474 
APPENDIX. 
Notwithstanding its defects, the Hawaiian has its excellencies. 
Ideas are frequently conveyed with great force and precision; 
verbs not only express the action, but the manner of it, distinctly; 
hence, to send a message would be orero, to send a messenger, 
kono, to send a parcel, houna, to break a stick, haki , to break a 
string, moku, to break a cup, naha, to break a law, hoomaloka , &c. 
Considering it is a language that has received no additions from the 
intercourse of the natives with other countries, and is devoid of 
all technical terms of art and science, it is, as well as the other 
dialects, exceedingly copious. Some idea of this may be formed 
from the circumstance of there being in the Tahitian upwards of 
1400 words commencing with the letter a . 
The greatest imperfections we have discovered occur in the 
degrees of the adjectives, and the deficiency of the auxiliary verb 
to be, which is implied, but not expressed. The natives cannot 
say, I am, or it is, yet they can say a thing remains, as, ke waiho 
maira ka waa i raira, (the canoe remains there;) and their verbs 
are used in the participial form, by simply adding the termination 
ana, equivalent to ing, in English. Hence in asking a native, 
What he is doing? the question would be, “He aha-ana oe?” 
(What-ing you ?) The answer would be, He ai ana wau. Eating 
(am) I. The He denoting the present tense preceding the ques¬ 
tion, the answer corresponds; but if he wished to say, what he 
was eating, the noun would be placed between the verb, and its 
participial termination, as He ai poe ana wau, literally, Eat poe- 
ing I; In every other respect their language appears to possess 
all the parts of speech, and some in greater variety and perfection 
than any language we are acquainted with. 
In reducing the language to a written form, the American mis¬ 
sionaries, adopted the Roman character, as the English mission¬ 
aries had done before in the southern dialects. The English 
alphabet possesses a redundancy of consonants, and though rather 
deficient in vowels, answers tolerably well to express all the native 
sounds. The Hawaiian alphabet consists of seventeen letters: five 
vowels, a, e, i, o , u, and twelve consonants, b, d, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, t, 
v , w, to which f, g, s, and z , have been added, for the purpose of 
preserving the identity of foreign words. The consonants are 
sounded as in English, though we have been obliged to give them 
different names, for the natives could not say el or cm, but in¬ 
variably pronounced ela and ema ; it being therefore necessary 
to retain the final vowel, that was thought sufficient, and the 
other was rejected. The vowels are sounded more after the man¬ 
ner of the continental languages than the English; A, as in ah, 
and sometimes as a in far, but never as a in fate; E, as a in 
gale, ape, and mate; /, as ee in green; e in me, or i in machine. 
