#language meta asks

No apologies necessary! I’m actually in the process of trying to catch up, so right now’s a pretty good time to throw messages my way.

At this point, there’s a decent chance that Oroshi’s whistled language won’t be developed past the concept stage. It’ll get namedropped from time to time within the Redux, but it has too little significance to make it worth constructing. More’s the pity, because its existence gets mentioned fairly early in the story (Russel Thrush is from Oroshi and knows how to whistle, but it’s not something he likes to broadcast).

You’ll be excited to hear that whistled languages are indeed a real thing! (And that my inspiration for Oroshi’s came from El Silbo.) They’ve evolved independently on six continents, and usually occur in either mountainous or densely-forested regions. In both environments, whistling is advantageous over shouting because it can be heard from a distance of 5 kilometers, at 130 dB. Mountainous areas generally have greater acoustics, whereas forests exert pressure over the acoustic environment, thus making whistles more energy-efficient compared to verbal communication.

You might enjoy watching these. They’re videos by a YouTube channel called Great Big Story that I highly recommend. The first—Whistling in the Wind: Preserving a Language Without Words—is a 4-minute video on El Silbo. The second—This Turkish Language Isn’t Spoken, It’s Whistled—is for the Turkish whistled language, kuş dili.

On a semi-related note, Mistral actually had more than one whistled language. As newer communication systems (like the scroll) were invented, the languages began to die off. Less people were interested in learning them because cellular communication requires less technical skill. Oroshi’s whistled language is one of the last to survive. Which is a shame, because in addition to being functionally useful, it was a major component of Mistrali culture. Part of Mistral’s main religious pantheon deifies birds, so the whistled languages were considered rather sacred. They were sometimes referred to as birdspeech.

Oh, boy. I was hoping to avoid having this conversation for a little while longer, but you’ve forced my hand, anon. (Which isn’t a bad thing! This is just a…really uncomfortable topic to have to address, in no small part because the RWBY fandom has a tendency to be extremely vitriolic toward criticism of the show.)

Let me state for the record that I am white. Like, Wonder Bread white. Given that I live in the United States, I have privilege derived from systemic racism. Therefore, rather than presenting my own ideas and commentary, I will be reiterating facts and statements made by POC. When talking about racism and cultural appropriation, it’s important to amplify the speakers of marginalized communities, rather than having yet another white person talking over them on something they will never be able to fully grasp or relate to.

With that disclaimer out of the way, allow me to answer your question: Why was Kuo Kuana renamed Dun Obel in the Redux?

First, we need to talk about Kuo Kuana’s canon name.

When the settlement first appeared in Volume 4, a proposed translation started to circulate on social media. It seemed to be an accepted fact that kuo kuana was Hawaiian, and that it meant either “trash” or “rejected.”

For the longest time I wondered what the source on that translation was. Did the writers reveal it in the DVD commentary? Was it made in a Tweet that later got deleted? I spent quite a few days scouring the internet, and at the end of the day, the best I could find was a Reddit post made about a year ago. The OP claimed to have used Google Translate to figure out the etymology.

Okay, fair enough. That’s about the standard I would expect from CRWBY, so math checks out.

Or so I thought.

I typed in every single variation of kuo kuana that I could think of and could not get the same results. I tried capitalization, adjusting the macrons, apostrophes, variations in spacing. Nothing worked.

Fine, I thought. I’ll just go to the source. Surely any number of English-Hawaiian dictionaries would be able to confirm the etymology.

Oh how naïve I was.

After consulting Ulukau, and then cross-referencing my findings with several other online dictionaries that seemed reputable, I cobbled together my results:

ʻōpala nvs. rash, rubbish, litter, waste matter wilikōī n. dust or trash blown by the wind

So maybe kuo kuana doesn’t mean trash? That was certainly possible. I decided to try and search for kuana, or something approximately similar, to see if there was a potential alternative etymology.

kuana n. position, attitude, standing kūana kik. a place value, usually used in compound terms (ie. unuhi kūana, helu kūana) kūō, kūwō vi. to cry loudly, as with joy or pain; to howl kuānea vs. lonely, forsaken, barren, desolate; cf. kuākuānea, ʻōnea

The only thing that looked like a possible match was kuākuānea, which is just a reduplication of kuānea. Menagerie is two-thirds inhospitable desert, after all, full of dangerous wildlife and Grimm. “Barren” and “forsaken” would definitely fit, especially if you stretched that definition to refer to the Faunus themselves—as in, they’re a people forsaken by the rest of Remnant.

Here’s the thing, though: None of it matters. Whether kuo kuana was a mistranslation from Google, whether it actually means barren, or whether it comes from a different Polynesian language entirely. At the end of the day, the etymology, unless confirmed otherwise by one of the writers, will remain fandom conjecture. We can speculate for hours, pouring through even more obscure sources in search of an answer, but the truth of the matter is that the initial assumption stuck. Most of the fandom either already assumes that Kuo Kuana means “trash” in Hawaiian; or, they’ll do a quick Google search like I did (some variation of “kuo kuana meaning,” “kuo kuana etymology,” “kuo kuana name”) and that Reddit post will be the top result.

