Kamakawi Word of the Day

ia

• (pron.) you (2nd person singular pronoun)

A male neviki ei i ia ti iko ikavaka poke ilau’u ie nakanaka oi’i kipe. Ae ha’ale!
“I’ll lend you this book I read to my sister yesterday. It’s funny!”

Notes: Nothing much going on with the second person pronoun (the iku is like a mirrored image of ei), so I thought I’d include a complex sentence. What I wanted to do was include a sentence that required the use of the passive and the applicative in a relative clause, but I couldn’t think of a plausible way to make “book” an indirect object (talk about unimaginative!). This is pretty good, though.

Ia has a good-looking iku, in my opinion. It’d be a cool name for an iku necklace, but all it means is “you”. Oh well. That is what I end up calling my cat many times…

leya

• (n.) rock, stone

Ale ei i leya oala takepalaki.
“Because I’m a mean talking rock.”

Notes: Hee, hee… This is my favorite line from the LCC2 Relay.

So this is the iku I was talking about yesterday. It’s kind of a combination of le and ia which…I don’t have an entry for?! Holy smoke! Okay, that’s coming next. Anyone, it’s like a combo of those two without the overline. It’s clearly different from lea, though, so I don’t see why I needed the notch on lea… Oh well. As I said, I like the cut of its jib.

lea

• (pron.) he (3rd person singular masculine pronoun)

Ka hekala ei i lea ae noala ke ine oku!
“I told him to sing but he wouldn’t!”

Notes: Another day, another pronoun.

I’ve decided to include a bit of grammar in today’s post. The example sentence above makes use of an object control verb. In these constructions, the direct object of the verb (in this case hekala, “to tell”) is coreferent with the subject of the following clause, but is still an argument of the matrix verb. In the case of Kamakawi, the use of the subject status marker ae carries the object pronoun over as the new subject, so it’s not quite the same mechanism as English object control verbs, but it achieves the same function.

You’ll also notice that that second clause lacks a k-. The deal is that that activity (the singing, in this case) isn’t completed, therefore it doesn’t take k-, no matter when it did (or didn’t) take place. Though Kamakawi lacks a subjunctive, this, at least, is marked in some way.

That’s how object control verbs work in Kamakawi. Hooray!

Quick comment on the iku. I got no idea what’s going on here. I think what I thought is that I had used this shape before, and so I added a little notch to differentiate it. But now that I’m looking back, I’m pretty sure I haven’t used this precise shape before… The closest is the iku for leya, but even that one’s slightly different. Oh well. The notch is cool. I likes it.

fale

• (n.) grass
• (adj.) grassy, made of grass
• (v.) to be grassy or made of grass

Kopu’u fale tiu e’i o ei eyana.
“The grass feels good on my feet.”

Notes: If one accepts the grass for what it is, grass can feel quite good on bare feet.

That’s all. That’s my observation for the day.

This iku is formed from the iku for ta, “sand”. The little lineys up top are little blades (leaves?) of grass. It’s like grass set upon the sand—something that can happen; I’ve seen it! Personally, I think it was another excuse to use the glyph for ta, which I love. It’s well represented in the writing system of Kamakawi.

a’i

• (adj.) white
• (v.) to be white
• (v.) to be misty
• (n.) mist

Mata ei ie a’i o feya tou.
“I can see the white of the waves.”

Notes: Apropos of nothing, that sentence struck me as a good one, so there it is.

The word for “white” comes from the older word for “mist”, it being nice and white most of the time. I’d say both meanings are quite common.

Or, I would if I were saying such things.

But I’m not.

So what is there to say today…? It’s a nice ikunoala, this one. There’s not much from the a in there, but there’s enough to be recognizable.

Here’s the thing. There was something conlang-related that I wanted to report today, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. Grrr…

If I remember tomorrow, I’ll let you know.

ata

• (v.) to be dry
• (adj.) dry
• (n.) dryness

Hena kepo o ei a ata hoya o ei…
“My body’s numb and my throat is dry…”

Notes: Here it is: Probably the most popular song ever written about the Crimean War, coming in at number 2…

Number 2
“The Trooper”

Piece of Mind (1983)

“The Trooper” is an Iron Maiden classic: Dueling guitars, their characteristic “galloping” rhythm, a song about an obscure historical event also loosely based on a famous British poem… If one were to ask for a single song that epitomizes Iron Maiden, this is that song.

