''Pidgin to Da Max'' (full title: ''Peppo's Pidgin to Da Max'') is a

humor Humour ( Commonwealth English) or humor (American English) is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which taught that the balance of fluids i ...

ous

illustrated An illustration is a decoration, interpretation, or visual explanation of a text, concept, or process, designed for integration in print and digitally published media, such as posters, flyers, magazines, books, teaching materials, animations, vi ...

dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged Alphabetical order, alphabetically (or by Semitic root, consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical-and-stroke sorting, radical an ...

Hawaiian Pidgin Hawaiian Pidgin (known formally in linguistics as Hawaiʻi Creole English or HCE and known locally as Pidgin) is an English-based creole language spoken in Hawaiʻi. An estimated 600,000 residents of Hawaii speak Hawaiian Pidgin natively and ...

words and phrases, published in December 1981, by Douglas Simonson, Pat Sasaki, and Ken Sakata. With the definitions of most of the words and phrases also given in Pidgin, the book is not clearly intended to be used as a Pidgin-English dictionary, although a reader unfamiliar with the dialect would likely understand most of the entries from context and the illustrations. Rather, the book is intended to be a humorous introspective for Hawaii residents about the language many of them speak on a day-to-day basis. As such, it is a relatively popular book in Hawaii, and sold 25,000 copies in its first month in print. By March 1982, it had sold 50,000 copies. There is an additional volume, titled ''Pidgin to Da Max: Hana Hou'', which follows the first book. As an example of an entry for which the dictionary may be of little help to outsiders, consider the definition of the word

da kine Da kine () is an expression in Hawaiian Pidgin (Hawaii Creole English), probably derived from "that kind", that usually functions grammatically as a placeholder name (compare to English "whatsit" and "whatchamacallit"). It can also take the rol ...

: :

Da kine Da kine () is an expression in Hawaiian Pidgin (Hawaii Creole English), probably derived from "that kind", that usually functions grammatically as a placeholder name (compare to English "whatsit" and "whatchamacallit"). It can also take the rol ...

(''da KINE'') Da kine is the keystone of pidgin. You can use it anywhere, anytime, anyhow. Very convenient. What would we do without DA KINE? "Ey, I no can da kine if you no like da kine, too!" The dictionary then turns around and uses "da kine" (often a notoriously difficult word for non-Pidgin speakers to understand) in some of the definitions of other words. :

Haole ''Haole'' (; ) is a Hawaiian term for individuals who are not Native Hawaiian, and is applied to people primarily of European ancestry. Background The origins of the word predate the 1778 arrival of Captain James Cook, as recorded in several ...

is another word covered in the book. The authors of ''Pidgin to Da Max'' are not originally from Hawaii, and Simonson admits to not speaking Pidgin all that well. In 1983 there was a television show by the same name, based on the book.

References

{{Reflist Hawaiian Pidgin English bilingual dictionaries

See also

References