26 July 2010
Posted in
Dr. Phillips CineDome
So you’ve just seen The Ultimate Wave Tahiti at the Orlando Science Center and now you want to go surf the big waves of Tahiti. Assuming you know how to surf (not an easy task!), you’ll probably want to learn the language of Tahiti. Well, here are some interesting facts about the Tahitian Language, or “Reo Tahiti.” Get out your pen and paper!
The Tahitian Language does not contain a “B,” even though one of the most famous islands in Tahiti is “Bora Bora.” This is because when early visitors heard of the island, they mistook “Pora Pora” for “Bora Bora.”
Another interesting fact about the Tahitian Language is that their alphabet includes what is called a “glottal stop,” or ‘eta. To English speakers, this would appear to be an apostrophe, but it is in fact a consonant. For example, the word for fish in Tahitian is i'a.
Now let’s say you’ve mastered all of the words in Tahitian. Something you’d have to keep in mind is the word order. In English, our general sentence structure is Subject Verb Object (SVO). For example, “I ate cake.” “I” is the subject, “ate” is the verb, and “cake” is the object. In the Tahitian Language, the order is “Verb Subject Object.” So a proper sentence in Tahiti would be “Ate I cake!”
If you haven’t seen The Ultimate Wave Tahiti, be sure to check it out at the Orlando Science Center.
