![]() When people use da kine, the expectation is that the other person will be able to recover what is meant. The most popular use of da kine is as a stand-in for another word, kind of like “ whatchamacallit.” But there’s an added social meaning to that use of da kine. ![]() It originally comes from the English “ the kind,” possibly relating to the meaning of that English word as “ kind of.” But there are not that many instances where you can replace da kine with “the kind” and have any idea what a Hawaiian Pidgin speaker is saying. Da Kineĭa Kine sticker – Photo via Atlas Obscureĭa kine is a great example of one of these words. Even if, as an English speaker, you think you recognize and understand a Hawaiian Pidgin word, you might not really be getting it. What makes a creole so confounding is that many of the words may have originated from another language, but have taken on totally new or different meanings. It is not really mutually intelligible with English sometimes an English speaker might understand enough words to kind of get the gist of a Hawaiian Pidgin sentence, but that’s true of, say, a native Spanish speaker listening to Italian, too. Hawaiian Pidgin today is made up of largely English-derived words, with some words from the various languages of the Hawaiian immigrants and the native Hawaiians, in a structure that’s sort of like English, sort of like other creoles, and contains some syntax from various Asian languages. Today it’s capitalized, which goes a little way to indicate that Hawaiian Pidgin is more than a standard pidgin. By the 1920s, Hawaiian pidgin was a creole, but the name, despite its inaccuracy, has stuck. When a pidgin Becomes a CreoleĪ creole has to be more precise and more complex. In a generation or two, the pidgin isn’t a tool alongside a native language: it is the native language. The children of the immigrants who created the pidgin add to it. But sometimes something weird happens: the pidgin begins to grow. A pidgin is, by definition, not a primary form of communication pidgins are tools, but they’re sort of blunt tools, not capable of the kind of complexity that all humans need to communicate. Maybe the isolated groups figure out a way to teach each other their native languages, or they just learn the lexifier language. ![]() So this form of pidgin would be “English-lexified.” English is the “ lexifier” in this case, meaning English lends the words to the pidgin. ![]() In Hawaii, immigrants from Japan, the Philippines, Korea, and China all came to work the plantations, but their only option for communication was to create an English pidgin. They did so using English words the workers heard from their bosses. In Hawaii, as well as in the Caribbean and other places, that language was English. The majority of pidgins tend to mine the vocabulary of the ruling class’s language for words. They are not considered full languages, in that they generally have limited and simplified grammar and vocabulary. There are several languages co-existing on the Hawaiian islands: Hawaiian, the Polynesian language of the original Hawaiians that’s experienced a renaissance of late English, brought to the archipelago by Americans the various languages brought by immigrant workers, including Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, and Spanish and something which is now called Hawaiian Pidgin.Ī pidgin, which is not capitalized, is a form of communication that arises when multiple groups of people need to talk with each other but do not have a language in common, and for whatever reason choose not to, or are not able to, teach each other their native languages. What language do modern Hawaiians speak? The answer, as Dan Nosowitz of Atlas Obscura points out, is not nearly as simple as you might think.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |