The Voices of Eden
A History of Hawaiian Language Studies
How did outsiders first become aware of the Hawaiian language? How were they and Hawaiians able to understand each other? How was Hawaiian recorded and analyzed in the early decades after European contact Albert J. Schutz provides illuminating answers to these and other questions about Hawaii’s postcontact linguistic past. The result is a highly readable and accessible account of Hawaiian history from a language-centered point of view. The author also provides readers with an exhaustive analysis and critique of nearly every work ever written about Hawaiian.
Albert J. Schütz, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, has been engaged in Fijian linguistic research since 1960. His first fieldwork, a dialect geography, involved collecting and analyzing data from 105 villages over the entire group. Sixty villages from the main island of Viti Levu were the focus of his PhD dissertation. In 1971 he was appointed Director of a monolingual dictionary project in Suva, a position that he held until 1979. With the help and advice of the dictionary staff, he continued to work on a grammar, The Fijian Language (1985), the predecessor to the present work. From 1962 to the present, he has published 40 books, monographs, articles, and reviews on Fijian linguistic topics. They include: a full-scale grammar, teaching materials for the Peace Corps (with Rusiate T. Komaitai), materials for workshops for Fijian teachers, language history and biography, a language primer for visitors, papers on sociolinguistics and language change, loanwords, dialectology, phonetics and phonology, lexicography, miscellaneous grammatical and phonological topics, and an e-book with words and phrases pronounced by a native speaker.
