The leter ‘g’ represents the unreleased ‘ng’ sound as in the English word singer and not the released-g sound as in the word finger.Samoan consonants are pronounced a lot like in English, with a couple of exceptions: Other hard combinations for English speakers to discern and differentiate correctly are au and ao ei and ë ou and ö. a long-vowel - because the change in sound means a change in meaning, such as in the Samoan words vae, which means ‘leg,’ and vai, which means water…whereas most English speakers simply don’t pay that much attention to slight variations in vowel pronunciation, because it doesn’t change the meaning of the words. This renders into a big challenge for English speakers learning Samoan (and other Polynesian languages) to correctly pronunce some vowel combinations - or a vowel combination vs. It’s generally said that Samoan vowels are similar in pronunciation to Spanish - with just one sound: the letter ‘i’ in Samoan is pronounced like the English ee as in the word ‘bee,’ but avoid turning a single vowel into more than one sound: For example, the letter ‘o’ in English is pronounced rapidly more like oh-oo, whereas in Samoan it would just have its ‘o’-sounding characteristic, and so forth. The taofi, which represents a glottal stop or break and is usually written with either an apostrophe or a reversed apostrophe - i.e.Unfortunately, most computers do not have fonts that include a macron over vowels, so in the example above I have used a European umlaut symbol to show that the last ‘o’ in the word is longer than a normally pronounced ‘o’. The fa’amamafa, which represents a Polynesian long-vowel and is indicated by a macron or bar above the lengthened vowel.Hence, the Samoan alphabet traditionally consists of 14 letters in this order: Since you’re reading this online, I first state the obvious that letters represent sounds: The early Christian missionaries who devised the Samoan writing system were usually well educated men and women of their day who used the western Roman alphabet to codify those sounds the best they could…which created some interesting differences among various Polynesian orthographies (spelling systems). It must also be noted that some references actually say this manner of oratory is a separate language, but it’s definitely Samoan. But it seemed to me that every skilled Samoan orator considers him- or herself an authority on this chiefly language, and like many foreign-language situations, sometimes one learned just enough to get in trouble. Ministers, Latter-day Saint missionaries, and other officials are considered to be chiefly, or just below chiefly rank and as such, for example, I learned enough to interact with the matai in giving appropriate responses to greetings, addressing chiefs, giving thanks and, of course, speaking in formal situations such as church meetings. There is a separate lexicon of chiefly language, bolstered by historical allusions, proverbs and socio-genealogical-geographical knowledge - all filtered through a prescribed centuries-old tradition of oratory - that usually only matai or chief’s learn to varying degrees.Formal Samoan writing uses diacritic marks which definitely help second-language learners to understand better, but they are not included in most Samoan writing.English speakers can handle most of the sounds - except for a couple of sorta’ new ones and some dipthongs (vowel combinations) as well as some completely unusual “swaps” (more on these below).Please note, Samoa does not have a caste system, but the word afakasi refers to someone or something of mixed heritage. It is totally unrelated to English or any other European language, except for ‘upu afakasi - borrowed or “half-caste” words.When I first started learning Samoan in 1965, I soon discovered:
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