RECURSIVE ANCESTOR EXPLORER
GLOBAL GRAPH ↗NORTH-STAR FEATURE / ROOT OF THE ROOT
WORD → PARENT → PARENT → UNKNOWNGO TO
THE ROOT.
Do not stop at the first ancestor. Follow every cited route—through compounds, reconstructions, and disagreements—until human knowledge actually stops.
START / NODE 559HawaiianHawaiian record–today
kapu
A Hawaiian word for what is prohibited, sacred, consecrated, or set apart, continuing the Oceanic tapu family through the characteristic Hawaiian *t to k sound change.
“Kapu is not a misspelling of tapu. Its k is the visible result of a regular Hawaiian sound change, while the sacred and prohibited semantic field stayed remarkably stable.”OPEN COMPLETE WORD DOSSIER ↗
EVERY REVIEWED PARENT, NOT ONE EDITORIAL PATH
FOLLOW EVERY BRANCH.
Compound components and competing routes stay separate. Every arrow retains its sound change, semantic change, scholar, confidence, and exact sources.
01
PARENT ROUTES1 REVIEWED RELATIONSHIP
Hawaiiankapu
prohibited, forbidden, sacred, consecrated, or set apart
↑GO DEEPER
Proto-Oceanic · Proto-Oceanic reconstruction*tampusacred, forbidden; under ritual restriction
*
RECONSTRUCTED, NOT DIRECTLY ATTESTED
- SOUND CHANGE
- Hawaiian kapu reflects the characteristic Hawaiian development of earlier *t to k after the older k-space changed; the rest of the form remains visibly close.
- SEMANTIC CHANGE
- Sacred, prohibited, consecrated, and set-apart senses continue across the family.
- SCHOLAR
- Robert A. Blust · POLLEX editors
- CONFIDENCE
- probable — POLLEX supplies the lexical comparison; Blust documents the Hawaiian *t to k sound change and its historical complexity.
3 CITATIONSTAPU [OC] — Prohibited, under ritual restriction, tabooHawaiian kapu reflex under OC.TAPU; POC *tampu note Kapu — Nā Puke Wehewehe ʻŌlelo HawaiʻiKapu entries from Andrews 1836 and 1865 *t to k: An Austronesian Sound Change Revisitedpp. 365–410 — Hawaiian *t to k AUDIT CANONICAL EDGE 518 ↗
Directly compares Hawaiian kapu with the Oceanic reconstruction.
ORIGINAL ↗Documents the attested Hawaiian form and semantic field.
ORIGINAL ↗Documents the sound change and its historical and dialectal complexity.
ORIGINAL ↗THE ASTERISK IS A PROMISE
RECONSTRUCTION IS
NOT INSCRIPTION.
Crossing into a starred form changes the evidence class. The interface marks that crossing, preserves confidence, and never manufactures the next root to make the picture look complete.