Pa Konane

Recently while fiddling with my iPhone I discovered a cool feature: region formats.

Sure, the iPhone supports dozens of languages, and if you set a language then the whole iPhone OS as well as any localized third-party apps will display in the specified language. But if you're not fluent in that language, you'll be lost on your own phone.

Region formats are different; they specify the preferred format for day, date, time, and phone numbers based on a specific region. But what's cool is that format isn't just the order of month and day or the use of dashes or brackets in a number, but the language of the days and months as well.

Even cooler, there's a region format for Hawai'i that uses the Hawaiian terms for the days (actually nights) of the week and the months of the year. Selecting that region format means that all the iPhone applications — even third-party ones that are correctly engineered — display dates in Hawaiian! In Weather, in Calendar, in Mail, in Stocks — everywhere there's a date, it's in Hawaiian.

Setting the iPhone couldn't be easier: tap Settings, tap General, scroll down and tap International, then tap Region Format. There are many regions listed, with some grouped under a language, such as Spanish, spoken in many different regions.

Not knowing Hawaiian myself, this has given me an opportunity to learn some interesting things about the language. For instance, as shown in the image above, all the days of the week start with pō except one: Lā pule, or Sunday. I guessed that Lā pule might mean "holy day" and some research revealed I was close. It actually means "prayer day" and reflects the influence Christian missionaries had on the islands.

But if lā means day then why do all the other names start with pō? Well, as I learned at UniLang, the Hawaiians traditionally started the 24-hour cycle at night, much the way we actually start a day at Midnight, and pō means night. The second part of the word specifies numerical order, first through sixth. So Monday is Pō'akahi or first night. Tuesday is Pō'alua or second night and on down the line to Saturday, Pō'aono. (Makes far more sense than a mix of celestial objects and Norse, Roman, and Anglo-Saxon gods, like in English.)

The iPhone OS even nails the little details: in Calendar on month view, Pō'akahi through Pō'aono are abbreviated P1 to P6, just as their names denote.

As for the post title, "Pa Konane" is a traditional Hawaiian song about the "bright touch" of the Moon.

Post	Reference	More Info
Pa Konane	Folk song performed by Manualua (and many others)