Preface to the Hawaiian-English Dictionary
(1957, 1961 - 1st & 2nd eds.)

He loa ka ʻimina o ke ala o Hawaiʻi ʻimi loa.
Long is the search for the way of Hawaii's thinkers.

The earliest known list of Hawaiian words is printed in Volume III of Captain James Cook's A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean and was compiled in 1778, the year of Cook's discovery of the Hawaiian Islands. This list includes some 250 words spelled in an English-like orthography: ee for today's i, as in eeheu (ihu), nose; oo for today's u, as in nooe (nui), large; and y for today's ai, as in myty (maikaʻi), good. Subsequent lists, prepared by Manuel Quimper in about 1791, by Urey Lisiansky in 1804, by Archibald Campbell in 1809, and by J. Arago in 1819, contain from about 170 to 400 words, and are written in orthographies that suggest the spelling habits of the Spanish, Russian, British, and French compilers. These and other early vocabularies have been described by Samuel H. Elbert (see Bibliography). In 1829 the missionaries decided to end this spelling diversity, and they adopted by vote an alphabet with vowels corresponding to the so-called continental sound values and with the usual English values of the consonants. C. M. Wise and Wesley Hervey have described the dramatic tale of the fashioning of this alphabet. The ease with which Hawaiians young and old learned to read and write is an indication of its success.

The more ambitious project of writing a dictionary of the Hawaiian language has been attempted some nine times since 1836, as appears from the following list of works containing 3,700 or more words. In each case the number of words is approximate.

The outstanding contributions have been those of Lorrin Andrews (1795-1868). His first book, published in 1836, was the basis for his greatly expanded work of 1865. Except for rearrangement according to the English alphabet and a surprising deletion of all Biblical references, the revised Andrews-Parker work of 1922 is nearly the same as the 1865 volume. Apparently only 400 copies of the Andrews-Parker dictionary were printed, of which 100 were given away. Within a year it was unobtainable except occasionally in second-hand stores at a very high price. Because of this, and because so many common words are not listed in the Andrews-Parker dictionary, the present authors were detailed in 1949 to prepare a new work or to revise and expand the old one. The story of this undertaking is briefly told below.

The first task involved determination of policy, and an advisory committee was appointed. It soon became apparent that thoroughgoing changes were necessary in the Andrews-Parker dictionary if it were to be in line with present-day lexicography, and that it would be neither accurate nor ethical to call the new work a revision of the previous dictionary. For one thing, the number of entries (as defined below) has been increased from approximately 14,000 in the earlier work to about 25,000 in this one. As indicative of the increase: the old volume has some 6 types of ahaʻaina (feast) compared with 23 in this work, some 49 types of hale (house) compared with 133, and 2 types of palapala (document) compared with 63. The number of illustrative phrases and sentences has been greatly increased and the system of cross references expanded. In spite of these significant increases, the new book has fewer pages than the old one, due partly to the type size used and partly to the elimination of questionable entries and duplicate definitions, and because every definition has been rewritten to eliminate padding and definitions within definitions.

The principal sources examined for words are listed in the Bibliography. Hawaiian quotations from these sources were rewritten to conform with the dictionary style, and glottal stops and macrons added. For some volumes, as the Bible, Fornander, Kepelino, Laieikawai, and the Kumulipo, English translations are available. Each translation in the dictionary, however, has been rephrased quite literally for the purpose of showing the value of each word. At times this has resulted in awkwardness or redundancy which could have been avoided only by a freer translation.

There follows a summary of the sources most assiduously examined, in addition to the previous dictionaries, and many unpublished notes, letters, word lists, and texts, most of which are in the Bishop Museum library. Documentation of these and other works consulted is in the Bibliography. Legends: Fornander, Beckwith's Laieikawai. Chants: Emerson's Pele and Hiiaka and Unwritten Literature, Beckwith's Kumulipo, Pukui's unpublished chants. Sayings: Pukui's unpublished sayings. Newspapers: Ka Nei Aupuni, Ka Hoku o Hawaii, Ka Nupepa Kuokoa. Texts: Beckwith's Kepelino, McGuire. Christian writings: Ka Baibala, 1941; Ke Alanui o Ka Lani: Oia ka Manuale Kakolika. Material culture: Te Rangi Hiroa. Laws: Moolelo o na Hana o ka Hale o na Lunamakaainana, legal notices in Ka Hoku o Hawaii. Plants: Neal, Handy, Whitney. Fish: Titcomb. Shore and reef fauna: Edmondson. Stars: Makemson. Games: Mitchell. Arithmetic: Thomson. Military: He Kumu Paikau. An article by Bruce Biggs influenced the description of possessives in the grammatical notes. The Proto-Polynesian and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian reconstructions are based largely on works by Dempwolff, Dyen, and Elbert.

