"Kanaka"

Not an Opprobrious Term

Letter to the Editor THERE is a letter in your September issue stating that the word “kanaka” is applied to the natives of the Sandwich Islands (sic) in a book writ ten by Mr. Marshall. Mr. J. Nixon- Westwood, the author of the letter, objects. As a resident of Hawaii for over 40 years may I contribute the fol

lowing?

The word “kanaka,” to a Hawaiian, simply denotes a male human being, and in Hawaii has no invidious application.

It is a word of dignity, rather than other wise, and never in my long association with those Hawaiian language authori ties. the Rev. Henry Judd or the late Joseph Emerson, have I heard it used in any other sense.

The late Prince Kuhio, himself a Hawaiian scholar and for some years Delegate from Hawaii to the United States Congress, used as his motto. “E hoo kanaka!”; that is. “Be a man!”— which he hardly would have done had it

implied any approbrious connotation.

It is, of course, well known in Hawaii that in some other parts of the Pacific the word “kanaka” is a term of con tempt, in some way connected with forced labour and black-birding, but beyond that, nothing.

I thoroughly concur with Mr. Nixon- Westwood in his detestation of the word “kanaka” when applied as a term of reproach, but hardly in his statement that it is a mutilation of the Samoan word “tanata.“ In Hawaii the letters K and T have the same phonetic value and are interchangeable, both forms, kanaka and tanata, occurring side by side.

If the aforesaid “mutilation” of the word “tanata” is believed to have been perpetrated by the white man, the T. following the transposition of consonants among European languages as illustrated by 1 Pimm’s law, would have been changed to D. a shift exemplified in the word “pardner,” where the clear T sound in the word “partner” has become obscured into a muddy D.

The above slurring of the consonant T is frequently to be observed in careless speakers who debase such words as “pretty” and “gentleman” into the uglier forms, “preddy” and “gennelmun,” which require less effort to articulate.

So far as my remarks on the Hawaiian language are concerned, I write as a pro vincial ‘‘Sandwich Islander” merely, and not from a pan-Polynesian point of view.

I am, etc.,

Leopold G. Blackman.

Paea. Tahiti, 28/12/1943.