MacGougan at Large

Notes from Hawaii - 1

Tommy Bahama

So I am sitting on a beautiful beach in Hawaii and making a list of the things about the place that might be worth commenting on. The first thing I write down is Tommy Bahama. Why? Because it is all around me. I am sitting amid a fair amount of human diversity, surrounded by travelers from every state and dozens of countries, leavened with a mix of locals. All of us are in bathing attire, which somehow simultaneously puts us on equal footing while accentuating our physical diversity. What is the one thing that seems to be universal? We have all brought Tommy Bahama folding chairs to this beach. Many of us have also brought Tommy Bahama sun umbrellas. Probably a lot of us are wearing Tommy Bahama bathing suits as well, but there is no easy way to tell. Unlike the chairs and umbrellas, the bathing suits don’t have conspicuous Tommy Bahama logos. 

I look around and wonder: How did one company achieve this level of beach market dominance? Why does the name even speak to anyone in Hawaii? This place couldn’t be further away from the Bahamas if it tried. (Although it does dabble in Caribbean culture. The mixtape for our sightseeing cruise featured a lot of Jamaican reggae.)

Vowels

The second thing I write down is Vowels. I am no linguist, but my layperson impression is that the Hawaiian language is unusual in the extent to which it expects vowels to do the heavy lifting. In English, you could leave out all the vowels and still make sense of most sentences. This is true of many other languages as well. The earliest versions of the Bible were written in a condensed version of Hebrew that omitted the vowels to save space. 

If you omit the vowels from a sentence of Hawaiian, you won’t have much left. Without the vowels, the two Hawaiian islands that my wife and I visited were K and M. 

As near as I can tell, Hawaiian has fewer available consonants than English and you never blend them together. Meanwhile, the vowels are free to mix and match at will. 

The downside of all this is that it takes some time for non-Hawaiians to get comfortable reading place names and other necessary bits of Hawaiian. The upside is that vowels, pretty much by definition, sing better than consonants. They are sounds you make with your mouth open. We have heard several excellent singers during our time here, and they have been good singers in English but unearthly good singers in Hawaiian.