Spending a few days in Hawaii results, at least for me, in a mild sense of consonant deprivation. I'll give the language this--the rules are few and simple, and once absorbed, the Hawaiian words are easily read and pronounced. While it's perhaps very musical and flowing to separate syllables with glottal stops, it gets tiresome after a while, and one misses good old "d" and "r," and the ambiguous but flexible "c."

And one of the Hawaiian's favorite consonants just barely qualifies as one, in my book. Aitch is just too soft a sound to really count. It's really just a little puff of air.

Take the word "staccato." Almost onomatapoetic, and one would never mistake it for an Hawaiian word--it contains three hard consonant sounds plus the beginning ess, and one can't imagine it working with such a wimpy consonant as an aitch. But Hawaiian is such a gentle language that it's naturally their favorite. They figure if they can't do without consonants at all, they're going to make the ones they have as wimpy as possible. The only Hawaiian consonant that has any force at all is the pee.

Take this word: Ha'amaea, which is the name of a harbor on the west coast of Maui (which itself has a vowel/consonant ratio of three to one). It has five vowels and only two consonants, but it still manages to wring five syllables out of them.

Why can't we set up some kind of exchange program between the islands and the Balkans? The Hawaiians could ship all of their excess vowels to places like Bosnia, that has names like Srbenica, and take as trade the Serbian and Croation overabundance of consonants.

Both languages would be far the better for it. The Balkan folks could savor their syllables, letting them breathe with new-found gentle sounds, and perhaps, for the first time, actually be able to pronounce their children's names.

The Hawaiians in turn could invigorate their language with not only fresh supplies of their scarce aiches, ems, ens, kays, ells and pees, but whole new frontiers in syllable separation, with the bee and the dee and the tee (not to mention the sibillant ess). They could give their glotti a break, and get more use out of their tongues.

I was thinking about this one day as we were driving along Maui's north coast, and Patricia suggested that we go explore a little town, which she'd read about on the web, that had a vacation rental.

"What's the name of it?"

"I don't remember--it starts with an aitch..."

That's helpful. We've now narrowed it down to about half the places on the island. I mean, the fricken state capital starts with an aitch. Hell, the name of the state itself does.

"I think it might be Hielo."

Well, that could be an Hawaiian place name. It has the right letters in it, anyway. But I suspect that she's thinking of the old days driving around Puerto Rico, where the gas stations and quickie marts all had signs proclaiming "HIELO," Spanish for "ice."

And I'm pretty sure that hielo doesn't mean "ice" in Hawaiian. In fact, no word in Hawaiian means "ice." The Inuit have two hundred words for it, in all its infinite glory and variety, but I doubt if the benighted Hawaiians have a single one. It's kind of like the French and "victory."

We dig out the map and find it. It's "Huelo." Close.

Agree with them now, it will save so much time.
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When Yahweh your gods has settled you in the land you're about to occupy, and
driven out many infidels before you...you're to cut them down and exterminate
them. You're to make no compromise with them or show them any mercy.
[Deut. 7:1 (KJV)]
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