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Sam Roberts wrote:
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 10:32 AM, KHMan <...> wrote:Why would anyone carve a crescent moon on the door of an outhouse?Why indeed. Lets ask google! :-) http://www.jldr.com/faqs.html#moons Ours had a moon on it when I was a kid, and so did many of the neighbours. Its so iconic that if I saw a line drawing of a small building with a crescent shape on the door, I would assume its an outhouse. Whether north americans managed to bring that idea to Hawaii, though, I don't know.
No Eastern culture that I am aware of associates the sexes with the sun and the moon. Most of these cultures see them as objects or locations or less commonly, magical beings. You capture the Sun, you kidnap some princess and bring them to the moon, etc. Polynesia is somewhat tied to Eastern cultures. But if this practice can be shown to be done in Eastern or Polynesian societies (pre-Islam, of course), then I would be glad to be proven wrong.
At Capt Cook's visit, Hawaii supposedly has an estimated 200K-400K inhabitants. Traders and whalers would probably only mingle in the Honolulu area. For all Hawaiians in multiple islands to drop a word they have been using for hundreds of years and adopt a Portuguese word... well uh, it seems rather far-fetched. So, IMHO, Occam's Razor holds. :-)
(I have said my spiel and won't bore the list any further. ;-)) -- Cheers, Kein-Hong Man (esq.) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia