Talk:Maori language

In my opinion, macrons should always be used correctly when writing Maori language, or writing about Maori language. There are many words where the length of the vowels makes a difference.

However, where the words are Maori words that have been imported into English, I don't think macrons are always necessary. For example, kowhai should be kōwhai, but when writing about the tree in English, the former is unambiguous. A note on correct Maori spelling and pronunciation on the relevant page would be good in any case. -- carey

I'd like to use them but aren't sure how to type them in. How do you manage to get them to show up on this page for example? Lisiate 00:36 Feb 28, 2003 (UTC)

For: Ā ā Ē ē Ī ī Ō ō Ū ū
Type: &#256; &#257; &#274; &#275; &#298; &#299; &#332; &#333; &#362; &#363;
--Brion

Cheers for that Lisiate 20:37 Feb 28, 2003 (UTC)

Microsoft have produced a simple fix (using the " ` " symbol - below the tilde) available on moderately advanced Windows systems; see http://www.microsoft.com/nz/hardware/keyboard/maori/ - it needs one of these:
- Windows 2000 Professional or Server with a Pentium 133 MHz or higher processor and 128 MB of RAM
- Windows XP Home Edition or Professional with a Pentium 233 MHz or higher processor and 128MB of RAM

Robin Patterson 05:40, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Windows XP/2000 users can also download Māori keyboard definitions from http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~timw/maorikb/
- These keyboard definitions use the AltGr (Right Alt) key instead of using the "`" key. TimW 10:30 Nov 11 2004 (UTC)

The other possibility is to double the vowel, so Maori(macron on the a) becomes Maaori. This is often used and is felt by some to be preferable, it may be a matter of regional variation, among the different iwi. Ping

I think maybe it's more a variation between different academic institutions. BP

There's also the problem that it fails to distinguish juxtapositions in compound words. Robin Patterson 05:40, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

The Reed Dictionary of Māori place names says this in the intro: "The student of Māori, [...] is still left with the problem of correct vowel length. For example, mata may be pronounced as maataa, mataa or mata, depending upon the intended meaning. Double vowels have been used in the past (in Te Kooti, for example), but the placement of a macron is now generally recognised as the best way to indicate a lengthened vowel sound." I would say to use them, as they change pronunciation — and thus, the meaning. We include the accents in French words and such as well. porge 04:32, Sep 20, 2004 (UTC) See also New Zealand Government Web Guidelines (http://www.e-government.govt.nz/docs/web-guidelines-2-1/chapter6.html#Heading656) porge 23:52, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)

Ng sound

I heard a Kiwi historian a few days ago, but for some reason, I couldn't catch how she pronounced initial ng, as in Ngai, in Anglicized pronunciation of Maori (even though she said it a dozen times). Because ng, as an initial one, is not part of Canadian English and needs to have an additional vowel attached to it, schwa or /i/, I believe. So it became [@N]. Is that how it's done in New Zealander English too? The rendering of --Menchi 09:32 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The Ng sound is difficult to signify phonetically because it doesn't have any English equivalent. To pronounce it correctly place the middle of your tongue against the roof of your mouth and then attempt to make a short NNN sound. What emerges sounds almost exactly like the letter/sylable used by the best Maori speakers and it was one of them who taught me how to do it many years ago. Ping 12 Jul 2003

My feeling is that it does have an English equivalent: like ng in the word "bang", but obviously dropping the first two letters. The trick is to remember that there is no "y" sound in there at all, so it's not like the childhood taunt "nya nya nya nyaaaa nya". The sound also occurs twice in the word "thinking". Mona-Lynn 02:49, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The best advice I was ever given about it was similar to that Ping offers above: shape your mouth as though you were saying a "k" sound, with the back of your tongue against the roof of the mouth. Then try - without moving your tongue - to say the word "nigh". This will give you - almost exactly - the sound of the word ngai, as in the names of many Maori iwi. Once you can do that, you can see how the sound works in combination with vowels. Remember that Maori is basically a syllabic language (like, say, Japanese) - consonants are rarely encountered on their own, as every syllable ends in a vowel. Grutness|^hello? Missing image
Grutness.jpg

03:33, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The ng sound in 'thinking' is probably too resonant or bell like. ping 08:31, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Other letters

Similarly, the other strange letter is written as Wh and pronounced as a slightly aspirated FFFF; very similar to the wh sound as used in Aberdeen and other areas of Scotland where "what's that" is pronounced s "fit's thaat" Until about 20 years ago the maori Wh was usually pronounced the media as a WWW but in recent years there has been a strong effort to revert to the correct pronounciation.

The other slight variation is the letter RRR. The letter DDD could have been chosen with almost equal accuracy. Often in early writing from New Zealand Keri Keri was written as Kedi Kedi. As with the Ng sound it is an RR sound emerging from the roof of the mouth and the middle of the tongue rather than the tip of the tongue against the front of the hard palate.

One qualification to all this, my experience is limited to Ngapuhi Maori, the dialect spoken by the most populous tribe in the far North of New Zealand. There are some regional variations across the different iwi or tribes.