And that’s the problem.

For those of you who aren’t aware, Hawai’i was once an independent kingdom. Over the last few centuries, Native Hawaiians (Kānaka Maoli) have been repeatedly brutalized by white colonizers through disenfranchisement, environmental degradation, poverty, Christian missionaries, loss of land ownership, violent coups, outlawing of Hawaiian culture, and the bastardization of important traditions due to commercialization. (Remember in Lilo & Stitch when Nani quit her job and said she didn’t want to work at some “stupid fakey lūʻau”?)

Another important thing you need to know is that the native Hawaiian language (‘Olelo Hawai’i) was made illegal to teach in schools in 1896. The language was quickly classified as endangered, and linguists feared that it would go extinct. The ban wasn’t lifted until 1978, and by then, there were few speakers left. It took the efforts of activists running the local National Public Radio, the formation of the Pūnana Leo preschools, and widespread social movement to get the number of speakers back to ~24,000 people.

At this point, some of you might be thinking: Wait, isn’t it a good thing then that Rooster Teeth used a Hawaiian word in RWBY? Wouldn’t that help increase exposure and acceptance of the language? How is that cultural appropriation?

Cultural appropriation is a tricky thing to talk about, and depending on who you ask, what does or doesn’t constitute it varies. The general consensus seems to be:

Consent. Is the culture open to sharing this thing? (And don’t cheat by finding one person who consents while most of the culture disagrees.)

Context. If a culture is open to sharing a thing, but it’s a thing of great religious significance, take the time to learn what is a respectful way to treat it. Probably don’t use it as random decoration, or sexualize it unless that’s what it’s intended for.

Credit. Give credit and if possible, buy from the original creators so the money goes where the credit should be. (If we’re talking about purchasing a material object made by that culture.)

[Criteria borrowed from this post.]

Now let’s apply this to Kuo Kuana, under the assumption that its name is indeed from the Hawaiian language.

Did RT acknowledge where they got the name from? No. (Which is what started this entire debate in the first place.)

Was Kuo Kuana’s name used as random decoration in a work of media with no relation to the marginalized culture it was borrowed from? Yes. There’s nothing about Kuo Kuana’s setting that creates or reinforces a connection with Hawaii, which implies that the name was chosen to fit an aesthetic.

And last but not least, is the usage of the name offensive, or reinforces harmful stereotypes?

Absolutely yes.

In the setting of RWBY, the Faunus are a marginalized ethnic group that were “rewarded” for their participation in the Great War by being “gifted” an island that was the least desirable real estate on all of Remnant (short of that place where Salem hangs out). Then, some years later, the rest of the human-controlled kingdoms enacted a war that tried to forcibly confine the world’s Faunus to Menagerie. And the Faunus had to go to war again to try and keep their rights.

To reiterate: the word allegedly used to describe Menagerie’s capital—a literal safe haven for a possibly-diasporic ethnic group—is trash or rejected.

So to answer your question: The reason why Kuo Kuana’s name was changed was because I couldn’t, in good conscience, continue to use a derogative term from an endangered language steeped in cultural oppression, and apply it to a fictional ethnic group.

I think that sends a pretty bad message. Wouldn’t you agree?

Hey! I’m glad you’re enjoying everything I’ve written thus far. And thank you for the well-wishes! At this point, my life has plateaued out into a vague “could be better could be worse” phase. If nothing else, I’ve been plenty busy with job-hunting and getting my new place in working order. That’s partly why there’s been so much radio silence on this blog as of late.

That, and New Pokémon Snap just came out. I have waited twenty-one years for this, and nothing short of death will stop me from playing it.

But that’s entirely beside the point.

To answer your second question: Múl, é tá mér nimbaaltés tóró míyón. *

At the moment, only one of my conlangs for the Redux is functional. It’s called Old Valin-Vacuose, the protolanguage of the Sanus language family. It’s a synthetic fusional language with a nominative-accusative alignment, three grammatical genders/noun classes, and eight cases. Once I’ve created enough vocabulary, the plan is to implement sound changes and split them along two distinct branches (Deltaic and Peninsular), then evolve it forward into various daughter languages.

Regrettably, this means that Mainland Valin and Patchy Valin aren’t developed beyond some tentative ideas on where to evolve them. Linguistically, the two are closer to dialects than they are separate languages, as they have mutual intelligibility. That’s all I’m prepared to say about them for now.

Old Valin-Vacuose is one of four protolanguages in the Redux. The other three are Old Mistrali-Mantic, Halcyon, and an as-of-yet unnamed language native to Vacuo’s southern peninsula. Just like with Old Valin-Vacuose, the plan is to derive daughter languages from the other three.

Which brings us to the language situation of Team RWBY, and by extension, pretty much every character on Remnant. Hang on, this is gonna take a bit of explaining, so bear with me for a second here.

[TL;DR at the bottom.]