Ho'oma'ama'a

vs. to practice, become accustomed; to train, drill.

     I am sure many of you grew up familiar with the word maʻa - accustomed to, adept, familiar. If you are maʻa to something you are at ease with it because you "know it". This is part of the word hoʻomaʻamaʻa - to practice. In other words, practice in an effort to get familiar with it. 

     The hoʻo- is a causative. Yikes. What does that mean? Well, I think in its simplest terms, a causative "causes" the verb following it to happen. Here is an easy example: hauʻoli - happy. Hoʻohauʻoli - to cause happiness (to make happy).

     Maʻamaʻa is a reduplication (in the dictionary it will say redup.) of the word maʻa. Hawaiian is into reduplication (check the recesses of your memory for all the Hawaiian redup. words you know. Here are a few: Likelike, haʻahaʻa, wikiwiki.  So when you stick hoʻo- in front of it, as in hoʻomaʻamaʻa it means to cause maʻa-ness. Get it? To cause familiarity. And the only way you are going to cause familiarity with something is to practice it, right? You have to hoʻomaʻamaʻa in order to get maʻa(maʻa) to it. Whew. 

E hoʻomaʻamaʻa i ka haʻawina - Practice the lesson.

Ua hoʻomaʻamaʻa anei ʻoe i ka hula? - Did you practice the hula?

ʻAʻole au e hele ana i ka hoʻomaʻamaʻa i kēia lā - I am not going to go to practice today.

Donʻt forget to sign up to be a follower on the right hand side of this blog!