Definitions
Wiktionary
- n. A person of Hawaiian descent.
- n. historical A South Pacific Islander, especially a labourer in Australia or Canada.
Etymologies
- 1840. From Hawaiian kanaka ("person"), ultimately from Proto-Polynesian *taŋata. (Wiktionary)
Examples
“Also, at the moment of delivering each kick, he called the kanaka a black heathen.”
“I aku o Aiwohikupua i kona Kuhina, "Heaha keia e hoi ole mai nei na kanaka a kaua e hoouna aku nei?”
“Some time he made kanaka plenty cross along him and kanaka want 'm kill m, kanaka he think devil-devil and kanaka he hear that fella mate sing out, Yah!”
“You fella kanaka just like 'm dog -- plenty fright along that fella trader.”
“In addition to her eight or ten kanaka seamen, her white captain, mate, and supercargo, and her six cabin passengers, she sailed from Rangiroa with something like eighty-five deck passengers -- Paumotans and Tahitians, men, women, and children each with”
“What name you fella kanaka all the same pickaninny?”
“Without doubt I had seen him with the rest of the kanaka crew on board, but I had not consciously been aware of his existence, for the Petite Jeanne was rather overcrowded.”
“So I called to the kanaka to come to me, and proceeded to share the hatch cover with him.”
“You fella kanaka kill 'm plenty fella white man long time before.”
“Plenty fella kanaka we get 'm canoe, plenty fella canoe, we go catch' m that fella ship.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘kanaka’.
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Learned (or Encountered) in Reading
I have a list for words learned from Newsweek; here's where I keep all the stuff from other shit I read.
Except when I'm looking stuff up and find new words that way. Those go on their...cellie, laminectomy, mridangam, terroir, hypospadias, crus, corpora cavernosa, crura, uretheral meatus, bartholin's gland, coloquintida, colopexy and 921 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for kanaka.
chained_bear I like this description of spoken language, though I am not educated enough to comment on the veracity of the author's position:
"I had heard much of the liquid beauty of the Kanaka tongue. It was a surprise to find it the most unmusical and harshly gutteral language I had ever heard. It comes from the mouth in a series of explosive grunts and gibberings. The listener is distinctly and painfully impressed with the idea that if the nitroglycerine words were retained in the system, they would prove dangerous to health and is fearful lest they choke the spluttering Kanaka to death before he succeeds in biting them off and flinging them into the atmosphere."
--Walter Noble Burns, A Year with a Whaler, 18 Apr 27, 2008