I was happy that my first peer-reviewed journal article (and first article of any type in several years) was published in Language Documentation and Conservation. I’ve had interactions with the National Foreign Language Resource Center at UH-Mānoa for many years, presented at their conferences, and have had a strong admiration for their work.
The paper is entitled “Puana ‘Ia me ka ‘Oko‘a: A Comparative Analysis of Hawaiian Language Pronunciation as Spoken and Sung”, and it is a translation, distillation, and revision of my MA thesis, which was originally written in Hawaiian. It is a comparative analysis that uses recordings and compositions by John Kameaaloha Almeida. It took nearly two years for me to translate and pare down, and nearly another two years to tweak it, get feedback, and then get it published. One reviewer felt is wasn’t linguistically focused for this journal, but I think I made an important point that in addition to acknowledging the importance of linguistic diversity in terms of the number of languages that are thriving in society, we also must look at and preserve the diversity that is inherent within a single language. To make this point I documented and examined some significant differences in Hawaiian language as spoken and sung. Some of these differences have been mentioned previously, but never closely examined nor explained.
