[Footnote 7: See Fornander's stories of Lonoikamakahiki, Halemano, and Kuapakaa.]
2. NOMENCLATURE: ITS EMOTIONAL VALUE
The Hawaiian (or Polynesian) composer who would become a successful competitor in the fields of poetry, oratory, or disputation must store up in his memory the rather long series of names for persons, places, objects, or phases of nature which constitute the learning of the aspirant for mastery in the art of expression. He is taught, says one tale, "about everything in the earth and in the heavens"—- that is, their names, their distinguishing characterstics. The classes of objects thus differentiated naturally are determined by the emotional interest attached to them, and this depends upon their social or economic value to the group.
The social value of pedigree and property have encouraged genealogical and geographical enumeration. A long recitation of the genealogies of chiefs provides immense emotional satisfaction and seems in no way to overtax the reciter's memory. Missionaries tell us that "the Hawaiians will commit to memory the genealogical tables given in the Bible, and delight to repeat them as some of the choicest passages in Scripture." Examples of such genealogies are common; it is, in fact, the part of the reciter to preserve the pedigree of his chief in a formal genealogical chant.
Such a series is illustrated in the genealogy embedded in the famous song to aggrandize the family of the famous chief Kualii, which carries back the chiefly line of Hawaii through 26 generations to Wakea and Papa, ancestors of the race.
"Hulihonua the man,
Keakahulilani the woman,
Laka the man, Kepapaialeka the woman,"
runs the song, the slight variations evidently fitting the sound to the movement of the recitative.
In the eleventh section of the "Song of Creation" the poet says:
She that lived up in the heavens and Piolani,
She that was full of enjoyments and lived in the heavens,
Lived up there with Kii and became his wife,
Brought increase to the world;
and he proceeds to the enumeration of her "increase":