I know the official end of summer is a month away, but to me, the Sunday before our fall semester starts is the true indicator that the summer has come to an end. This year is also the first that all schools in the state of Hawai‘i follow a unified calendar, so our daughter, along with all public school students throughout the state, started classes three weeks ago. Perhaps I’ll have to move it back yet again and reduce the summer to about seven weeks. I’m only teaching one class this semester, unless something changes and I need to take…
Great Balls of Fire!
I really need to get my act together and update this site on a more regular basis. It seems I alternate bursts of activity between here and Nahenahe.net, and Nahenahe has been receiving all of the love recently. I have also spent a lot of time helping my friend and songwriting partner Kenneth Makuak?ne get his website launched in anticipation of his upcoming CD release, which will feature anywhere from 10-15 of our joint compositions, in addition to a few that he has written himself or with others. We’ll be performing together (or more accurately, I’ll be backing him up…
The truth is out…
Last year I pointed to Kenneth Makuak?ne’s weblog and speculated who his anonymous collaborator at UH-Hilo was. Well, Kenneth’s let the cat out of the bag, and I don’t mind – it’s me. It has been an amazing process, and hard to believe we’ve been at it for over a year. Sometimes I write lyrics to his music, sometimes he sets music to my mele, but there is always a lot of give and take. I always run the mele by my colleagues at UHH, a process called paka, to make sure that there isn’t anything in there that could…
José Can You See?
A group of Latino pop stars record a Spanish ‘Star Spangled Banner’ to support immigrants. Boy, a touchy issue, for sure. Apparently many people are outraged about this, including a descendant of the author. My first impression was, why should anyone be offended by this? I’m certainly not. However, I don’t know how I’d feel if someone took “Hawai’i Pono‘?” (our state anthem) or “Hawai‘i Aloha” (held with the same reverence) and performed them in English. That being said, I am looking foward to hearing it, and it certainly is certainly going to bring even more attention to one of…
The kind of comment that can make your day.
Or year. ‘Analu is a student in our online Hawaiian language class, and I can relate to his feelings. Since returning from Ireland some 3 and a half years ago, I’ve tried to make some progress with learning Gaeilge, only to give it up after a few weeks, and then starting from scratch again months later. Here’s the best part: “I do have a cassette for studying the language, but your podcast was the first time ever that I was able to hear Hawaiian as a true living language!” I know exactly how ‘Analu feels, as An tImeall and Cumann…
Nahenahe.net Podcasts going native.
I posted an announcement and a brief podcast on Nahenahe.net announcing my decision to cease the use of English in my podcasts. I’m sure some people will be unhappy with this decision, but I spent the better part of a week pondering. English is my native language, and Hawaiian my language of choice. I couldn’t justify starting another podcast just to do one in Hawaiian, and I didn’t want to do a Hawaiian language podcast and simply talk about Hawaiian language in it. As Conn does with his An tImeall podcast, I didn’t want Hawaiian to be simply the vehicle,…
Measuring Linguistic Diversity on the Internet.
Coincidences (or signs) seem to abound this week. Following Conn’s post and my reply on his upcoming decision on whether or not to begin posting in English as well as Irish, I recieved this link from a totally different source… “UNESCO has been emphasizing the concept of ‘knowledge societies’, which stresses plurality and diversity instead of a global uniformity in order to bridge the digital divide and to form an inclusive information society. An important theme of this concept is that of multilingualism for cultural diversity and participation for all the languages in cyberspace.” I should also note that Bernie…
To Gaeilge or not to Gaeilge, that is the question.
Conn at an tImeall posted about a topic that I’ve been agonizing over as well – weblog and podcast language choice. His blog is, of course, done in Irish. I was a bit surprised to see that the bulk of hist post today in English, though the accompanying podcast was still predominantly in Irish. His quandary – should he continue to blog and podcast in Irish exclusively (BTW, I like the term “GaelBlogs”), or to begin to also produce them in English as well. Is it better to have separate blogs for each language, or produce a dual language blog.…
Funding to help business in city go bilingual.
[ From the Daily Ireland ] “Businesses in Belfast are being encouraged to embrace the Irish language with the relaunch of a scheme to help them benefit from using it more. Foras na Gaeilge is offering small to medium-sized enterprises funding to erect bilingual outdoor signs on their premises or produce brochures or websites in both Irish and English.” I’ve sometimes thought of starting a program in Hawai’i that would encourage the promotion of Hawaiian in the business arena. More and more my family and I encounter Hawaiian speakers that we don’t know, and learn this by some chance encounter.…
13th Annual Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium.
2006 SILS Conference Theme “And Together Our Minds Are One”. To be held at Buffalo State College, State University of New York, 18-21, 2006.