In my fifth year at UH Hilo, I am finally accomplishing one of my personal goals: studying Hawaiian language. I have studied languages my whole life. My mother bought some Spanish language records for me while I was in grade school. That was followed by Spanish, French, and German study in high school, more Spanish and Portuguese during study abroad trips, and dabbling in Catalan, Greek and Russian as an undergraduate, with more serious study of Arabic, Farsi, and Latin in graduate school.
Like working out, language study has to be regular and consistent to be useful, and I have forgotten a lot of what I have studied merely because I have not taken the opportunity to practice. That should not be a problem with Hawaiian, as I find more and more words finding their way into my everyday speech.
Languages reflect people’s experiences. We used to joke in Arabic class about how many words have a secondary meaning about something to do with a camel. If you are going to cross desert regions on a camel, after all, you are going to have words for every piece of that beast and every piece of the saddle, reins, etc. Similarly, in Native Alaskan languages there are many words and phrases for snow, and, of course, in Hawaiian, there are many words and phrases to describe types of rain, of which we have seen a lot these last couple of weeks.
Languages also reflect history. Twenty percent of the Spanish language has its roots in Arabic because of the Moorish occupation of the Iberian peninsula in the Middle Ages. In Hawaiian we see words with roots in English, such as paikikala (bicycle) in which the English “b” converts to “p” and “c” converts to “k” as there were no bicycles in the pre-contact era that makes sense. Tracing back further, the English cycle comes from the Greek kuklos; so in the long story of the bicycle, the “k” became a “c,” which reverted to a “k” when it came into Hawaiian.
Clearly I could go on about this for a lot longer then the length of this column, but I’ll just add that languages also reflect what is important to their people. In Hawaiian, there are a number of words for family relationships because family is such a very important foundation for community.
Yesterday, I was witness, as I am every year about this time, to the dual importance of language and family during the UH Hilo commencement exercises. As a Hawaiian-serving institution, the Hawaiian language permeates our ceremony: a part of my remarks is in Hawaiian, our school chant is the “Ua Ao Hawai‘i” and after we sing the “Star Spangled Banner,” we sing “Hawai‘i Pono‘i.” I always enjoy hearing so many of our students, faculty, staff, and families chiming in on the Hawaiian songs as well as the English ones. One day I hope to be fluent in both. This bilingual ceremony demonstrates our respect for our community and the university’s role in the Hawaiian language movement.
Seeing the gym filled with families and friends always warms my heart. Some have tears in their eyes when their student crosses the stage, some cheer, some just clap. All are proud of their student’s accomplishments and happy that this day has (in some cases, finally) come. All of those family relationships are represented somewhere in the audience: parents, grandparents, siblings, spouses, in-laws, aunties and uncles.
Each student gets a limited number of tickets, and each chooses who will attend the ceremony. We know, however, that behind each student is an even larger group of people, parents and friends, to be sure, but also teachers and counselors, siblings and cousins, scholarship donors and employers, and all the many people who work in our community to support the journey each student makes.
One of the first words one learns in Hawaiian is ‘ohana, and much like the word aloha, we need to grasp the full meaning of the word to really understand it. The ‘ohana that surrounds each of our students can encompass a whole village of people, and like our students, we are grateful for their presence today and always.
Bonnie D. Irwin is chancellor of the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Her column appears monthly in the Tribune-Herald.