The Hawaiian language only has 8 consonant sounds!

[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’"

[matthewb0051]

State fish of Hawaii (this is true). Used to have my kids say this, without the beoytch part.

[Steve Carlton]

You triggered this.

[WPOZZZ]

Wat, bodda yu? If can, can. If no can, still can.

Btw, Mele Kalikimaka was written by my friend's grandfather.

[Tobra]

You want beef brah?

[GH85Carrera]

TheWhen we lived in Hawaii I went to school from 8th to 10 grade there. I first year was horrid, as I was 50% of the Haole students. Yep, just one other unfortunate Haole kid. Every day was some fighting, and on Fridays even the girls would hit me. And they all had huge Samoan boyfriends, so no fighting back with a girl. The last Friday of the year, I just stayed home.

Then we moved on base to Hickam AFB and I went to Radford HS and it was about 50-50 Haole and locals so no more fighting.

I was proficient in understand and speaking pidgin English after three years.

Then we moved to Alabama to a school that was 60% black. I was clueless to what they were saying for the first year. I completely lost my ability to speak pidgin after two years.

Tattoo and Aloha are about the only two Hawaiian words in common use in the rest of the world. Even 50 years later at my parents house they had a peg board on the garage we all called it a puka board.