The lyrics draw inspiration from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. Bruce Dickinson will sometimes read portions of the poem before performing the song live (the part with the lines “Cannon to right of them / Cannon to left of them”). I think it also showcases their somewhat tangled relationship with war. Iron Maiden have a lot of songs about war (especially about famous historical battles), but, at the same time, they reject it (cf. “These Colours Don’t Run”, for example). During their songs, though, they revel in the content.

“The Trooper” is a good example. I was fortunate enough to see Iron Maiden live in San Diego, and, of course, they played “The Trooper” (I don’t think they can play a live show without playing it). At the beginning of the performance, Bruce Dickinson picks up this gigantic Union Jack flag and races to either side of the stage waving, and everyone cheers—including me—even though none of us are English. Furthermore, this song is about an English soldier who charges forth in the Battle of Balaclava and is killed. It’s a high-energy number, and sounds quite menacing, but what is being reported is an ultimately meaningless death and a folly (echoed in the lines “The bugle sounds; the charge begins / But on this battlefield no one winds”).

But to get into the spirit of the song is kind of like wearing a costume on Halloween. One adopts the attitude of the courageous soldier plunging on into certain death for a little while just to try it out. The goal, I think, is to try to imagine what it must have been like. It’s not glorifying a tragedy, but is an attempt at musical empathy. I think it’s quite effective.

Funny Kamakawi aside. I can never—ever—remember the right genitive pronoun to use; I have to look it up every single time. You’d think I’d eventually get it—or at least remember one of them consistently—but no: I just keep forgetting. I knew that bodies are inalienably possessed, and that that meant they took a particular genitive marker, but I couldn’t remember which one it was, even though it was the easiest (o). So it goes…

[Update: This is the funniest and most appalling thing I've seen in quite some time: A gentleman playing Iron Maiden's "The Trooper" by making farting noises with his hands. He calls himself a "manualist". It must be seen—and heard—to be believed.]

pika

• (n.) thunder
• (v.) for there to be thunder, to thunder
• (adj.) thunderous, like thunder

Li ioku pika ti’ia poiu…
“Take not thy thunder from us…”

Notes: But take away our pride… There is way too much to say about this, so let’s get right to it!

Number 3
“Revelations”

Piece of Mind (1983)

“Revelations” is a true heavy metal anthem. It begins (after a kind of prelude) with the recitation of a poem by the enigmatical G. K. Chesterton (good writer, despite all else), and then dives into a kind of symbolic Egyptian tale that encompasses all that’s epic. Years before Nirvana (and even the Pyxies [though several years after Black Sabbath, who invented the trick (and several centuries after Beethoven, who probably had the prior claim)]), this song moves from a slow, lilting tempo in the verse to a fast-paced solo, back to the slow verse, and then to the intro bit which is somewhere in between. It’s strong the whole way through, and has a great finish (“Bind all of us together / Ablaze with hope, and free / No storm or heavy weather / Will rock the boat, you’ll see”). I stood and saluted the first time I heard it. Truly one of their very best.

Now to the word of the day. As you may have guessed, something inspired me to coin this word. What, you might ask? Well, even though I’ve posted about him once before, here he is again!

Yes, Pikachu, that darling little thunder mouse, directly inspired the Kamakawi word for “thunder”. But choosing pika for the word for “thunder” led to no small amount of other coincidences.

You may have noticed that this iku is tagged as both an ikunoala and an ikuleyaka. In fact, when I went to make the image for this iku, I went to the section of my font where ikunoala are stored and couldn’t find it. Turns out it was in the ikuleyaka section, and that’s when I realized that this iku is kind of a “pun”, in the visual sense.

The overall body of the iku is, of course, the glyph for pi. The line down the middle, though, can either be the glyph for ka, or the “bad” line determinative. Evidently when I created the glyph, I was thinking first of the “bad” line determinative. It’s there to indicate the danger of thunder (in that it’s commonly associated with lightning, which can be dangerous [but, hey, thunder's loud, and it can kind of hurt your ears, if they're tender... Or if it's really loud, you might not hear someone say, "Don't step on that sea urchin!", and then you'd be in for it!]), but serves well as a reminder of the ka in the second half of the word.

