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Language: en-GB

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Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say on a bright
Hawaiian Christmas Day. Thus spake Bing Crosby

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and a whole load of artists who covered his
song.

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It's not that Hawaiian has a completely different
word for Christmas -- it's just that Kalikimaka

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is the closest that Hawaiian can possibly
get to the word Christmas.

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You see, Christmas is a very English word.
It's actually from Old English. Cristes mæsse,

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the festival or mass of Christ. But the Hawaiian
language, along with a lot of Polynesian languages,

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uses only a few consonants and has much more
restrictive phonotactic rules. Phonotactics

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are the way that languages put sounds together
-- so, nought, sought, wrought, and bought

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are all possible English words... but ngought
isn't. You can end an English word with ng

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- ring, sing, thinking... but you can't start
one. It's not allowed. It sounds non-English.

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English speakers stumble over words from languages
with less restrictive phonotactic rules, so

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we convert them to be easier to say. It's
the bane of anyone whose surname is Nguwen.

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Which I've probably still mispronounced. Hawaiian
does the same. So how does Merry Christmas

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become Mele Kalikimaka?

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Well, like this. First of all, Hawaiian doesn't
allow more than one consonant together. No

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Kr or sm. So Christmas becomes Karisimas.
The T has vanished, because, let's be honest

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here, when was the last time you said ChrisTmas?
Now, every time there's a consonant, there

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must be a vowel after it. So, Karisimasa.
This is what gives Polynesian languages their

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distinct sound -- and it's why the Hawaiian
state fish is the wonderfully-named humuhumunukunukuapua'a.

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Hawaiian has a much smaller alphabet too.
It only has eight consonants. That last one,

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by the way, is the glottal stop -- that's
the ? sound that English speakers make in

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the middle of uh-oh, or bu?on.

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You'll notice that there's no R in there.
In Hawaiian, /r/ and /l/ are interchangeable

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-- actually, they're the same sound -- and
they're written as L. So now we have Meli

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Kalisimasa. There's no /s/ either - the closest
sound is /k/, so switch those over, and there

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we go: Mele Kalikimaka.

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Every language has complicated phonotactic
rules. Hardly anyone who speaks them knows

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what they are, but all understand them intuitively
if they grew up with that language. And if

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want to see what happens when someone really
plays about with this, check out Skwerl by

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Karl Eccleston and Brian Fairbairn. It's cleppy
ancretest and leery setmes ha your ped.

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Goobilt!

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