Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 March 1

= March 1 =

Kahulla
Hello, while transcribing on wikisource, more precisely on that page for context, I found the word "kahulla". ("kahullas", but I think that is a plural.)

I could not find any mention of that word anywhere.

The book is from 1850, so it might be an archaic form.

Does anyone know what that means?

(I do not know if this is where I should be asking that, sorry if it isn't.) Alien333 (talk) 08:40, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Just to provide a little more context, the author is Frances Sargent Osgood. The poem and the word make me think of Hawaii, but I don't see a connection in her article and that feeling may be completely wrong. --Wrongfilter (talk) 08:52, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
 * In this edition, it is spelled "Kahullah's", the genitive of a name, which makes more grammatical sense than the adjective form in the edition on wikisource. --Wrongfilter (talk) 08:56, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
 * It sounds like an Arabic (Muslim) given name, such as Abdullah, Bahaullah and Najibullah, but several common nouns also end in -ullah, meaning "of God". I do not find uses of the word as a given name other than perhaps in the poem. To me, the interpretation as the genitive of a name does not make sense in the context; if we interpret "" as a noun phrase, then where is the verb? The word ""? The poet is American, but the use of the word as a verb is British. Will the deceased girl's hair brighten the deck of Kahullah? What does that mean? I find a poetic subject–object inversion, helping to maintain the rhyme, more plausible: bright kahullahs, whatever these may be – presumably something specific to the yonder spirit world – will deck (cover or decorate) the girl's hair. If the rendering "" was a typographical error in the 1846 edition of Osgood's poems, it was not corrected in the 1848 edition. --Lambiam 13:11, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes, the possible inversion now I see and do agree that is is more plausible. In both interpretations the comma after "stream" seems out of place, doesn't it? Or does it help to identify the hair's stream as the object rather than thhe subject of the phrase? --Wrongfilter (talk) 13:31, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Running "kahullah" through google translate (using detect language) gives "his shoulders"(Arabic). Gender aside, it would fit the context. Shall bright(bare) kahullahs(shoulders) deck. 41.23.55.195 (talk) 13:33, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
 * The deceased person is feminine, so we'd need something meaning "her shoulders". --Lambiam 14:15, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Since, in the next lines, the poet envisions wreaths of rainbow shells around the little girl's arms and neck, it is semantically more likely that bright somethings (perhaps some kind of flowers?) enliven her dark hair. Spirit-fruit, kahullahs and wreaths of rainbow shells are said to constitute "fragrant bowers" amid which the child's spirit can play on. --Lambiam 14:23, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
 * The little girl whose burial inspired the flow of Osgood's poetic vein (see the epigraph of the poem) was Tamahoogah, a minor character in a story entitled "William Burton, the boy who would be a sailor" by L. Maria Child, published in her collection of children's stories Flowers for Children, Part III (1844). The setting is an island "". This makes any connection to Arabic less likely. --Lambiam 14:04, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Great find! The islands are identified as the "Mulgrave Group", i.e. Mili Atoll and Knox Atoll in the Marshall Islands, which would make the word Micronesian. I haven't found the word in the "William Burton" story yet, but wouldn't be surprised if it was lurking in there somewhere. --Wrongfilter (talk) 16:26, 1 March 2024 (UTC) Nope, looks like it is not. --Wrongfilter (talk) 16:38, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
 * The Voyages of Captain Cook mentions that Tongans wore "necklaces, made of the fruit of the pandanus, and various sweet-smelling flowers, which go under the general name of kahulla". Perhaps Osgood, who's referring to hair ornaments rather than necklaces (those are in the next lines), is making a distinction between adornments of vegetable origin in the hair and ones of conchological origin on the neck and arms. Deor (talk) 02:51, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
 * This answers the question. I don't think we need to pay much weight to putative distinctions made by the poet, but can interpret her use as meaning a wreath or garland of fruit and sweet-smelling flowers, regardless of which part of the body it adornes. After all, her use of the term also ignores that Tongan is part of the group of Polynesian languages while the Marshallese language that would have been spoken on Child's Mulgrave Islands, some 1,000 miles apart from Tonga, belongs to the Micronesian languages. Consider that Hawaiʻian is also a Polynesian language, closely related to Tongan, yet has a different term: lei. So it is somewhat unlikely that Tongan and Marshallese, not that closely related, would have the same word for such wreaths. --Lambiam 11:58, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks to you all!
 * I am amazed by what you reference desk wizards can find on such an obscure thing in less than two days. Alien333 (talk) 13:20, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Update: I was going to add it to wiktionary, and then noticed on some Tongan pages mention of the Churchward english-tongan dictionary, which is available for borrow on IA (tongandictionary0000chur). It mentions, on page 242, "kahoa", but not "kahulla". kahoa is said to mean necklace or garland. As it seems to be the same word, I am wondering, did Cook and Osgood get the spelling wrong, or did the word just change over time? (the Churchward dictionary is from 1959) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alien333 (talk • contribs) 20:05, 2 March 2024 (UTC)


 * I have a suspicion that when Cook reached Tonga, the Tongans did not have a spelling for their language. Note that the first written record of the name of Hawaiʻi, by Cook's second lieutenant James King, was spelled "Owhyhee". --Lambiam 23:34, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Tocharian /n/
From an uncited part of Tocharian languages:"is transcribed by two different letters in the Tocharian alphabet depending on position. Based on the corresponding letters in Sanskrit, these are transcribed (word-finally, including before certain clitics) and n (elsewhere), but represents, not."Since the sound's position determines what letter is used, why are these two glyphs considered different letters, rather than one being seen as a variant of each other? Hebrew's sofit forms, and final forms of "S" (ſ rather than s) and "Σ" (ς rather than σ), are considered variants rather than separate letters, and when Tocharian was discovered, it didn't have any living speakers to argue for them to be considered separate letters. Tocharian script doesn't answer my question, since every consonant letter appears to represent a different sound. Nyttend (talk) 22:17, 1 March 2024 (UTC)


 * I don't know anything about Tocharian script specifically, but generally in Indic alphabets Anusvara is a diacritic indicating nasalization, which would be hard to visually unify with the ordinary alphabet letter which writes [n] or [na]... AnonMoos (talk) 01:58, 2 March 2024 (UTC)