If you look at this iku kind of slantwise, though, it kind of looks like a crouching Pikachu with a line going through him (and even another way of looking at it is to imagine the zigzags of pi being something like lightning zigzags. It kind of works!). That, as it turns out, is reminiscent of something from my life.

Back in 1999, all my friends became obsessed with this Nintendo game called Smash Bros. Whenever we got together, they would insist on playing it. This persisted when the sequel came out, and started up again in 2008 when the third one came out. They loved this game to death.

I, of course, hated it. No idea why. I like the characters, and like fighting games and competition in general (I was raised on Street Fighter and Bomberman). I’ve just never—ever—liked this game. I’ve never liked any incarnation of it, and still don’t. I’ve played it a lot, though. And, both as a matter of tradition and so I don’t have to learn any other character’s moves, I always choose the same character to play when I have to: Pikachu.

Pikachu basically has three moves (he has a fourth, but I could never do it right): He can stand at a distance and shoot little thunderbolts at people, which annoys the crunk out of them; he can teleport around, deftly avoiding attacks; and he can call down a lightning bolt on himself that hits anyone who touches it, and when he does so, he shouts out, “PIKA!” It actually kind of looks like the iku for pika, too!

So basically, whenever I play, I stand far, far away and shoot people until they get annoyed and come at me, at which point in time I start calling down lightning—and if they get too close, I dash away and hide.

Oh, but I forgot to mention the best part. If you play Pikachu, you can change his palette, and give him a series of darling little hats! Here’s the set for the 2008 game:

When I play that one, I usually go with the goggles, but my favorite was always the blue wizard hat, which you could use in the first or second game (the palette choices for the second game are shown below):

Pikachu may not be the strongest character, but he is, by far, the cutest. And, hey, if you look at it the right way, the iku for pika kind of looks like Pikachu wearing a little hat!

Use your imagination.

ua

• (phon.) glyph for the sequence ua
• (n.) hill

Takama iu ua…
“Run to the hills…”

Notes: Run for your lives! Here it is, Iron Maiden’s most famous song, coming in at number 4:

Number 4
“Run to the Hills”

The Number of the Beast (1982)

I mentioned earlier how I came to hear “Run to the Hills”. It was back when they still played heavy metal on the radio in Southern California (even if it was only a two hour show). What I neglected to mention was how thoroughly off my socks were knocked by the experience. (Ha! How’s that for a sentence? Maybe that’ll finally get me onto Language Log. Or do I have to change it to “knocks were socked” to make it interesting enough…?) “Run to the Hills” is a veritable sonic assault; it’s pure energy.

I’ll refrain from trying to capture the music of it in print. Allow me, though, to comment on the lyrics. The song is divided into two parts. The first part is a kind of lament by a Native American tribe (the Cree, according to the lyrics) about the devastation that Europeans have visited upon their lands and their people. This is followed up by a much faster section that’s the point of view of the Europeans. The Europeans, in this tale, are a rather rapacious and vicious bunch. They’re certainly not portrayed sympathetically.

And yet, the tempo is so lively, and the chorus so unbelievably catchy, that one can’t help but be swept up in it. The goal, I think, is to force the listener to adopt the point of view of the invaders, and to accept it, for the duration the song, in order ultimately to reject it. It’s a splendid musical example of what it’s like to be swept up in the hysteria of unbridled jingoism, to the point where lines like “Murder for freedom / A stab in the back” sound exciting. All in all, I’d say it’s a good meditation on the nature of exploitation.

There is a very definite reason that the iku for ua looks the way it does. Or at least I thought there was—for quite awhile, in fact. But now that I look at it, it simply cannot be an ikunoala. No way. It does kind of look like a hill, but why wouldn’t I have made it look more like a hill…? That’s what’s got me now.

Let’s say, for the time being, that it is a hill. What’s the line in there for…? I mean, if that were a mountain, maybe the line is telling you, “If it comes up to here, it’s a hill. If it goes beyond that, it’s a mountain.” I wish I could take a time machine back to when I came up with the whole system… I should have actually written down what I was doing. I always assume that I’ll know precisely what I was thinking by glancing at what I was doing. What I didn’t anticipate was how aging has frazzled my brain… I often feel like that old “this is your brain on drugs” commercial, even though I’ve never gone near the stuff.

ti’a

• (n.) time
• (v.) to take time, to last

Male ale ti’a li’ia ko!
“Your time will come!”

