Tongan language

Encyclopedia : T : TO : TON : Tongan language

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This article is about the Polynesian language of the kingdom of Tonga. For the unrelated languages with similar names, see Tonga language (Zambia), Tonga language (Malawi) or Tonga language (Thailand)

Tongan (lea fakatonga) is an Austronesian language spoken in Tonga. It has around 100,000 speakers and is a national language of Tonga. It is a VSO (Verb-Subject-Object) language.

Related languages

Tongan is one of the many languages in the Polynesian branch of the Austronesian languages, along with Hawaiian, Māori, Sāmoan and Tahitian, for example. Together with Niuean, it forms the Tongic subgroup of Polynesian. Assuming that the Polynesian languages have developed from a (real or imaginary) ancient language referred to as the Proto-Polynesian language, it seems that in Tongic the phonology has changed the least.

1. Tongan has preserved most of the phonemes of proto-Polynesian, most notably the /k/, /ŋ/, and /f/, while generally one of them has shifted to /ʔ/ in most other Polynesian languages. Examples in the table below.

Concerning the phonemes which did not shift to /ʔ/, some of them may have shifted further (/t/ to /k/, /f/ to /h/, /v/, or /w/, /ŋ/ to /n/). The /f/ change represents a historical change between Western Polynesian languages (such as Tongan) and Eastern Polynesian languages (such as New Zealand Māori). The last change is /faf/ becomes /wah/. New Zealand Māori also preserves proto-Polynesian /f/, except before back vowels /o/ and /u/, where it has changed in to /h/ .

2. Tongan has a glottal stop too, but it is a phoneme preserved from proto-Polynesian, which has disappeared in most other languages. However, one Eastern Polynesian language, Rapa Nui, has also retained the original /ʔ/ in some words.

3. /r/ and /l/ were distinct phonemes in proto-Polynesian, as they are still in Fijian, but in most other Polynesian languages they have merged, mostly to /r/ in East Polynesian languages, and mostly to /l/ in West Polynesian languages. However, Tongan has kept the distinction by keeping the /l/ but losing the /r/. This loss may be quite recent. The word "Lua", meaning "two", is still found in some placenames and archaic texts. "Marama" (light) thus became "maama", and the two successive "a"s are still pronounced separately, not yet contracted to "māma" (but see next chapter). On the other hand "toro" (sugarcane) already has become "tō" (still "tolo" in Sāmoan).

4. Tongan is one of the very few Polynesian languages where the so called definitive accent still occurs (see next chapter). Rotuman is another example.

	Languages
Phoneme	Fijian	Tongan	Hawaiian	Sāmoan	Tahitian	Māori	Cook Islands Māori	Rapa Nui	English
/ŋ/:	tangane	tangata	kanaka	tagata	taata	tangata	tangata	tangata	man
/k/:	vuaka	puaka	puaa	puaa	puaa	poaka	puaka		pig
/f/:	yalewa	fafine	wahine	fafine	vahine	wahine	vaine	vieSee Metraux	woman/women
/ʔ/:	tu	tuʻu	kū	tū	tū (-> tiʻa)	tū	tū	tuʻu	stand
/ʔ/:	lako mai	hāʻele	hele	haele	ʻaere	haere	haere		go/come
/r/:	rua	ua	lua	lua	rua (piti)	rua	rua		two
/l/:	tolu	tolu	kolu	tolu	toru	toru	toru		three

Tongan alphabet

In the old, "missionary" alphabet, the vowels were put first and then followed by the consonants (a, e, i, o, u, f... etc.). This was still so as of the Privy Council decision of 1943 on the orthography of the Tongan language. However, C.M. Churchward's grammar and dictionary favoured the standard European alphabetical order, and since his time that one has been in use exclusively:

• a - /a/
• e - /e/
• f - /f/
• h - /h/
• i - /i/
• k - /k/
• l - /l/
• m - /m/
• n - /n/
• ng - /ŋ/ (written as g but still pronounced as [ŋ] (as in present-day Samoan and Fijian) before 1943}
• o - /o/
• p - /p/ unaspirated; written as b before 1943
• s - /s/ sometimes written as j before 1943 (see below)
  
• t - /t/ unaspirated
• u - /u/
• v - /v/
• (fakaua) - /ʔ/ the glottal stop. It should be written with the inverted curly apostrophe (unicode 0x02BB) and not with the single quote open or with a mixture of quotes open and quotes close. See also okina.

Note that the above order is strictly followed in proper dictionaries. Therefore ngatu follows nusi, a follows vunga and it also follows z if foreign words occur. Long vowels come directly after short, which in practice means a do not care situation.

The original j, used for /ʧ/, disappeared in the beginning of the 20th century, merging with /s/. By 1943, j was no longer used. Consequently, many words written with s in Tongan are cognate to those with t in other Polynesian languages. For example Masisi (a star name) in Tongan is congate with Matiti in Tokelauan; siale (Gardenia taitensis) in Tongan and tiare in Tahitian. This seems to be a natural development, as Proto-Polynesian had no j - the /ti/ phoneme is generally not pronounced the same as /t/ in English, thus, rendering more of a [ʧ]/[j] sound in nearly all of the Polynesian languages.

Syllabification

• Each syllable has exactly one vowel. The number of syllables in a word is exactly equal to the number of vowels it has.

• Long vowels, indicated with a toloi (macron) count as one, but may in some circumstances be split up in two short ones, in which case, luckily, they are both written. Toloi are supposed to be written where needed, in practice this may be seldom done.

