"Chee, you seen Kaipo? He had karang da reef on his
face. Ho, all hemajang. Was uji."
I was reminded of the wonderful Hawaiian pidgin word hemajang when the Oxford English
Dictionary announced it was putting the word hammajang on its extensive list of "real" words.
There is, of course, no standard spelling for most pidgin
words. And I was concerned the English dictionary OED would create a standard where
none existed. I was concerned, because if you were to find a standard, it might
not be hammajang.
I wrote OED this email:
I note that you have
added a word, hammajang, to the dictionary.
I am a lifelong
journalist in the Hawaiian Islands and want to suggest another spelling, which
is often used, is pronounced in the same way, is more attuned to the word’s
Hawaiian language roots, and doesn’t violate Hawaiian pidgin spelling rules in
the way that hammajang does.
The more appropriate
spellings, from my perspective, are hemajang, or perhaps hamajang or even
hemajeng or hamajeng. But not hammajang.
I have no thoughts on
the origin of “jang, but hema may be from the Hawaiian word hema meaning left
or south (used in the sense that English uses sinister, as left but also wrong,
odd or unfortunate). Or perhaps hemo, which can mean loose or undone.
The Hawaiian language
reduplications, hemahema and hemohemo, emphasize these definitions.
Hemajang is Hawaiian
pidgin, meaning it is a spoken and not a written language. There is no
consistency in spelling. But one rule is this: As in the Hawaiian written
language it doesn’t use double consonants.
This word is sometimes
spelled hemajang, my own preferred spelling, which is also the preferred
spelling of the classic Hawaiian creole book, “Pidgin To Da Max,” which dates
to 1981. I’m not sure whether hemajeng was in the first edition, but it was in
later editions of a book that now claims more than 200,000 printings.
And sometimes hemajeng
(https://quizlet.com/89843159/pidgin-flash-cards/),
And sometimes hamajang
(http://slang.uoregon.edu/pub_search.lasso?RecordIDNumber=15079&Process=detail01)
If you’re going to
stick with hammajang, please at least concede that there are other spellings.
But I suggest that hammajang is a nonstandard spelling and that hemajang is the
one that gets the most currency.
Pidgin is very personal to folks, and I know that the pidgin
I learned on west Molokai is different than the pidgin of Kalaheo and of Makawao
and Kunia and Papakolea. There really isn't one pidgin. It changes (at least
words, although not so much grammar) with the ethnicities of the community.
I will concede that there are occasionally double consonants in pidgin (but not Hawaiian). Like buggah. And slippa. At least in these cases, the double consonants are a function of English words repronounced as pidgin, bugger and slipper.
I will further concede that some folks in the Islands have used the spelling
hammajang. The website e-hawaii.com does, but then, with all due respect, they
also spell hanabata as hanabaddah and uji as ujee. Maybe that's an O`ahu thing.
There are places where a voyage is something on which she went go, where other places she had go.
Certainly, there are a lot of communities that don't use some
pidgin words that are common elsewhere. Take tantaran or borot. Some places
you hear them, others not so much. (Incidentally, if you can have a conversation
about the difference between someone who's tantaran and someone who's borot, you’re
up in pidgin master's degree territory.)
And back to the subject at hand, when a European publication
decides to decide how to spell a Hawaiian pidgin word.
Well.
That's hemajang.
© Jan TenBruggencate 2019
