484 
APPENDIX. 
The priest of Melchisedec there shall atone. 
And the shrines of Hawaii be sacred to God. 
The heathen will hasten to welcome the time, 
The day-spring the prophet in vision foresaw. 
When the beams of Messiah will ’lumine each clime, 
And the isles of the ocean shall wait for his law. 
Notwithstanding its defects, the Hawaiian has its ex¬ 
cellences. 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 in¬ 
tercourse 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 V y What- 
ing you ? The answer would be, He ai ana wau, Eating 
(am) /. The He denoting the present tense preceding the 
question, 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 po e-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 lan¬ 
guage we are acquainted with. 
In reducing the language to a written form, the Ame¬ 
rican Missionaries adopted the Roman character, as the 
English Missionaries had done before in the southern 
dialects. The English alphabet possesses a redundancy 
of consonants, and, though rather deficient in vowels, an- 
