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- "Hālāwai ke kauka ma nā Pōʻak…
"Hālāwai ke kauka ma nā Pōʻakahi."
Translation:The doctor takes appointments on Mondays.
15 Comments
You are correct, the english is weird but I think they tried to be more colloquial with the translation because the direct understanding might not be clear.
For us, the direct is more like: "The Doctor's appointments are Mondays."
Because it's really short, not everyone might understand that it means the doctor is "available" for appointments on mondays or that the doctor only "takes" appointments for mondays. So I surmise they wrote the translation that way to be more clear :)
191
I'm thinking since the verbal form of halawai means "To arrange a meeting" and "ke kauka" is the subject, that's why. If it were "the doctor appointments" wouldn't it be more like "ke halwai o ke kauka"?
This one is hard to explain but Halawai doesnt need to be pluralized as it is a topic here.
It's kind of like when we had the earlier lessons with structures like "Puni o Kaleo i ka mai‘a."
This sentence was saying that Kaleo loves bananas, but doesnt use nā infront of mai‘a. Why?
Becuase we are trying to say kaleo loves bananas as a preference. We are not trying to say that kaleo loves "multiple bananas." Nā is used for literal plural instances so if we used it, we would be saying kaleo loves all the bananas, kaleo loves plural bananas rather than kaleo loves bananas "as a topic/thing."
Think of halawai in this sentence "as a topic/thing" rather than "as a plural." It is the difference between:
Appointments are long.
All three appointments are long.
In english, both of those sentences have an "s" at the end of appointment but only the latter sentence is a literal plural and is directly indicating multiple appointments. The first sentence is not a literal plural, it uses appointments as a topic to say "in general, an appointment is long."
Sorry for the long explanation, it was the only way I could think to break it down. Hope it helps! :)
"Halawai ke kauka" is indeed the possessive form here.
It is similar to "Puni ka po‘e" from earlier lessons. Puni = favor, desire, love, favorite, so:
Puni ka po‘e i ka hula = favor (of) the people is for hula -or- people's love is for hula.
These lessons don't explain direct translations such as above and only give the colloquial english of "the people love hula." This makes sense but then a lot of people miss the possessive nuance.
As with the current sentence at hand, they also went with a colloquial translation to make it more undersrandable.
The direct english translation for the sentence is: "the doctor's appointments are on mondays." The colloquial translation they gave us is just meant to clarify that the doctor "takes" appointments on mondays.
Hope that makes sense! :)
I am very confused, please clarify.... Wouldn't it be more accurate to say "the doctor appointments are on Mondays"? where does the word "takes" come from? isn't there a word in Hawaiian for "takes" and wouldn't it be in the sentence if we are to translate the sentence this way? if we can insert an additional word, couldn't we use "makes," "accepts," "has, "holds," or "schedules"? How do we know which of those words is acceptable? How are we to know when it's ok to add a word? mahalo
191
Maybe it's easiest to try to remember that "hālāwai" means "to take (an) appointment(s)" (colloquially), since wehewehe does say it means "To arrange a meeting" (close enough???) ...?