What’s in a consonant? How missionaries changed Hawaiian

 The language Hawaiians speak today is not their ancestors’ ‘ōlelo 

© Copyright Stephen Shender 2025

Thanks to “Chief of War,” Jason Momoa’s nine-part series streaming on Apple TV+, a wide viewing audience is learning about the Hawaiian Islands’ unification and the founding of the Kingdom of Hawaii for the first time, notably from the Hawaiians’ point of view and in their language. But the series’ Hawaiian characters are not speaking the ‘ōlelo (Hawaiian language) of Hawaiians in the late-18th century, when “Chief of War” takes place.

Hawaiians had a rich oral tradition but no written language prior to 1820, when the first Congregationalist missionaries arrived from Massachusetts. After gaining fluency in Hawaiian and converting influential chiefs and chiefesses to their brand of Protestantism, the missionaries set out to spread the Word to the up-to-then unlettered masses by teaching them to read it in their own language. To this end, the missionaries embarked on a six-year project to develop a Hawaiian-language lexicon for a Hawaiian-language Bible.

They quickly ran into a problem, however. The Hawaiians’ spoken language was too complex for the written language the missionaries wanted to create. First off, the Hawaiians used too many interchangeable and potentially confusing consonants—B and P; L, R, and D; K, T, and D; W and V.

For example, consider the last pair of consonants, W and V. As the missionaries presumably heard them say it, Hawaiians interchanged “v” for “w” in “Hawaii,” pronouncing it “ha-vy-ee," which they still do. Meanwhile, the missionaries would have heard Hawaiian word for woman pronounced as wahine, which does not rhyme with “machine.” Oops, Hawaiian vowels are pesky. The “i” is pronounced “ee” and instead of being silent, the final “e” is pronounced “eh.” And wahine is pronounced wah-hee-neh.

If they’d come up with their own written lexicon, the Hawaiians likely would’ve kept and interchanged the  “v” and “w.” Moreover, the old Hawaiians actually pronounced “Hawaii” “oh-vy-ee.” The consonant-loving missionaries were loath to start any word with a vowel, thus “o” had to go.

To simplify their Hawaiian-language lexicon, and perhaps to reduce the printing costs of Hawaiian Bibles, the missionaries dropped the interchangeable consonants B, R, D, and V, leaving the Hawaiians with P, L, K, and W. Hawaiian as the missionaries wrote it and 19th-century Hawaiians learned to read and write it—becoming the world’s most literate people at the time—is the Hawaiian we mostly hear today.

The British naval explorer Capt. James Cook, who “discovered” (stumbled across) the Hawaiian Islands in 1778-79, heard Hawaiian and wrote it in his journals as Hawaiians spoke it. For example, Cook wrote of a Hawaiian ruler named “Terryaboo” (Teh-ree-ya-boo), and a subchief named “Tamahamaha” (Ta-mah-hah-mah-ha). In the missionaries’ lexicon, “t” becomes “k” and “r” becomes “l”, “Terryaboo” becomes Kalani‘ōpu‘u (Kah-lah-nee-oh-pu-u), and “Tamahamaha” becomes Kamehameha (Ka-meh-ha-meh-ha). Kamehameha is, of course, the Hawaiian who united the Hawaiian Islands and became the Islands’ first king; Kalani‘ōpu‘u was his uncle and ruler of the Big Island when Cook arrived. Turns out, Cook got Hawaiians’ names right—to a T.

I was deep into the first draft of Once There Was Fire, my novel about the life of Kamehameha and the unification of the Hawaiian Islands, before I learned from a park ranger at the Big Island’s Pu‘uhonua o Hōnaunau National Historical Park that missionaries had altered the Hawaiians’ language. (Hōnaunau is a must-see stop on any Big Island historical tour.) I approached the ranger, told him about my novel, and asked him if I needed to change all the characters’ names. To my relief he assured me that today’s Hawaiian is what it is and not to worry about it.

That said, I’ll leave off with one caveat for viewers of “Chief of War”: The true (pre-missionary) name of the series’ hero wasn’t Ka‘iana; it was Ta‘iana.

Postscript: What’s in a name?

If you’re wondering why the Hawaiians are called “Hawaiians,” speak “Hawaiian,” or why their island chain is named the “Hawaiian Islands,” or America’s 50th state is called “Hawaii,” look for the answer to Kamehameha (AKA, The Conqueror), who united the islands. Kamehameha was born on the island of Hawai‘i (the Big Island) and began his successful campaign to unify (subjugate) all the other islands there. If Kamehameha had hailed from Maui, or if his fiercest enemy—Kahekili, the ruler of Maui—had conquered all the islands instead of  Kamehameha, the chain would likely be identified on today’s maps as the “Maui Islands,” the islanders would be “Mauians,” and their language would be “Mauian.”

Before the Hawaiian Islands were called the Hawaiian Islands, they were known as the “Sandwich Islands,” thanks to their aforesaid “discoverer,” Captain Cook. Cook named the islands after his patron, the Earl of Sandwich, an English nobleman who had the brilliant idea of slapping a piece of meat between two slices of bread. Hawaiians called their islands the Sandwich Islands until 1840, when the preamble to the Kingdom’s first constitution referred to the archipelago as the Hawaiian Islands. And they’ve been the Hawaiian Islands ever since.

“Chief of War” takes promiscuous historical liberties in first episodes

 © Copyright Stephen Shender 2025

 (Spoiler alert: You may not want to read this blog post if you haven’t watched the series yet.)

 Anyone familiar with Hawaiian history and hoping to see it well portrayed, however dramatically adapted, is likely to be disappointed by the first two episodes of “Chief of War,” Jason Momoa’s nine-episode series on Apple TV+.   

 Fiction

Episode one finds Ka‘iana, having deserted Kahekili’s army on Maui in disgust over the latter’s bloodlust, living peacefully as a simple, shark-roping fisherman on Kaua‘i. 

Requiring Ka‘iana’s continued service in his quest to conquer O‘ahu, Kahekili sends his warriors to find him and summon him back by the following morning, or else. After somehow crossing 230 to 250 miles of ocean between Kaua‘i and Maui overnight in a sail canoe, Ka‘iana agrees to fight for Kahekili again. Returning to O‘ahu with a fleet, he spearheads a successful invasion amid graphic and copious bloodshed and many bared male butt cheeks. Kahekili arrives in time to gratuitously order the slaughter of unarmed civilians and O‘ahu’s boy king, who are sheltering in a holy place of refuge (a pu‘uhonua in Hawaiian). Ka‘iana is filled with disgust anew. At night, he and his family steal away, this time to Maui.

In episode two, Kahekili’s warriors pursue Ka‘iana to Maui. Ka‘iana hides his family in Maui’s ’Iao Valley and takes off, leading a score of pursuers away from them.

Meanwhile, a group of haole come ashore from their ship to gather provisions for their continued voyage to China. One of Kahekili’s men crosses paths with a crewman, kills him and takes his pistol. Ka‘iana comes upon this fellow, kills him, takes the pistol and, encountering the other haole seamen in the bush, returns the pistol to them, earning their good will.

Ka‘iana continues his flight and is injured in a melee when Kahekili’s warriors overtake him, but he manages crawl away and hide in a cave where he’s subsequently found and nursed back to health by the ali‘i princess Ka‘ahumanu, meeting him for the first time.  

Ka‘ahumanu and Ka‘iana part ways, Ka‘ahumanu to travel to the nearby Big Island where she’s been betrothed by her father to an unnamed chief, against her will, and Ka‘iana to continue leading Kahekili’s warriors away from the ’Iao Valley.

This time Kahekili’s warriors corner Ka‘iana at the edge of steep cliff at the ocean’s edge and in the ensuing fight he disappears over the side with one of his attackers. Ka‘ahumanu and her entourage are about to depart for the Big Island in their double-hulled sail canoe when a crewman from the haole ship staggers up the beach crying he’s lost. Ka‘ahumanu orders her people to take the bedraggled haole with them. Meanwhile Ka‘iana wakes up aboard the haole ship and is last seen staring at Maui as it recedes in the ship’s wake.

Facts

None of the 19th-century Hawaiian sources on which I relied while researching Once There Was Fire, my novel about the life of Hawaii’s Kamehameha, mentioned a connection between Ka‘iana and Kahekili on Maui prior to their alliance on O‘ahu. The pair could have been together on Maui before moving on to O‘ahu. But everything else about Ka‘iana’s whereabouts in “Chief of War’s” first episode is sheer bunkum. 

As detailed in a previous blog post: Ka‘iana fled from O‘ahu to Kaua‘i after picking the wrong side in a rebellion against Kahekili. After Ka‘iana irritated Kaua‘i’s queen-consort, he left Kaua‘i on the Nootka, a British ship captained by John Meares and bound for China. “Chief of War’s” misplacement of Ka‘iana in episode one leads to some serious historical problems in episode two.

In episode two Ka‘ahumanu’s encounter with Ka'iana in a cave on Maui couldn’t have happened because Ka‘iana wasn’t there. Moreover, Ka‘ahumanu was more likely on the Big Island with her mother and father. Ka'iana met Ka‘ahumanu on the Big Island after he’d returned from China several years later, when she was already one of Kamehameha’s wives.

Captain Meares did not fish Ka'iana out of the sea after he fell off a cliff on Maui because neither of them were there. Ka‘iana boarded Meares’s ship under his own power at Kaua'i, where the Nootka had stopped for provisioning.

Meanwhile, who was that lost haole sailor whom Ka'ahumanu took aboard her sail canoe as she left Maui (where she probably wasn’t in the first place) for the Big Island? My bet's on John Young an English seaman who fell into Kamehameha’s hands about the time of Ka‘iana’s return from China. If confirmed in a later episode of “Chief of War,” that’s a historical mashup three or four times over: Ka'ahumanu wasn't on Maui, and John Young did not get left behind on Maui by the Nootka (Meare's ship), because (1) the Nootka stopped at Kaua'i, not Maui, and (2) because Young was left behind on the Big Island, not Maui, by a different vessel, the Eleanora captained by a nasty haole named Simon Metcalfe.

What a tangled history we weave when first we screw up who was where when!