Description

There is a need to know a couple of local pronunciations to avoid (sheepish grin) embarrassment. “Oh, you mean that fern.” It’s about the threatened loss of a language and its subsequent recovery-in-progress:

It was challenging for some newcomers to the islands to grasp the little “uh-oh” mark, the ‘okina, so plenty of people have grown up pronouncing this plant’s name as law-wye or maybe like low-wye where the “low” sounds like in “allow.”

But the language is returning, in the hands of cultural practitioners as well as linguists, and so is the ‘okina. (The kahakō, too, but that’s for another story.) So the best we can do at the moment is try to pronounce it, “Law-oo-ah ‘ eh” with that clear break in it… glossing over the awkward beginning that sounds so simple and smooth when it comes from the mouths of fluent speakers.