Calixa Lavallée wrote the music; Adolphe-Basile Routhier wrote the words in French. It was first sung in French in 1880. Robert Stanley Weir wrote English words for the song in 1908.
It was sung as the national anthem for many years before the government made it official on 1 July (Canada Day) in 1980.
Here are the words, explained in Simple English:
Here are the words in French. The words in French and English do not mean the same thing.
Oahu
Oahu (or Oʻahu) is the third largest of the Hawaiian Islands, in the United States. It means "the gathering place" (a place where people meet) in the Hawaiian language. Most of the people of Hawaii live there (1.2 million of the state's 1.7 million in the mid-1990s). The total land area is . Honolulu, the capital city of Hawaii, is on this island. Other well-known places on Oahu are Waikiki, Pearl Harbor, Diamond Head, Hanauma Bay, Kaneohe Bay, and both the North Shore and Makaha (which are famous for very big ocean waves).
Kamehameha I made Oahu his capital when he became the first king of Hawaii. Iolani Palace was built later on by others of the royal family. It is the only royal palace on American soil.
Oahu was perhaps the first of the Hawaiian Islands which the crew of "HMS Resolution" saw on 18 January 1778. This was during Captain James Cook's third Pacific Ocean trip. Europeans did not land on Oahu until 28 February 1779 when Captain Clerke of the "HMS Resolution" stepped ashore at Waimea Bay. Clerke took command of the ship after Captain Cook was killed at Kealakekua Bay on February 14.
Today, Oahu has become a tourism and shopping center. Almost 7 million visitors (mainly from the American mainland and Japan) go there every year to enjoy the special island holiday found only in Hawaii.
Oahu can be seen in hundreds of movies and TV shows. Some of them are "Magnum, P.I.", "Lost", "Hawaii Five-O" and "Jake and the Fatman".
Open content
Open Content is when someone creates something and lets others copy it or change it without having to ask for permission. Any media can be open content, from text and pictures to video and sound.
When someone creates something (like a picture or book), they can make that work "open". This means that other people are allowed to copy it and change it if they want. Something that is open content may be free of charge, but it does not have to be.
The Simple English Wikipedia is open content. So are other Wikipedias. If a person changes open content or makes new open content, everyone can give it to anyone else, or even sell it. It is never needed to ask permission to do this, because the people who wrote the text already gave their permission when they clicked the "save" button.
The rules that say how people can use, change and pass around open content are called a license. A license explains exactly what you are allowed to do with the content that falls under it. Licenses are often written in difficult lawyer language (legal jargon), but many licenses have summaries that are much easier to understand.
The makers of open content get to choose what license to use for their work, and everyone else has to follow it. Only the maker, who owns the copyright, can change it to another license. Most open content licenses say that when others change the work, they must also declare it to be open and under the same license. This is called "share-alike" and means that anything based on work will always be open content.
All the content in Wikipedia is open under the rules of the , a very well-known open content license. Another well-known open content license is the .
Orthography
Orthography is an official or correct way to write a particular language. It includes rules of spelling. Orthography may also include rules about punctuation, capitalization, and diacritics (e.g. accents). In English, spelling is a problem for all learners, and is the main issue in orthography.
Some languages have someone to decide the correct spelling, such as the Académie française. English does not. English orthography was the work of the early printers. They had to decide how particular words would be spelled in their books. Gradually the number of alternative spellings began to drop. The word which is "merry" today was spelled in about 30 ways in written sources from the 9th to the 16th century.
English orthography, or English spelling, is the way the 26 letters of the alphabet are used to write down the 36 (IPA) sounds of English. The first manuscripts in Old English were written using the Latin alphabet. It had 24 letters.
No alphabet fits its language exactly. One reason for this is that there are always more sounds than letters. In English there are far more vowel sounds than vowels. The ancient Greeks, who were the first to use letters for vowels, decided to use only a few letters for their vowel sounds. This choice influenced all later alphabets:
English would need about 20 vowels to represent the vowel phonemes (~sounds) in common use, and some languages do have more letters for vowels. The Georgian language has a total of 41 letters. A shorter alphabet works by using two or three letters for a single sound, or one letter for several sounds.
The English alphabet has only three consonants which have one sound, cannot be produced by other combinations and are never silent: n, r and v. The English language uses 22 to 26 consonant phonemes.
The other reason that alphabets never exactly fit languages is dialect. A spoken language varies from place to place and from time to time. This is very obvious with English, as the pronunciation is so different in different parts of the world. A written language will always be less flexible than its spoken parent. It has a different function, and is produced mechanically. It must serve everyone who speaks the language, and it does this by keeping the spelling similar from one time to another.
Therefore, all alphabets have sounds which are difficult to represent with the letters in use. And English also has other problems: sounds that can be written in different ways, and spelling which can be pronounced in different ways. This all gives rise to problems of spelling.
Differences between American English and British English spelling came about mainly as the result of one man. Noah Webster (1758–1843) wrote a "Grammar", a "Spelling" book, and finally an "American dictionary of the English language". In the course of this, he proposed a number of simplifications in spelling. In his dictionary, he chose "s" over "c" in words like "defense", he changed the "re" to "er" in words like "center", he dropped one of the Ls in "traveler". At first he kept the u in words like colour or favour but dropped it in later editions. He also changed "tongue" to "tung": that did not stick. His main reason was to help children learn to read and write. Webster's dictionary contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never appeared in a published dictionary before.
Webster did create a slightly different identity for American English. But, because his efforts did not address some of the most glaring problems, his variations make little difference to the way the language is used. An example of the real problems in English orthography is the word ending "-ough", which is pronounced several different ways: tough, bough, cough... The root causes of spelling variation are historical. Loan words come with their own (foreign) spelling. Some French loan words are still spelled in the French way; others have been changed.