Online Hawaiian Dictionaries
I try to spell Hawaiian words correctly whenever I can, which among other things means using kahakō and ʻokina correctly. I’m not fluent in Hawaiian, so I rely on dictionaries for my spelling. Ulukau, the Hawaiian Electronic Library, offers an excellent set of online dictionaries. Four major Hawaiian-language references are rolled into one search engine.
What I really like is that if I set the Ulukau search engine to “All Dictionaries”, “other characters”, and “find regular spelling”, I can enter an American-style no-accent-marks version of a Hawaiian word and get the correctly accented spelling; e.g. if I type in “Kaneohe”, I get “Kāneʻohe”. And if I type in “pau”, I get all four possible words: “pau”, “paʻu”, “paʻū”, and “pāʻū”.
I also like Firefox. Great browser, lots of very useful add-ons. I found a Taiwanese Firefox add-on called OpenSearchFox that lets me add the Ulukau search engine (or any web site’s search engine, for that matter) to the Firefox Search bar. So now my Hawaiian language dictionary is at my fingertips. Very, very cool. Is this what they mean when they talk about Web 2.0?
February 20th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
I really like Ulukau too. Since Hawaiian wasn’t taught when I was in school, I have been trying to make up for lost time, learning here at home. I notice that the Advertiser uses diacritical marks, but the Star-Bulletin doesn’t. Since the meaning of the Hawaiian words can be so different, depending on these marks. it’s really too bad that the SB (and others) don’t use them. I guess it’s habit or they don’t want to make changes that might cost some time or money.
I think I might be just a tad “grammar police” when it comes to ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, but it’s such a beautiful language and to me should be spoken and written correctly, just as you are doing. We need to learn to spell correctly in English…why should we not care as much about Hawaiian?
I purchased Guava Graphics’ Hawaiian fonts program, and use it all the time for my own personal stuff. It’s a great program, and very easy to use.
February 23rd, 2007 at 9:47 am
You’d think that the state government would be the biggest promoter of the Hawaiian language, but that hasn’t been true until recently. In fact, in 1992 the State Legislature had to declare any official rule or policy prohibiting the use of kahakō and ʻokina to be void. (I’m guessing this was in response to some knucklehead state official “correcting” subordinates who spelled Hawaiian words properly.) This year the Leg is considering a proposal to not just allow, but to actually require Hawaiʻi government documents to use kahakō and ʻokina when spelling Hawaiian words (HB1946/SB1052). So far, nobody seems to be objecting.