In general, Mary Kawena Pukui has been responsible for the accuracy of the meanings of the Hawaiian words, and Samuel H. Elbert for the technical aspects of presentation. Many problems arose during the years of work, the most important of which are briefly described below.

1. Description versus prescription. Is the function of dictionaries to prescribe what the compilers consider the best usage, or is it to describe the actual usage of cultivated speakers? Statements in the prefaces to English dictionaries overwhelmingly indorse the descriptive approach. This matter is of sufficient importance to justify inclusion of a few statements of creed:

John S. Kenyon, in Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition (1934), "The function of a pronouncing dictionary is to record as far as possible the pronunciations prevailing in the best usage, rather than to attempt to dictate what the usage should he. In so far as a dictionary may be known and acknowledged as a faithful recorder and interpreter of such usage, so far and no farther may it be appealed to as an authority." (p. xxvi)

NBC Handbook of Pronunciation (1943), "Makers of pronouncing dictionaries are inevitably confronted by at least two alternatives: recording what should be pronounced and what is pronounced. The latter seems reasonable and worthy of attempt." (p.x)

Clarence L. Barnhart, editor-in-chief, The American College Dictionary (1947), "This dictionary records the usage of the speakers and writers of our language; no dictionary founded on the methods of modern scholarship can prescribe as to usage; it can only inform on the basis of the facts of usage. A good dictionary is a guide to usage much as a good map tells you the nature of the terrain over which you may want to travel. It is not the function of the dictionary-maker to tell you how to speak, any more than it is the function of the mapmaker to move rivers or rearrange mountains or fill in lakes. A dictionary should tell you what is commonly accepted usage and wherein different classes of speakers or regions differ in their use of language." (p. ix)

The implications of the descriptive approach pervade every aspect of the lexicographer's trade. He is permitted no personal predilections for words of native origin as opposed to words from foreign sources, for ancient words as opposed to newer ones, for words of one standard dialect as opposed to another, for pronunciations conforming to the spelling as opposed to pronunciations heard in the fast colloquial conversation of cultivated speakers. He must not frame condemnatory definitions of customs of which he may not privately approve, nor on the other hand may he glorify the past or purge from it what he may deplore. Nor may he blanch at risqué terms. In short, he is a reporter and in his role of lexicographer he never takes the part of teacher, missionary, innovator, or purist.

2. The concept of a dictionary entry. The Andrews-Parker system of entries seems to have been based on translation into English. All the meanings of maikaʻi, for example, that could be translated by English nouns (as beauty, goodness) constituted one entry. The meanings that might be translated by English adjectives (externally good, handsome, beautiful, morally good) constituted another entry. The meanings that might be translated by English verbs (to be handsome, to be pleasing to the sight, to be good) constituted a third entry. The present compilers have treated all of these as a single entry, as many Hawaiian words can be translated by English nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Similarly, some eleven meanings of pua that may be translated by English nouns form a single entry in the Andrews-Parker volume; in this new book the words spelled p-u-a that have widely differing meanings constitute different entries. This new conception of an entry necessitated a complete rearrangement of the material and has resulted in avoiding much repetition. It has also meant abandonment of English grammatical terms such as noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, as in Hawaiian these are syntactic subclasses rather than major form classes.

3. Spelling. The principal difficulties involve indication of the glottal stop and macron, the spelling of loan words, and the indication or omission of the w-glide. 'the necessity for showing the glottal stop and the macron (as a symbol of both vowel length and of stress that does not conform to the predictable pattern) is attested by such pairs as koʻu (my) and kou (your), malama (light) and mālama (care). No stress mark other than the macron is necessary: vowels with macrons and diphthongs are always stressed; vowels in words consisting of a single syllable (except the clitics) are always stressed. Vowels not marked with macrons are short; this need not be shown with a breve. Many Hawaiian words borrowed from English words beginning with sounds not found in Hawaiian (b, d, g, j, r, s, t, v, z) are omitted from the Andrews-Parker dictionary. In the present work they are entered as commonly pronounced by Hawaiians, that is, with Hawaiian sounds. (Substitutes of Hawaiian sounds for English sounds are listed in PE, p. xix [or Hawaiian Grammar, 1971, section 2.9] .) Thus the Hawaiian word for baptize is entered papekiko, bapetiso, and the word for room is entered lumi, rumi. Words variously spelled with and without the w-glide (koali and kowali, uila and uwila) presented another problem. The difference between the two members of each of these pairs, and hundreds of others, is purely graphic, that is, exists in the spelling and not in the pronunciation. Rules were drafted for an objective determination of a preferred spelling. The definitions are given under the preferred spellings, with cross references from other spellings found frequently in published form.

