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I& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;s great paper "Loanwords in Hawaiian": https://www.academia.edu/3769002/Loanwords_in_Hawaiian,">https://www.academia.edu/3769002/L... searches on http://wehewehe.org/ ,">https://wehewehe.org/">... and discussions with @TKettig. Thanks for reading! /fin
