Albert J. Schütz

Webster's Third and the Pronunciation of Hawaiian Loanwords in English: A Different View of Usage

Ifyou were a singer, unfamiliar with Hawaiian and learning this song from the sheet music, how could you find out how to pronounce the word? The standard advice is: look it up in a dictionary. And the word does indeed appear in the 2003 electronic version of Merriam-Webster III (MW), with the following pronunciation transcription (followed by the original, divided into measures (stress units), which are explained later):

Vowel Length in Niuean and Déjà Vu

Even though Niuean and Tongan, although closely related, are considered to be separate languages, when I read “Vowel Length in Niuean” (Rolle and Starks 2014) in the previous issue of this journal, it was clear that the authors’ treatment of the main topic of the article— the patterning of long vowels vs. double vowels—could easily have been applied to the same phenomenon in Tongan. I described this feature and others related to Tongan accent in Schütz 2001 (which is included in the references section of the authors’ article). Apparently the authors missed this section (2001:319–21), even though the heading, in boldfaced capital letters, is: “What accounts for the ‘double vowel’ and the varying accent patterns of diphthongs in certain positions?” After noting that C. Maxwell Churchward (1953, unexpectedly missing from the references) recommended writing both double vowels and long vowels, even though there was no phonemic contrast, I proposed (2001:319): Based on the taped data for this study ... it seems that a penultimate long vowel in a word said in citation form or at the peak of the phonological phrase (the latter condition is assumed in the former) can have the phonetic form of a double vowel, because there is a pitch change marking the peak [emphasis added]. In the reading of the following example (Pulu and Pope 1979:4), the word ‘eikimaama is at the peak of the phonological phrase, and we hear stair-step intonation on the long vowel, written here as a double vowel. This description is illustrated by an example of a Tongan phrase, with lines showing the pitch fall on the accented long vowel of the phonological peak, maama: