[masraum]

I saw this the other day. I've never been to HI, but have, of course, heard place names, and some of the common words. I'd never given the words/language any thought. Whoa! Only 8 consonant SOUNDs.

https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/hawaiian-loanwords/

Below is not the entire text of the article in the link above, but it's a lot of it.

The Hawaiian language only has 8 consonant sounds (phonemes), making it one of the smallest consonant inventories of any language in the world. (The smallest consonant inventory goes to Rotokas with only 6!) (Gordon 2016: 44)



First, most of the consonants get converted to /k/. The /k/ sound does a lot of heavy lifting in Hawaiian. Since the only other stop consonants in the language are /p/ and /ʔ/, any stop consonant that isn’t a bilabial or glottal stop can function as /k/—even [t]! The Hawaiian language doesn’t distinguish between [k] and [t]—they are functionally the same sound. So makua ‘parent’ might be pronounced as either [makua] or [matua] with no functional difference. Speakers recognize it as the word makua either way. Certain dialects will pronounce /k/ as [t] more frequently than other dialects, which prefer a [k] pronunciation, but it’s all considered the same phoneme. (Wikipedia: Hawaiian phonology)

The result is that all the English sounds /s z ʃ ʒ t d tʃ dʒ g/ are converted to /k/ when borrowed into Hawaiian. Here are some examples:
English Hawaiian
truck kalaka
blessing pelekine
speak kapika
rabbit lāpaki

You may already know another famous borrowing: Mele Kalikimaka for English ‘Merry Christmas’

Hawaiian syllables are also strictly either consonant-vowel (CV) or just a vowel (V). Syllables cannot end in a consonant. So in borrowed words, clusters of more than one consonant are either broken apart or simplified into a single consonant, while syllable-final consonants are either given an extra vowel or deleted entirely (Wikipedia: Hawaiian phonology):
English Hawaiian
bill pila
island ʻailana
scraper kalepa

Knowing all this, now you can see how all the following English words got borrowed into Hawaiian as kini (which also happens to be the native Hawaiian word for ‘multitude’).

gin
tin
king
kin
zinc
guinea
Jean
Jane
Jenny

My mind is blown!

"Mele Kalikimaka for English ‘Merry Christmas’"