54 
PRESTON. 
Just what is implied therein has baffled more than one Ha¬ 
waiian scholar. The idea may be akin to that contained in 
the Spanish phrase, Voy a dar un abrazo a mis padres, where 
the word padres is employed when both father and mother 
are meant, the meaning, of course, being that he is going to 
embrace both of them. 
French and German Constructions. —In certain constructions 
two negatives are necessary, just as they are in French. Nele 
means to lack, and ole means not; yet they are both em¬ 
ployed, and, taken together, have the force of one negative 
only, as: 
Nele na Kanaka o Honolulu i he kumu ole. 
This ole in our idiom would be superfluous, but the Ha¬ 
waiian requires it. The French ne-pas is precisely parallel, 
and the French equivalent of the Hawaiian phrase is: 
Les gens de Honolulu n’ont pas d’instituteur. 
The interjection of words between two parts of a verb as 
in the German is very common, as: 
Na lawe main ia he dala. 
The other form would be with laweia as one word; and the 
phrase translated into German, using a separable verb to 
show the correspondence, would be : 
Man nahm das Geld heimlich weg. 
Here is a case where the regular German separable verb 
construction is duplicated in Hawaiian. 
Flexibility. —The Polynesians avoid inflection. But if 
their language is loose and cumbersome in this respect there 
are corresponding advantages. Indeed, from this very fact 
great flexibility becomes a necessity, and any sentence may 
be cast in a variety of ways, depending on the idea which is 
to take precedence or acquire emphasis. Take the phrase, 
“ I give this to you.” Here we have five words. The sen¬ 
tence may have as many different arrangements in Hawaiian, 
according to the shade of meaning sought. When it is de- 
