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I've previously tweeted about "Pferd", the German word for horse, but what about in Hawaiian? How does a language figure out words for animals that are not present in the area the language is spoken? A thread. /1
Horses were not present in the Hawaiian islands prior to European contact, so there wasn't an established term for it. Languages usually either borrow or invent new words for "new" animals, and this was no exception. /2
The word used today is _lio_, which is likely an abbreviation of _‘īlio_, which means "dog" and is also "a generic term for any foreign quadruped". (Words for "dog" have a pretty rich history in Austronesian languages, but we'll save that discussion for another thread...) /3
But what about other animals? Cows, mules, goats, snakes? Mostly these words were borrowed from European languages. But some curious semantic shifts took place... /4
For example, take the word _kao_. This comes from the English word "cow" and is pronounced almost identically. It means "goat". /5
The word for "cow" is actually _pipi_, which is derived from English "beef". (English /b/ and /f/ became Hawaiian /p/, a common adaptation.) /6
How about _hoki_? This is derived from English "horse". (/s/ to /k/ is another common adaptation in Hawaiian loanwords.) _hoki_ means "mule", not "horse"! /7
(I believe the word _miula_, from English "mule", is a more common word for this animal than _hoki_; there might be some semantic distinctions here that I'm unaware of.) /8
These kinds of semantic shifts are not uncommon when a language borrows a word from another. For example, English has narrowed the meaning of the noun "prune" to mean "dried plum", whereas in the original French it means any plum, dried or not. /9
Back to Hawaiian. Next up is the word for "snake", which is _naheka_ (or _nahesa_ in some older texts). This word comes from, of all places, Biblical Hebrew נָחָשׁ nāḥāš! /10
The word was introduced by missionaries as they attempted to compile a Hawaiian translation of the bible. Other examples of this include _‘aeko_ "eagle", and _‘alopeka_ "fox", both from Biblical Greek αετός aetos and ἀλωπός alepos. /11
Each of these loanwords gives us a little insight into the history and cultural context around the time the loans happened. Each language navigates these waters differently, but there are many common threads. /12
A quick note: I've chosen only to focus on loanwords here, but Hawaiian also has plenty of novel coinages to describe foreign animals and plants. "Pineapple" is _hala kahiki_, literally "foreign pine"! (The pineapple is native to Brazil, not Hawai‘i.) /13
Much of this thread was informed by ‘Ōiwi Parker Jones's great paper "Loanwords in Hawaiian": https://www.academia.edu/3769002/Loanwords_in_Hawaiian, searches on http://wehewehe.org/ , and discussions with @TKettig. Thanks for reading! /fin
