Hawaiian alphabet

The Hawaiian alphabet (in Hawaiian: ka pīʻāpā Hawaiʻi) is an alphabet used to write Hawaiian. It was adapted from the English alphabet in the early 19th century by American missionaries to print a bible in the Hawaiian language.

Origins

In 1778, British explorer James Cook made the first reported European discovery of Hawaiʻi. In his report, he wrote the name of the islands as "Owhyhee" or "Owhyee". By July 1823, they had begun using the phrase "Hawaiian Language." The actual writing system was developed by American Protestant missionaries on January 7, 1822. The original alphabet included five vowels and twelve consonants:

A, B, D, E, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, T, U, V, W

and seven diphthongs:

AE, AI, AO, AU, EI, EU, OU

In 1826, the developers voted to eliminate some of the letters which represented functionally redundant interchangeable letters, enabling the Hawaiian alphabet to approach the ideal state of one-symbol-one-sound, and thereby optimizing the ease with which people could teach and learn the reading and writing of Hawaiian.^[1][2]

• Interchangeable B/P. B was dropped, P was kept
• Interchangeable L/R/D. L was kept, R and D were dropped
• Interchangeable K/T. K was kept, T was dropped
• Interchangeable V/W. V was dropped, W was kept

ʻOkina

Due to words with different meanings being spelled alike, use of the glottal stop became necessary. As early as 1823, the missionaries made limited use of the apostrophe to represent the glottal stop, but they did not make it a letter of the alphabet. In publishing the Hawaiian bible, they used the ʻokina to distinguish koʻu ('my') from kou ('your'). It wasn't until 1864 that the ʻokina became a recognized letter of the Hawaiian alphabet.^[1]

Kahakō

As early as 1821, one of the missionaries, Hiram Bingham, was using macrons in making handwritten transcriptions of Hawaiian vowels. The macron, or kahakō, was used to differentiate between short and long vowels.

Modern alphabet

The current official Hawaiian alphabet consists of thirteen letters: five vowels (Aa, Ee, Ii, Oo, Uu) and eight consonants (Hh, Kk, Ll, Mm, Nn, Pp, Ww, ʻokina).^[1] Alphabetic order differs from the normal Latin order in that the vowels come first, then the consonants. The five vowels with macrons – Āā, Ēē, Īī, Ōō, Ūū – are not treated as separate letters, but are alphabetized immediately after unaccented vowels. The ʻokina is ignored for purposes of alphabetization.

See also

• Hawaiian Braille

References

This article incorporates material from the Citizendium article "Hawaiian alphabet", which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License but not under the GFDL.