Notes: What a triumphant return this was! This is the refrain from a true classic:

Number 6
“The Wicker Man”

Brave New World (2000)

Wow. Now the release of this song was an event.

To give you some background, the first Iron Maiden album I bought was The X Factor, which came out in 1995. This was the first album with their third studio lead singer Blaze Bayley. Being a fan of metal, I had heard of Iron Maiden, and heard they were great, so I picked up this album and tried it out.

It was terrible.

The first song, “The Sign of the Cross”, had promise, but thereafter, the off-key caterwauling of Bayley and the uninspired song writing left me cold. I immediately wrote Iron Maiden off as a band that had aged and was no longer any good (and, perhaps, was never any good). It wasn’t until, by chance, I heard “Run to the Hills” on a metal show on a local radio station that I decided to give them another chance. I proceeded to get their earlier albums, and the rest was history.

The discovery that Iron Maiden was one of the best metal bands in history, however, made me sad, more than anything else, because I thought, “Wow. This band was so good, and I missed them!” Bruce Dickinson was gone, and the band was…well, writing songs like “Fortunes of War” (or “Como Estais Amigos”, for that matter).

Then came the year 2000. On the radio, I heard an advertisement for Iron Maiden playing a concert, which struck me as odd (why would a non-metal radio station be advertising a concert of a band that had lost its way so irrevocably?), until they played a brief snippet of the chorus of “The Wicker Man”: “Your time will come!”

That was Bruce Dickinson; it was unmistakable. But is this some song I hadn’t heard before—some B-side? I thought. Unlikely. But does that mean that—! And, sure enough, it was true: Bruce Dickinson was back. And…wow.

It wasn’t like a return to form. It was much more than that. “The Wicker Man” opens with a single guitar playing some riffs that sound faded, distant; a little unimpressive. And then at the end of the measure a second guitar comes in loud and forceful, and there’s no looking back from there. This song grabs you by the throat and reminds you why you listen to metal, and why it’s good to be alive. And the best thing is that the rest of the album is fantastic. Iron Maiden didn’t reunite to get more money, or to produce some songs that sounded like the old ones, but to take the band to new heights undreamt of prior. This wasn’t a new Iron Maiden album, but a new classic. After a terrible hiatus, they came back and produced some of the best songs they’ve ever recorded, and this is the best of the bunch.

And, just to further illustrate how everything’s coming on back, I got the chance to see Iron Maiden (with Bruce Dickinson) a few years back in San Diego. Now I just need to see David Bowie and I’ll be set!

The iku for ti’a is very close to the original iku for ha; there’s just an added line. You can kind of see the ti in there, but its presence is barely noticeable. The result, though, is pretty cool, I think.

I’ve always been uncomfortable coining words for “time” in conlangs. They demand a lot of attention; a lot of thought. I think that’s why this word’s definition hasn’t been elaborated very much. The word should bespeak a system, or at least bring a long with it a host of other words. These words will help to shape the culture in important ways. Words for time, and related concepts, can’t be coined lightly. I think it’s for that reason that I always leave them until last, and spend so much time avoiding them. (For example, I haven’t even touched time in Dothraki.) Some day I’ll work it all out.

olomo

• (v.) to walk
• (n.) walker
• (n.) walk
• (adj.) walking

Olomo iu paleumi…
“Walking through the city…”

Notes: A decidedly bizarre song, but still one of Iron Maiden’s best. Here at number 8 we have…

Number 8
“Prowler”

Iron Maiden (1980)

So if you click that link and listen to this song, you might find yourself thinking, “Is this song about a…flasher?” If so, you would be right. It is, indeed, a song about a creepy flasher. It doesn’t seem like a very metal subject for a song, yet the song itself is a short, simple sonic attack. This is the first song on Iron Maiden’s first album, and it effectively announces them to the world.

