized, “Well, it’s some kind of bird.” Heh. Pretty cool! While there are, of course, obvious drawbacks to learning a writing system with over 600 characters, this is one of the happy benefits.

For more information about the bulbul bird, go to its Wikipedia entry here. It seems like a spunky little bird. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen one, but if I do, I’ll be sure to make a note of it and see if I can snap a picture.

fe’a’u

• (v.) to be known

Fe’a’u amo!
“It is known!”

Notes: Okay, so I may have cheated with this word, but I wanted to give a shout out to Bryce Homick, who put together an authentic Halloween costume of Khal Drogo from scratch! It’s quite impressive! To take a look at this handiwork, check out today’s Dothraki post.

But regarding passives, there are some theories of syntax which hold that—necessarily!—passive versions of active verbs must be listed separately in the lexicon. That’s just crazy! The relationship between a passive and active version of a verb is so systematic, and so rarely produces actual different lexemes, that treating them like different lexemes is, to me, indicative of a failing in the theory, and not very illuminating about language. But that’s just what I think.

futa

• (n.) knee, elbow
• (n.) a hard knot on a tree or log

Au pama futa o ia ima!
“Your elbows are hard!”

Notes: In Kamakawi, there’s one word for either your elbow or your knee (or an elbow or knee). The two things are basically the same: It’s a hard piece of bone that sticks out at a limb joint. And if you get kneed or elbowed in the face, it doesn’t really matter which you got hit by: it hurts!

The iku is the reversed version of ti, and was chosen because the darn thing really looks like a knee or elbow (in fact, the original ti is a stylized version of an arm).

foka

• (n.) fish (or any animal that lives primarily in the sea)

I ilea! Ai foka toi li’ia ai?
“Hello! Got any fish on you?”

Notes: HAPPY CATURDAY!!!

This is my second time around writing this post, thanks to the DreamHost outage yesterday (IT ATE MAH POST!11!!). Here’s Keli, twisting up the way she does when she wants to get comfy:

As I explained yesterday, I believe Keli now knows when she’s being photographed, and relishes it. The second I unbutton my little iPhone camera case, she perks up—will wake up if she was previously asleep, even (I can’t get pictures of her asleep anymore!). And then she poses and looks straight at the camera. What a cat!

Today’s word was inspired by the Spanish word “marisco”. We often see it pluralized (“mariscos”), where it means “seafood”. I liked the idea of having a single word refer to everything that comes out of the sea. The difference with foka is that it doesn’t refer primarily to food the way “mariscos” and certainly “seafood” does.

fie

• (n.) albacore tuna (or just tuna)

A kaneko i oi’i poe havava i fie.
“I have a cat who likes tuna.”

Notes: I do! And yet, she only likes fish, it would seem, in the form of treats. Give her actual fish—in a bowl—and she’ll give it a sniff and then turn her nose away. What a cat she is…

This is actually one of my favorite glyphs, and i completely forgot about it. All it is is fi rotated 180°, but in rotating it, it reveals a “V” shape that’s reminiscent of e, turning it into a kind of ikunoala. I thought it was pretty clever. As for the fish, I like it; it’s pretty good. Not my favorite, but I dig it.

fuli

• (n.) wart
• (n.) bump, knot

Awei, Taniela Tamata! Ia i fuli!
“Argh, Daniel Thomas! You’re a wart!”

Notes: Though, really, it’s Matt Moore’s fault. If Chad Henne were at QB, the Dolphins would’ve used Thomas, dagnabbit…

Hey, yesterday I did the word fela and talked about jazz and I didn’t make one mention of Fela Kuti. Yikes! Wel, hopefully this rectifies that.

Today’s word fuli might give a chuckle to fans of anime. It was inspired by the anime miniseries FLCL, in which (among other things) the young protagonist gets what he thinks is a massive bump on the head which turns into a gigantic robot. It’s a great series (and now streaming on Netflix!), and if you get the chance, I urge you to give it a shot.

And here’s more fun. The series is usually pronounced (and sometimes spelled) Fuli Culi. If you take a gander at the names section, you’ll see a common nickname strategy for disyllabic names is to reduplicate the whole name, replacing the first consonant (if present) with k. If fuli were a name, then, the k-reduplication form would be: Fulikuli.

Other than that, the iku is a straightforward ikunoala. It’s word enough to be used.