• Each syllable may have no more than one consonant.

• Consonant combinations are not permitted. The ng is not a consonant combination, since it represents a single sound. As such it can never be split, the proper hyphenation of fakatonga (Tongan) therefore is fa-ka-to-nga, against which normal, English-oriented wordprocessors always sin.

• Each syllable must end in a vowel. All vowels are pronounced, but an i at the end of an utterance is usually not heard.

• The fakaua is a consonant. It must be followed (and, except at the beginning of a word, preceded) by a vowel. Unlike the glottal stops in many other Polynesian languages texts, the fakaua is always written. (Only sometimes before 1943.)

• Stress normally falls on the next to last syllable of a word with two or more syllables; example: móhe (sleep), mohénga (bed). If however, the last vowel is long, it takes the stress; example: kumā (mouse) (stress on the long ā). The stress also shifts to the last vowel if the next word is an enclitic; example: fále (house), falé ni (this house). Finally the stress can shift to the last syllable, including an enclitic, in case of the definitive accent; example: mohengá ((that) particular bed), fale ní (this particular house). It is also here that a long vowel can be split into two short ones; example: pō (night), poó ni (this night), pō ní (this particular night). Or the opposite: maáma (light), māmá ni (this light), maama ní (this particular light). Of course, there are some exceptions to the above general rules. The stress accent is normally not written, except where it is to indicate the definitive accent or fakamamafa. But here, too, people often neglect to write it, only using it when the proper stress cannot be easily derived from the context.

Although the acute accent has been available on most personal computers from their early days onwards, when Tongan newspapers started to use computers around 1990 to produce their papers, they were unable to find, or failed to enter, the proper keystrokes, and it grew into a habit to put the accent after the vowel instead on it: not á but a´. But as this distance seemed to be too big, a demand arose for Tongan fonts where the acute accent was shifted to the right, a position halfway in between the two extremes above. Most papers still follow this practice.

Use of the definitive accent

English and many other languages only provide two article types:

• the indefinite (a) and
• the definite (the).

The phenomenon of the definitive accent allows Tongan to have three article levels, and not only articles, the idea spreads to the possessives as well.

• the indefinite accent ha. Example: ko ha pālangi ('a caucasian', but it could have been almost any other human being)
• the semi definite accent (h)e. Example: ko e pālangi ('the caucasian' in the sense that the person does not belong to some other race, but still rather 'a caucasian' if there several of them)
• the definite accent (h)e with the shifted ultimate stress. Example: ko e pālangí ('the caucasian', that particular person there and no one else).

Divide into three registers

There are three registers which consist of

• ordinary words (the normal language)
• polite words
• honorific words (the language for the chiefs)
• regal words (the language for the king)
• deragatory words

For example, the phrase "Come and eat!" translates to::

• ordinary: hau pea kai (come and eat!); Friends, family members and so forth may say this to each other when invited for dinner.
• polite: meatokoni (food, or more precisely: mea-tokoni: food-thing, i.e. foodstuff); This would be used in serious study books or in more formal situations, rather than the ordinary meakai.
• honorific: mea mai pea ilo (come and eat!); The proper used towards chiefs, particularly the nobles, but it may also be used by an employee towards his boss, or in other similar situations. When talking about chiefs, however, it is always used, even if they are not actually present, but in other situations only on formal occasions. A complication to the beginning student of Tongan is that such words very often also have an alternative meaning in the ordinary register: mea (thing) and ilo (know, find).
• regal: hāele mai pea taumafa (come and eat!); Used towards the king or God. The same considerations as for the honorific register apply. Hāele is one of the regal words which have become the normal word in other Polynesian. Some regal words clearly reflect a Sāmoan origin. History tells that sometimes the Tongans really went to Sāmoa to invent a new regal word. The Sāmoans, instead gave them words with vulgar meanings in their language, and the Tongans, not knowing that, used them to their king. ^{[[Citing sources citation needed]]} Example 1: māimoa = labour of the king, either physical or mental (like the poems of Queen Sālote) from the Sāmoan maʻimoa = chicken illness, meaning: insane.^{[[Citing sources citation needed]]} Example 2: lakoifie = good health of the king, probably from the Fijian lako-i-vē = walk to where?^{[[Citing sources citation needed]]}
• derogatory: mama (eat!); Words which normally would be used for the pigs. The word mama means "to chew" (along with various other meanings) in the ordinary register. A speaker would apply this word to himself and the commoners to make the distance between him and the nobles or the king even larger.

Literature

Tongan is primarily a spoken, rather than written, language. Only the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and a few other books are written in Tongan. There are not enough people who can read Tongan to commercially justify publishing books in the language. Most reading literature available in Tonga is in English.

There are a several weekly and monthly magazines in Tongan, but there are no daily newspapers.

Weekly news papers, some of them twice per week:

• Ko e Kalonikali ʻo Tonga
• Ko e Keleʻa
• Taimi ʻo Tonga
• Talaki
• Ko e Tauʻatāina

Monthly or two-monthly papers, mostly church publications:

• Taumuʻa lelei (Catholic)
• Tohi fanongonongo (Wesleyan)

References

• C.M. Churchward; Tongan grammar; ISBN 0-908717-05-9

External links

[ {{{1] of Wikipedia

• [Planet Tonga]
• [Ethnologue on Tongan]
• [Omniglot on Tongan]

 

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