4. Obsolete words. Hours were spent attempting to analyze the hundreds of words in Andrews-Parker which were completely unknown to the compilers. Some proved to be misspellings or garbled phrases, sayings, or poetical expressions written as single words, and could be eliminated or entered elsewhere. Others that could not he found in the oldest legends and chants proved a real problem. Rather than assume the responsibility for omitting them the compilers decided to enter them with Andrews-Parker as the source.

5. Scope. Names of persons and places in Hawaiian are probably as numerous as other types of words. Frequently their interpretation depends on local knowledge and even then may be subject to controversy. Early in this study it was therefore deemed unnecessary to include proper names except those in very common use, as the names of the islands, of the major gods, and of winds and rains frequently mentioned in poetry.

Another limitation is that there has not been included a statement of the derivation of many Biblical words, as without study of the missionary translators' work manuals it is often impossible to know whether the source of a particular word is Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or English.

A completely new feature of this dictionary is the incorporation of Proto-Polynesian and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian reconstructions by Ronald R. Brown. An example is the following (which comes at the end of the entry following lani, 1, sky):(PPN langi; PMP langit). This means that langi is the hypothetical reconstructed form in the Proto-Polynesian language spoken by the ancestors of the Hawaiians before the separation of the Polynesian peoples; this reconstruction is based largely on the form in use today in Tongan, Uvean, or Futunan, which languages have preserved more archaic features than any other Polynesian languages thus far recognized. Similarly, langit is the hypothetical reconstructed form in the Proto-Malayo-Polynesian language, the ancestor of Proto-Polynesian, spoken much earlier, before the separation of the Polynesian and other peoples from the Indonesians; this form can be reconstructed only when cognates are unmistakably present among Indonesian languages, as Javanese, Malay, Tagalog, or Malagasy. In the present work only those reconstructions are listed of which there can be little doubt, based on the present state of Malayo-Polynesian studies, and only those found in Indonesia as well as in Western Polynesia. A reconstruction is acceptable only if the meanings of the cognate forms in the related languages are similar, and if the sounds of the cognates in the various languages are in accord with certain tables of sound correspondences, as published by Dempwolff, Dyen, and Elbert. The symbols used are those established by Dyen for Proto-Malayo-Polynesian and by Elbert for Proto-Polynesian, except that a herein may be interpreted as Elbert's "a, or e before i" or "a, or o before u." The velar nasal is written "ng." [See Supplement D.]

It is impossible to tally the enormous number of man-hours behind a dictionary- the senior author has been working more than two decades assembling data. Some have questioned the propriety of "exposing the bones of the ancients," a Hawaiian expression of scorn for one who reveals the secrets of the ancestors. For the authors there have been dissatisfaction and frustration in the realization that in spite of years of dedicated work, it is impossible to record any language completely. How true this seems of Hawaiian, with its rich and varied background, its many idioms heretofore undescribed, and its ingenious and sophisticated use of figurative language. Thousands of pages have been printed in Hawaiian. These may he classified approximately as follows: (1) Texts concerned with ancient Hawaii, especially the chants and legends; they contain a wealth of names for stars, plants, fish, winds, rains, clouds, and objects of material culture. (2) Texts dealing with the period of the monarchy. With the coming of Christianity and the goods of modern civilization, hundreds of words were introduced into Hawaiian, mostly from English. (3) Texts published since Annexation, beginning with a translation of the Organic Act and continuing with names for technological advances and including recent vocabulary additions of World War II. The present work cannot hope to achieve complete coverage of a history as rich and complex as this one. Many more years of work and more workers would have been needed. A complete lexicon is a picture of the whole of the life of today and of yesterday. But at least the present compilers can say, "Ua ʻimihia ka māno wai o ko Hawaiʻi kūpuna: the many sources of waters and life of Hawaii's ancestors have been sought after."

MARY KAWENA PUKUI
SAMUEL. H. ELBERT

University of Hawaii
June, 1957