- Forum >
- Topic: Hawaiian >
- "Makemake ʻo ia i ka mea uliu…
8 Comments
It comes at the beginning when it is a verbless sentence. It is confusing because sometimes noun phrases are translated into English as complete sentences. Like you might remember in the weather lessons something like “Hū, ka wela o Kona” (“Wow, Kona’s Heat”) would be translated as “Wow. It’s hot in Kona.” because that is how we would prefer to express the weather in English.
Hawaiian also does not have the same kind of copular verb as English does with “to be”. So there are a lot of sentence structures that lack verbs, like you might remember from the personal data lessons “‘O Kaleo ko’u inoa” (“Kaleo my name”) but they translate it to English as “My name is Kaleo”. If there is a verb in the sentence, it comes first unless there is a particle (like the negative particle ‘a’ole) in front of it...