Kamakawi Word of the Day

awi

• (n.) fur (or animal hair)
• (adj.) furry
• (v.) to be furry

Ai ivi awi o ei i ia ai?
“Does my fur amuse you?”

Notes: HAPPY CATURDAY!!!

Every so often I’ll be upstairs, and Erin will call up to me to “take a look at our cat”. Whenever I do so, she’s always in some amusing or cute position. On this day, she was lounging on top of one of our chairs, happy as a cat:

Hey, this is another one of those words that uses the mysterious glyph au. It does its job.

So for those keeping track, both teams that I predicted would get to the World Series this year have been eliminated. So…yeah. The lesson here is not to put money on my baseball picks.

hoya

• (n.) throat

He ha’ala’i ue ea ima, he hoya!
“We must coexist, throat!”

Notes: Erin came home sick today (sore throat, etc.). I felt fine. Now, though, my throat is starting to feel a little…funny. I know what it has in mind, and I want no part of it. None of that nonsense! I haven’t been sick in ages (I can probably go back and find the last entry where I was sick. I haven’t been sick yet this year!).

No matter, though. I have important stuff to do. I will fight this off and will be no worse for the wear; just you wait. We shall coexist, throat! Mark my words—and fear my wrath!

olu

• (adj.) wide
• (v.) to be wide
• (n.) width
• (v.) to be open (said of mouths, eyes and similar things)
• (adj.) open

Témepa, olu lau o lea.
“Temba, his arms wide.”

Notes: That quote is from the famous (or infamous) Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok”, where the alien Tamarians have a language that they apparently refuse to use—or understand. A truly puzzling one to think about as a language enthusiast.

Today’s iku is, I think, the real base for fala, the Kamakawi word for “father”, as opposed to opu, the Kamakawi word for “flea”. This one’s a true ikunoala (a straightforward blend of o and lu), and fala is the same glyphed simply flipped around.

And, of course, it’d make sense (perhaps?) for there to be a word for “father” before a word for “flea”, so it seems likelier that the glyph for fala had a notch added to it to produce opu, rather than the notch having been removed from opu to produce fala.

So, yes. I’m glad to have that figured out. On to the next mystery…

hu’u

• (n.) heart
• (v.) to beat, to throb, to sound regularly
• (v.) to pulsate
• (adj.) great, big, huge, important, significant
• (suf.) chief, important, central

Tomi’u amo ti hu’u.
“It’s called a heart.”

Notes: The quote above is the title of a song by Depeche Mode, and, every so often, it’s fun to listen to a little Depeche Mode.

Well, the symposium is all finished. It was a terrific event! Concordia is a nice college with an active student body, and I met a host of wonderful people (also am coming home with a ton of movie recommendations). I’ve also experienced the very beginning of the cold weather here in Minnesota/North Dakota. I can only imagine what it must be like here in January. Glad I’m going back home to the Pacific Ocean when I am! But what a treat this was. I feel privileged to have been a part of it.

ObKamakawi, there’s a lot of crossover between Dothraki and Kamakawi (which is not something one would expect, I suppose). I can’t remember when, but some time ago I came up with the idea of turning hu’u, “heart”, into a suffix, and it attaches to a whole bunch of things to pick out, say, the leader of a group, or the most important part of a set (we saw one example yesterday). I really liked the idea, and so I borrowed it over into Dothraki, using qoy, “blood”, in place of “heart” (and the form itself, of course, was recommended to me by “blood rider”).

nukoa

• (n.) meat
• (v.) to have or be meat (said of an animal)
• (v.) to be edible, to be nutritious
• (adj.) edible, nutritious

Ka li ia i nukoa ke nevi i’i! Ae eli i ia!
“You have given me meat! I love you!”

Notes: HAPPY CATURDAY!!!

After an utterly inexplicable one week absence, Caturday has returned! And to make it for it I thought I’d do something special.

I’m not quite sure when it started, but Keli and I have a tradition. Some time after Erin has gone to sleep, she meows to let me know that her food dish is empty. If she needs wet food, I give it to her, and she goes up and sniffs it and then leaves it there (the expensive food we buy for her specially doesn’t excite her in the least). If she needs dry food, though, that’s a different story.

We store the dry food in an airtight tupperware container, and what she does is she meows and follows me to the container, I open it, it makes a loud sound, and she runs away (every time!). Then I give her one or two scoops of dry food, she goes over to the dry food, and then (and this is the strangest part): she thanks me.

Every time!

She goes up to her food bowl and puts her face in as if she’s about to eat, but then she stops, turns up her head to me and gives me a look (or, if she’s feeling especially grateful, gives me a little meow), and I pat her head and she starts eating.

