When she said it, it was like this **bloom** of beautiful, different sound. And I thought, how am I going to remember this, these exact sounds? But I was lucky, because it turned up when I searched--I heard it and thought, yes! This is what she said! And then, to be sure I wasn't fooling myself, I searched on the meaning, and was able to confirm that yeah, alii (ali'i) is a word that denotes high rank in Polynesian languages.