fa’e
- (v.) to boil
- (adj.) boiling
A fa’e lelea.
“The water is boiling.”
Notes: Today’s iku may look familiar. It’s the iku for mate turned on its head.
Oh, shoot, wait a minute… Actually, maybe it’s the iku for novu with steam rising off the top, and mate is the iku for fa’e turned on its head. Darn!
I guess it kind of depends what order these glyphs were created in. Surely the word for “boil” would precede the word for “soup”, because you couldn’t have the latter without the former. Or could you…? Oh, but wait a minute: that’s not at issue. The iku for novu (“soup”) certainly preceded the iku for fa’e, whether or not the words were coined in that order. What’s at issue is the order of fa’e and mate (“pour”). Seems to me the latter word would come about first, but that doesn’t mean the iku would’ve come first… I’m going to go out on a limb and say that fa’e came first, and mate is fa’e turned on its head.
So, yes. Revise what I said above. Revise, I say!