Also, I should make it clear that when I select this song at number eight, it’s the song I’m selecting, not necessarily the performance I linked to up there. Iron Maiden’s first two albums featured their original lead singer, Paul Di’Anno, and while he’s…good, he’s no Bruce Dickinson. In 1988, Iron Maiden rerecorded the song “Prowler” with Bruce Dickinson on vocals to serve as a B-side for their single “The Evil That Men Do”, calling it “Prowler ’88″. That’s actually the first version of the song I heard, and it is incredible. They capture that hollow, street-side feel, and Bruce Dickinson’s vocals are a fivefold improvement over the original.

Speaking of the lyrics and this word, I’m not quite sure what the subject of the first line is supposed to be. The lyrics go “Walking through the city / Looking oh so pretty / I just got to find my way”. I think from context, one can assume that the subject must be some woman, but upon listening to it, I always assumed it referred to the narrator. I’ve left it without a pronoun in the Kamakawi translation, but the sentence looks naked… Perhaps that was their intent. (That is, back in 1980 they foresaw my birth and the creation of Kamakawi, and they crafted these lyrics to make their Kamakawi translation suggestive.)

The iku for olomo is the little man you see in words like hopoko with the “ground” determinative beneath him (it’s like he’s walking! ). I think it’s a nice word for “walk” (extended, it kind of rolls along).

Speaking of conlanging, on the Conlang List we were recently talking about (for the second time in nine years!) path and manner language (or satellite-framed and verb-framed languages). Most languages feature a bit of both, but you can basically categorize natural languages as one or the other. English, for example, is a satellite-framed language. In English, you can say things like the following:

• I walked into the room.
• I slumped into the room.
• I trudged into the room.
• I tripped into the room.
• I fell into the room.
• I ran into the room.

And so forth. You can do pretty much anything you want, and the thing that indicates that one entered the room is the preposition “into”. That is, it’s a satellite element that indicates motion from one thing to another, and the verb indicates the manner (how it was done). You can also do it the other way (e.g. “I entered the run running”), but it’s less English-like to do so. In Spanish, on the other hand, that’s the only way you can do it (for the most part). In Spanish, the motion must be indicated on the verb, and the manner is indicated with a gerund (if at all).

One might wonder, then, what type of a language is Kamakawi? Turns out, it’s both. However, unlike Esperanto, which is kind of a train wreck, there’s an explanation for why Kamakawi is the way it is—and this example sentence is a nice illustration.

In Kamakawi, all prepositions (save one) were originally verbs. In addition, all verbs were originally intransitive. The transitive construction one sees today is a result of a serial verb construction. So in old Kamakawi there would be something like this:

Ka hava ei ka i kolata.
/PAST eat 1SG PAST exist pineapple/
“I ate and it was the pineapple (that I ate).”

In the past, there was a kind of implicature that strung transitive clauses together (and it’s what led to the development of the subject status markers), and that led to the development of transitive verbs with the former verb i becoming an object marker. That reanalysis stopped at the level of the transitive verb, though, so the serial construction persists in ditransitive clauses.

Now let’s jump to the creation of prepositions. Originally, prepositions were simply verbs—and they still are, in fact (Ae ei ie pale, “I’m in the house”, where ae is a verb meaning “to be inside”). This meant that old Kamakawi was a verb-framed language, e.g.:

A iu ei a i puka.
/PRES go.through 1SG PRES exist door/
“I go through and it is the door (that I go through).”

Of course, you could also have what, I think, are rather standard serial constructions like the following:

A olomo ei a iu ei a i puka.
/PRES walk 1SG PRES go.through 1SG PRES exist door/
“I walk and I go through and it is the door (that I go through).”

With the development of the subject status system (and the solidification of i as an object marker), though, that could be simplified as follows:

A olomo ei e iu i puka.
/NEW.SBJ walk 1SG SAME.SBJ go.through OBJ door/
“I walk and go through the door.”

We’ll call this Middle Kamakawi. Then, though, the same reanalysis that applied to the existential verb i applied to the other locational verbs, and you get the modern phrasing:

A olomo ei iu ie puka.
/NEW.SBJ walk 1SG go.through OBJ.DEF door/
“I go through the door.”

Thus, Kamakawi adopted a satellite-framed system while retaining its initial verb-framed system, and the two coexist quite happily.

Well, that turned into a nice little mini-historical overview! Fun. Up next, one of my favorite Iron Maiden songs (just like the previous three, and the six that follow tomorrow’s).