Monday, July 20, 2009

Expressions of the Heart

Are you ready? To test your Pidgin English skills, I will write the next paragraph using many of the Pidgin words we have learned. If you have kept up with all of our blogs teaching you Pidgin English, I'm sure you'll understand it all. So here we go!

Ho howzit everybody? Right now we jus stay chilling and relaxin in da beatiful Hawaiian weather. Stay real hot right now, but pretty soon going get cooler. But you know what? Wen the weather stay this hot, the buggah make um real good fo go to da beach! And I know I wen say um choke times already, but Maui get the meanest sunsets ever! The best is wen you get some ono grinds too. Wen you grind um on the beach, the buggah taste so much betta!

Most of these words were taught in our previous blogs, but there are some that might need a quick explanation. Some words in English are slightly altered by changing or shortening the ending of a word. For example, many words in English that end with an "er" will be changed to an "ah" sound in Pidgin. For example, "better" becomes "betta," "more" becomes "moa," and "where" changes into "wea." Also, some words are shortened by removing the last letter of the word. In the paragraph above, we can see that the word "just" changes into "jus" and "for" becomes "fo." This is easy to get the hang of because it sounds really similar to standard English.

Now on to another one of our wonderful poets here at the Maui Language Institute. Yoshiyasu comes to us all the way from Japan. Today we will be treated to two of his works. So here's Yoshiyasu!


-Maui-

Big sea, Big sky
Big beautiful island
Too big to enjoy by bike
No choice but peddling for me with no driver's license
I'm already tired


-Jiro- It's my hamster's name who died last year

Hey, Jiro
You weren't just my pet.
You were like my family,
my friend,
my brother,
my partner,
my healing,
And like the end of my life.
Your death left a big vacuum in my heart.

Hey, Jiro
What are you doing?
Are you watching me?
Please watch me from heaven.
From your death,
I decided to love all animals.
But I'm sorry,
I can't like insects anyway.


Okay folks! We'll see you again soon. Aloha!

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