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Origins
Hawaiian is a member of the Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family. It was brought to the islands by Polynesian seafarers, who are thought to have arrived around 1300 CE.
Before the arrival of Captain James Cook, the Hawaiian language was purely a spoken language. The first written form of Hawaiian was developed by American Protestant missionaries in Hawai?i during the early 19th century. The missionaries assigned letters from the English alphabet that roughly corresponded to the Hawaiian sounds. Later, additional characters were added to clarify pronunciation.
Unlike English, Hawaiian is a mora-timed language. This means that it distinguishes between long and short vowels. In the writing system, the long vowels are written with a macron called kahako. Also unlike English, in Hawaiian, the presence or absence of a glottal stop is distinctive. In writing, a glottal stop is indicated with the ?okina. When a Hawaiian word is spelled without the necessary ?okina and kahako, it is impossible for someone who does not already know the word to guess at the proper pronunciation.
Omission of the ?okina and kahako in printed texts can even obscure the meaning of a word. For example, the word lanai means stiff-necked, while lanai means veranda, and Lana?i is the name of one of the Hawaiian islands. This can be a problem in interpreting 19th century Hawaiian texts recorded in the older orthography. For these reasons, careful writers now use the modern Hawaiian orthography.
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