When the United States formally took control of Hawai'i in 1898, the eighty-something years of Americans living among the "kanaka maoli," called "Hawaiians" in English, had already positioned them above the "maka'ainana," or commoners. By the end of the nineteenth century 90 percent of all kanaka had died from foreign diseases, and the 40,000 or so still alive were almost completely Christianized. With Christianity came "haole" (white) notions of literacy, that is, a written alphabet. The consequences of this worked for and against the kanaka, as writing down an extremely complex language also meant applying an arbitrary simplification via the foreigner's perspective. For example, the sounds of "K" and "T" were interchangeable from region to region, but in the written version, the letter "T" was left out of the alphabet.