Though filming this little ritual ought, by rights, to be a two person job, I’ve tried my best to get the whole thing on video myself. The results are below:

Unfortunately, she didn’t give me her darling little mmmrow this time, but her little head tilt is on camera. I’ll try to get another one where she makes her thank you noise in the future.

The Kamakawi are very much a meat-centric people. A meal isn’t a meal unless there’s a meat dish involved. Hence, something that’s “good” for you is derived from the word for “meat”. Meat is supposed to give you strength and vitality and renew your spirit; fruit and vegetables is for flavor and (for lack of a better word) regularity.

The iku for meat (in case you’re wondering. It looks right to me, but I know what I was basing it on, so you can let me know if you saw it before the following explanation) is a hunk of meat roasting on a spit (the ends of the rotating pole are on the right and left of the iku, and the line in the middle is the meat [the glyph has been simplified over time]). The Kamakawi do a lot of spit-roasting like this. Some day I’ll have to put up the vocabulary that surrounds such roasting. Some day soon…

tawa

• (n.) skull

I tawa pe.
“There’s a skull over there.”

Notes: For reasons unknown.

So hey, I know I said that yesterday’s was my 600th post, but apparently the scoreboard says something different. If you take a look at the ol’ dictionary, it says that today is my 600th dictionary post. Outside of dictionary posts, I have four announcements. That means that either today is my 600th post, or it was a few days back.

Well, whenever it is or was, it’s always a reason to celebrate! Hooray for my 600th dictionary post according to the count in the sidebar!

Today we have a morbid word: the word for “skull”. You may recognize the iku. If you do, be not afeared: it belongs to ono. This version is simply the determined version of the iku.

Man, it’s hot in this state! Not dry like Nevada, though. Man was that dry! How do people’s lips not just melt off there?!

foalo

• (n.) kidney

Titiva ia ie foalo o lea!
“Stab him in the kidney!”

Notes: Heh, heh… There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write in Kamakawi. But there it is.

Kidneys, I figure, should be basic terms, since we’ve got them inside us, and they’re pretty important. Although I’ve never seen my kidney I’ve seen plenty on chickens. I was horrified the first time I saw one in a piece of KFC. It looked like a brain. But then I remembered I’d actually eaten goat brain before (my parents and relatives never told me what it was. They just said it was carne de la cabeza. It was in a stew, so it wasn’t too noticeable… I wised up in later days, though), and figured, “Eh”.

Not that I eat the kidneys. Bleh! I just don’t freak out when I see them any longer.

Well. Not too much, anyway.

itava

• (n.) banana peel
• (n.) peel (any kind)
• (v.) to peel a banana
• (v.) to peel anything
• (v.) to remove
• (adj.) peeled

Ai itava ia i ipe oli i’i ai?
“Will you peel that fruit for me?”

Notes: And, as promised (or foretold), another banana word!

This time it’s the peel. Since banana’s have such a canonical peel, though (or maybe exceptional—highly recognizable), the word for peeling a banana has been extended to peeling anything (and the peel itself to all peels). Then peeling itself was extended to cover removing anything. And so it goes.

And now to figure out if there are anymore banana-related lexical items in Kamakawi…

nanu

• (n.) nose
• (v.) to smell
• (adj.) smelling of

Kaneko oi’i: Nea o nanu uliuli.
“My cat: She of the little nose.”

Notes: HAPPY CATURDAY!!!

I don’t have a lot of full body shots of Keli (as I recall), so I snapped a good one today. Here she is sniffing a jacket lying on the ironing board:

What a proper lady!

Nanu is built off the glyph for hu. It’s pretty straightforward: There’s a mark where the nose is. Here hu is being used for its face-like properties, no its phonetic properties.

i’o

• (n.) goat
• (n.) penis (slang)

A mamata i’o ukia po a!
“Now the goat is facing left!”

Notes: Here is the aforementioned and aforepromised goat! Though some will try to deny it, I affirm—and have long affirmed—that goats are native to the Kamakawi islands. Indeed, there are goats aplenty! Hopping about the way they do. Oh, that reminds me: You’ll like this. It’s a video of pygmy goats running around on a deck! I absolutely love pygmy goats. They’re kind of like a crossbreed of kittens and rabbits.

The iku for i’o is one of my favorite simply for its construction. As you may notice, the iku is built off the the syllabic glyph for i—the first syllable of i’o—so there’s a partial phonetic component to this iku. And even though the glyph for i is a stylized eye, if you put little horns and a goatish beard on it, it also kind of looks like a goat. And there it is!

The other meaning for i’o is a byproduct of how common the i- derivation strategy is. See, the word looks like it could be i- plus ho, and the glyph for ho is a man (same as hopoko). So if an i’o is anything at all, well…you get the idea.

Tomorrow another picture of my (pygmy goat)/(rabbit)!