Linguist Commenting on Ep. #214 about Hawai‘i

Hi guys! I’ve never posted here before, but as a linguist, I had to say something about the boys’ observations about Hawaiian and alphabets in general. If anyone finds that stuff interesting. 

Humans can make tons of sounds, but we only use a handful for language. These are called speech sounds, and you can look at a chart of all  of them here. The sounds we make that carry meaning are called phonemes. If you change a phoneme in a word, it becomes a new word. For example, if you say an English word and add a ‘d’ sound to the beginning, it would change the word or make it nonsensical. We also use some sounds coincidentally when speaking, ones that don’t carry meaning. When you say the word ‘uh-oh,’ you feel a catch in your throat before each syllable. That is the glottal stop (or glottal plosive, same difference), and it’s not that important in English. But in Hawaiian, the glottal stop is a phoneme. Since the alphabet we use to represent Hawaiian is based on the English one, and we don’t have a letter for a glottal stop, we use a backwards apostrophe: Hawai‘i. 

Fun fact: There is no apostrophe in the word ‘Hawaiian’ because there is no glottal stop to represent, because it’s an American English word. The actual name for the Hawaiian language is ōlelo Hawaiʻi. 

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