Thursday, February 25, 2010

Hō mai ka ʻike

From the House Journal, we learn that yesterday's session was opened with a Hawaiian prayer.  

The invocation was offered by the Chaplain, Pastor Judy Shook of Aldersgate United Methodist Church. Representative P. Wilson moved and asked unanimous consent that the invocation be spread on the journal. There being no objection, it was so ordered. I was in ministry for 6 years in Hawaii prior to moving to Juneau. This prayer is a Hawaiian chant written by Kumu Keala Ching:



[For the fanatically curious, the printed journal had the whole prayer in Hawaiian, but the online version only had the first and last lines of Hawaiian. I tried to find the way to write the letters with the ¯ (I learned this is called a macron) over them. I found the ¯ but couldn't figure out how to put the letter under it and after ten minutes of searching online, decided to just take a picture of the printed text. But then I wanted to type the title in Hawaiian so I looked again. By going into Apple system preferences, then to language and text, then go down the list and choose Hawaiian. If you have the language symbol - the flag - on your top bar - the one with the File, Edit, View, etc. - click on it and change to the Hawaiian flag. Then, if you want the macron above the letter, hit option+letter. I decided to just leave the photo of the poem instead of retyping.]

2 comments:

  1. wow - cool that someone wanted to use a hawaiian chant....

    aloha!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, there have been prayers in Inupiaq, Yup'ik, Denaina, Koyukon, Tlingit, Russian, Alutiq, Hebrew, and Haida that I know of in the past...

    The pastor spent a number of years in Hawai'i.

    FYI, Steve, inserting symbols or accented characters is much easier in MS Word, at least in Windoze --- you just go to the menu and Insert->Symbol, the table pops up, and you select the character you want.

    If you will be typing often in a foreign language that uses special Roman characters, you can switch to a keyboard profile that uses special keyboard combos instead.

    If you think Hawai'ian is hard to type with symbols, try Tlingit, which uses macrons, underlines, and accent marks to denote the sounds that don't occur in other languages.

    ReplyDelete

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