Ko'olau mountains, O'ahu

... as seen from Nu'uanu Pali

 

N.B. - you'll be seeing place names, lots of them, with double vowels. The apostrophe I inserted might not be correct Hawai'ian spelling (the apostrophe is actually one of just a handful of consonants recognized in the Hawai'ian language; it's called "okina" and is pronounced as a glottal stop, an unvoiced "uh"), but it gives you an idea of how to pronounce the word. Adjacent vowels without the okina are slurred together as a diphthong. So Nu'uanu is said "Noo-oo-WAH-noo", and O'ahu is 3 distinct syllables: "oh-AH-hu."

 

Though I don't show them here, the language also uses macrons, the "long vowel" sign, to indicate a syllable stressed outside the usual rule of "second-last syllable gets the stress." E.g. - a main street in Honolulu is named after King David Kalakaua, and there's a macron over the 2nd "a" -- making his name (properly pronounced) "Kah-LAH-kow-ah."

 

It took me _ 5_ visits to Hawai'i before I learned I'd been mangling that name into "Kah-lah-KOW-ah"!

Done