Word: maori
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...museum pieces. But the answers that the Teouma site may help provide are just as precious. The tussle over the origins of the Lapita and Polynesian people has boiled for more than a century, from the 1885 publication of New Zealand scholar Edward Tregear's widely debated theory that Maori were of Aryan descent, to Thor Heyerdahl's attempt, in his epic 1947 raft trip from Peru to Polynesia, to prove that South America was the Polynesians' homeland...
...English has been adding Maori words to its lexicon since Captain Cook noted that fortified Maori villages were called pa. British settlers readily adopted Maori names for indigenous animals and plants, from kakapo birds to kauri pines. But the use of Maori words has surged in the past 15 years as te reo schools have multiplied and Maori activists gained clout. Terms like kaumatua (tribal elder) and taonga (cultural treasures) have come into play because they express concepts for which there's no English equivalent, says Macalister. But some words have been picked up because they're more economical than...
...Pleased as he is that English speakers are embracing Maori, Piripi fears that some are squeezing it out of shape. His Language Commission has had a long, and so far losing, argument with newspapers that insist on anglicizing Maori words - adding s to mark the plural, for example. Pronunciation is another disputed point. It's said Kiwis have 11 different ways of saying "Maori," from the hackle-raising "Mayo-ree" to the correct "Mow-rri." "New Zealanders have a long way to go in terms of pronunciation," says Piripi. "Really, 200 years of occupation without achieving five simple vowel sounds...
...protect Maori from the onslaught of English, the Language Commission has created new terms for hundreds of modern concepts (for electricity it chose hiko, or unseen power; computer is rorohiko, electric brain). Most Maori speakers, though, learned English as their first language. And when their Maori vocabulary comes up short, they reach for an English word. Young speakers increasingly structure Maori sentences as if they were English, says Bauer. "Swapping words is one thing," says Toni Waho, a pioneering te reo teacher. "The sinister thing is when grammar changes, because grammar reflects cultural values and ways of thinking. We have...
...Still, Waho is optimistic. "With 30,000-plus learners of te reo, there's going to be an explosion of interchange between the languages," he says. "Maybe that 1,000-word vocab will also explode." Does Macalister expect his list to grow? "For sure." Non-Maori people still have a lot to learn about te reo, he says, but "it's exciting - it's a journey we're on." As the popular English-Maori phrase goes, everything's kapai (good). With luck and a little aroha, both languages will still be saying that many years from...