Thanks, lj. There’s no substitute for firsthand information.
How can Tutu be Hawaiian for grandmother when there is no letter T in the Hawaiian alphabet?
Officially there is no ‘t’ in the Hawaiian alphabet but ‘t’ and ‘k’ were recognizably interchangeable in Hawaiian. ‘T’ was a hold-over consonant from Tahitian and other Polynesian language bases. Tamehameha was an acceptable alternative spelling for Kamehameha. In Hawaiian one of the staple plants was the ki plant but most people know it as the ti plant or ti leaves.
(I did my share of picking ti leaves and never heard them called “ki” leaves.)