The ‘Okina and the Kahakō

When I first read ‘Akamu (the first book in the Tales of Nu‘alolo Valley books) I felt so many emotions: thrilled to have read such an amazing book, but also a little nervous. This was going to be the first book I ever edited, and I had to make sure that the text perfectly reflected Johnson Kahili IV’s intention and vision. That meant correcting any minor typos in the manuscript, and triple-checking the exact spellings of the Hawaiian words in the book (over seventy of them!).

This was sometimes a little tricky, because the Hawaiian language was an oral one, which means they chose not to have a written language. Instead, their histories were recorded through chants, songs, and movements (such as hula). It’s only in the last two hundred years that Hawaiian has been written down, and only the last seventy-ish years that folks are standardizing the ‘okina and the kahakō, which are marks that clarify how the word is pronounced. These are not optional—the entire meaning of the word changes.

(Note: the ‘okina looks like a tiny 6. Some (okay, MOST) word processors will auto-correct the ‘okina if it’s in the middle of a word to look like an apostraphe [ ’ ]. This drove me literally bonkers while I was editing ‘Akamu.)

For example, consider the Hawaiian word for “shark.” It’s manō, with a kahakō over the o. But if you look at the entries in Ulukau (an incredible online resource for the Hawaiian language), there are over thirty different translations for the letters “m-a-n-o,” and they all mean different things. So it’s simply a matter of double-checking each dictionary entry to make sure that your intended meaning has the any needed pronunciation marks.

Johnson trusted me (a white woman from Chicago) to publish his novel, and I’ve done everything I can to make him proud. ‘iwith his novel. It is an honor to publish such an incredible book that takes place in the visually and lyrically astounding setting of ancient Hawai‘i. And so it was a joy to double-, triple-, and quadruple-check the book to make sure that every ‘okina was (as I pictured it to myself) a fish swimming downward with a small tail.

-Jess Wright Buha