As indigenous populations run, the Māori are relative newcomers. Their ancestors migrated to New Zealand from the Society Islands in several waves spanning the period from about 800 to 1250 C.E. More controversial views hold that the Māori were preceded by one or more other cultures, but most anthropologists see no evidence for this. Māori is a Polynesian language closely related to Tahitian and a bit less so to Hawaiian (“71 percent lexical similarity” according to one hair-splitting source) and Samoan. It has about 50,000 speakers and enjoys full legal status. Like most members of its family it makes do with an amazingly small range of sounds. The Māori consonants are H, K, M, N, P, R, T, W, WH (a digraph pronounced like an F in most dialects) and NG. A macron lengthens a vowel: ā, ē, ī, ō, and ū. While Māori is simpler than English in some aspects, it outdoes it in others. It offers no fewer than four first-person plural terms, for example: tāua, māua, tātou and mātou meaning respectively “we two” including the addressee, “we two” excluding that person, “we three or more” inclusive and “we three or more” again exclusive. Māori uses its own names for the planets, although the term for Neptune shown below is a provisional one and — oddly — precisely the same as the word for a last-quarter moon. |
