This dictionary is backing you up:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Kanaka
Didn't that Republican presidential candidate (George Allen?) call a reporter of color "Kanaka"?
(The 1% fudge factor is just because I'm afraid to speak definitively on anything relating to Hawaiian culture, issues, etc.)
I think the pejorative associations of "Kanaka" came from this ad. It was not made by Hawaiians, though. All a miscommunication.
2: "macaca". And using the dictionary definition of a word to determine its offensiveness or lack thereof doesn't work... e.g. "articulate".
Now I have that #$% Hawaiian Christmas song going through my head.
I'm pretty sure Bing Crosby wasn't actually Hawaiian.
There, there, kololukunaka.
7: And a Meli Kalikimaka to you too!
Ya know, if you think about the dictionary definition of "boy," you probably won't catch its racially derogatory meaning.
There's a picture of Bing in the dictionary next to haole.
Oh, I'm not saying it wasn't used as a slur; I'm sure it was. But there's a difference between 'reclaiming a slur' and 'continuing to use a word for its original meaning despite the fact that it was used as a slur.'
A black father looking proudly at his teenage son and saying "That's my boy!" wouldn't be reclaiming a slur, just ignoring one.
There, there, humuhumunukunukuapua'a.
9 beats me. 14 is the Hawaiian name for the reef triggerfish, the state fish of Hawaii.
13: And I don't think it was so much that the word was a slur as that the group to which it referred was looked down on. Admittedly that's pretty much how most slurs get their starts, but it's a little different when the word continues to be used in a non-pejorative way all along.
The bigger question is why God didn't give the Polynesians more consonants at the Tower of Babel. Did he run out of letters? ("here, have a handful of Ks. Take as many vowels as you want.")
My dad's theory is that the Hawaiians and the Czechs need to do some swapping.
Maybe He was trying to give the Polynesians and Slavs some basis for setting up a trading relationship.
They don't have many vowels, either. Very small phoneme inventories overall. That's why the words are so long.
Many of the consonants could have washed overboard during the long ocean voyage from Babel to Micronesia.
(Which somehow reminds me of how Canada got its name: a couple of voyageurs, lacking inspiration, decided to just draw Scrabble tiles at random and see what they'd come up with. One was to draw letters and read them off while the other recorded. And so: C, eh? N, eh? D, eh?)
An alternative to the words being long could be that they have a tone system. But they don't have a tone system. WHY THE HELL NOT?
Mookalakaheeki. Come on, you wanna lei me.
I know! The consonants were playing with the unicorn and didn't make it onto Noah's ark.
25: Emphasis does carry more meaning than in other languages I'm aware of -- word pairs like shoe polish/polish sausage, where the only difference is where you place the emphasis, are all over Samoan. It's not tone, but it's something.
They do have vowel lengthening and glottal stops. That's gotta count for something.
14.---The humuhumunukunukuapua'a "goes swimming by" in an awesome song I learned in first grade, which I was singing at top voice just a couple of days ago.
Actually, polish/polish isn't the same sort of thing -- that's a vowel change not an emphasis change. I can't think of one in English.
But, e.g., TA-la is Samoan for 'dollar', while ta-LA is the word for story. And there's a whole lot of pairs like that.
31: There are lots in English. We've discussed this before.
That stress shift would be another way to distinguish words given the small inventory of sounds, so it's not surprising.
31: There are lots in English. We've discussed this before.
That stress shift would be another way to distinguish words given the small inventory of sounds, so it's not surprising.
Has everyone seen Hillary Clinton's Sopranos parody already?
Funny, although the implications would seem to be negative.
(And, did you sing "Eddy Cuchacatchacuchatosamiratosacomasamakamawaki Brown"?)
Teo, were you stressing 32 or 33?
I know the song in 36 with a different set of nonsense syllables.
I think I got a couple of them wrong in 36 -- the second "cucha" s/b "kama" and there might be something wrong with "tosamiratosacoma" as well.
(Is there a Polynesian edition of Scrabble(tm)?)
Eddie Koocheekachikamatosaneratosanokasammakammawaki Brown.
37: Depends what you want it to mean.
No, it was this song, which was written (I have just learned) not by a Hawaiian pining for home, as the lyrics claim, but by a country singer from Nova Scotia.
33: Would you buy that there are a lot more in Samoan, and it's not a way between distinguishing between two grammatical forms of a word, it can be a fundamental distinction between two unrelated words?
40: Not that I know of, but playing with the English tiles and a pathetically small vocabulary is very frustrating. It lasts five or six turns, and then you quit and drink more beer.
In other news, John McWhorter continues to strike me as an ass. It's another sign of NPR's shititude that they continue to put McWhorter, the black David Brooks, on "All Things Considered".
So, translations?
9 was an attempt to transliterate "slolernr".
Polynesian, apparently not. But this is amusing.
I thought the slur for ethnic Hawaiians was "moke". Try it sometime, for fun.
In German "kanake" is a very derogatory word for immigrants from the East (Turkey, Maghreb). According to the German Wikipedia article, it was not derogatory in Polynesia, and just means "man", as other posters have noted. The word was brought back to Germany in the 19th century by German sailors, and was apparently used originally in a positive sense as "comrade" when applied to sailors the Germans had enlisted from their South Sea colonies, but gradually took on racist and pejorative overtones. By the 1980s it was an epithet commonly used by neo-Nazis and German far right wingers. Now, in a weird shift, young Turks in Berlin have adopted "kanake" as a term of ethnic pride. Maybe McWhorter is simply confused about which ethnic group adopted the word.
"Canaque" in French is supposedly not derogatory. In English, supposedly more so.
50: "Moke" doesn't mean ethnic Hawaiian. There are plenty of Hawaiians who aren't mokes and plenty of mokes who aren't Hawaiian.
Is it a Hawai'ian word? That is, is it pronounced English mowe-k like Coke or Hawai'ian mowe-kay like OK?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moke_%28slang%29
14, 30: I got attacked by a humuhumunukunukuapua'a once. They're not huge fish, but damn feisty and equipped with a scary beak that breaks coral. Scariest moment of my underwater times thus far. They're a better choice for a surprisingly terrifying and beautiful state animal than the wild turkey.
Pua'a is Samoan for pig -- is the beak snouty-looking, or is the word just a coincidence?
55: Your point? "Local" doesn't mean ethnic Hawaiian either. In fact, some of the Hawaiian activists get pretty upset at the idea that the relevant "us guys" in Hawaii is locals rather than ethnic Hawaiians. And that wikipedia article doesn't do a lot to convince me that its authors have much contact with or understanding of what they're trying to write about.
54: Moke rhymes with Coke.
57: I think that's the etymology, but not sure.
Dave, you are taking this a lot more seriously than I, who find the similarity between "moke" and "mook" amusing, since they refer to the same type, the former Polynesian , the latter Italian.
Nah, but I do try to speak up at touristy misunderstandings of Hawaii when I see them getting repeated. No big deal, but it is a real place, not just a theme park.
is the beak snouty-looking, or is the word just a coincidence?
No coincidence. Humuhumunukunukuapua'a means 'pig-snouted triggerfish.'
46: What do you mean, "would I buy it?"? I'm not arguing with you.
I thought, but on looking back didn't say, that pairs like that were rare in English. So you weren't arguing with me, but with my unwritten thoughts.
Damn unwritten thoughts. They get me every time.