Hope this helps you,

Ping 10:20 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It's interesting to read about the details unmentioned in the article. Do most White Kiwis pronounce them the traditional Maori way (at least according to the local or most common Maori dialect, like you described)? If not, how do White Kiwis pronounce ng and wh (as initial sounds of a word) usually? --Menchi 10:24 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The article says that "ng" is pronounced as in the English word "singer". That sounds perfectly straightforward to me. Or am I missing something? Are you saying that it's actually not quite the same as the sound in "singer"? -- Oliver P. 10:27 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

To Oliver P, yes, that is what I am saying, it is a single sound, try running the ng of singer together. its, close. Ping 10:44 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I realize I'm coming to this discussion quite "late in the day", as it were...but if anyone is still paying attention, the problem here is one of dialect and idiolect differences within English prounciation. In pronunciation of most native-speakers of English, Maori "ng" is pronounced exactly like the "ng" in "singer". There are, however, significant groups who pronounce "singer" to rhyme with "finger", i.e., as though it were written *"singger". I recommend that, if anyone ever puts a phonology section back into this article, that they us the IPA symbol however, instead of trying to come up with a "universally agreed-upon English phoneme equivalent". Tomer ^TALK 20:25, Apr 17, 2005 (UTC)

That sounds like a good idea; we need someone familiar with the system. ping 08:29, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Type it up and let me know when it's ready on my User_talk page. I'll help in any way I can. You appear to be in a much better position to know what you're talking about wrt exactly to Re'o Maori than I am. I'm more than happy to help out with the IPA templating when a suitable phonology section is created. Tomer ^TALK 08:55, Apr 18, 2005 (UTC)

To Menchi, Most Pakeha(non Maori) new Zealanders pronounce maori words exactly the same as if they were speaking English, thus Whanganui comes across as WONGA-NUI although Ngawha is usually rendered as NARFA Ping 10:49 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

There are often three pronunciations (here illustrated with Whangarei):
1. Traditional Pakeha - Wonga-rei.
2. Pakeha attempt (failed) at political correctness - Fonga-rei.
3. Maori (where the initial consonant varies from region to region) - Fa-ngaa-rei or Ha-ngaa-rei or Wa-ngaa-rei.

The 2nd really grates on me. I'd rather people stuck to 1 if they can't manage 3. -BP 30 Oct 2003

Alot of the 'correct' Maori pronounciations that've been come up with are a bit of a red herring. Maori was historically a language like German in that it was very fractured by different dialects with different pronouncations. This notion of there being a single correct way of saying each vowel & word is a product of nationalism, accidemia, and the very small number of remaining speakers of many dialects. Crusadeonilliteracy

Yes and no, you are partly correct but there are certain bondaries in the range of pronounciations. That is why spoken Maori would never sound like German; thus Cook Island Maori still sounds like Maori. My impression is that within New Zealand at least the range of spoken Maori is far narrower than, say, the range of spoken English in England. And yet people still talk about "correct English" ping 06:08, 31 Oct 2003 (UTC)~

Article needs attention

Several paragraphs are obviously (when one reads them) just the standard Wikipedia "X language" paragraphs telling contributors what sort of material the finished para should contain - see "Examples", for example.
Let's dig out some relevant material to fix it. :Robin Patterson 22:22, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Copyright paragraphs

Maori language contains some text copy & pasted from [1] (http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/Gallery/tereo/history.htm) ᚣᚷᚷᛞᚱᚫᛋᛁᛚ 01:02, 11 May 2004 (UTC)
- If it's not the whole article, just remove the part you think is a copyright violation. Angela. 11:19, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
  - The "complaint" is correct. The material has been there for 6 weeks, now spread over several paragraphs. It arrived in this revision (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Maori_language&diff=3398935&oldid=3170148) on 13 April, with the somewhat cryptic comment "Conformation to template". Without realising its origin, I thanked the 14-year-old Arizonan Wikipediholic then rephrased and enlarged parts of it a day or two later. I or one of my fellow-Kiwis could probably do more paraphrasing and other editing so that it owed next-to-nothing to that site. Or maybe one of that site's guardians would like to do that for us... Robin Patterson 07:54, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Writing system

As it currently stands, the article claims that "Maori once had a script similar to the Rongorongo script of Easter Island". I have never heard of such a script being used by Maori - could someone please point me towards the source of this claim? (I'm not saying it's wrong, but since it conflicts with what I thought I knew, I'd quite like some confirmation of it). Thanks. -- Vardion 11:41, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Sounds/grammar/vocabulary, generally

Here (slightly edited for heading level) is what I have just concealed inside comment code in the article. Now that it's safely here, I suggest that it be deleted from the article next time someone's editing that. Robin Patterson 01:02, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Sounds

Description of the sound set of the language. Can include phoneme charts and example words for each phoneme like in French language. If there is significant discussion here, it is probably best to divide the section into vowels and consonants subsections.

Vowels

Vowel chart and discussion of vowels.

Consonants

Consonant chart and discussion of consonants (including the "wh" and "ng").

Phonology

Discussion of some major phonological processes, such as important allophones or assimilation rules.

Historical sound changes

Description of important sound changes in the history of the language. (Maybe this should go under history?)

Grammar

Description of the grammar of the language.

Vocabulary

This section should contain a discussion of any special features of the vocabulary (or lexicon) of the language, like if it contains a large number of borrowed words (large number of words are borrowed from English, as with all Polynesian languages) or different sets of words for different politeness levels, taboo groups, etc.

Sailed over vs arrived

As the page history (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maori_language&action=history) shows, there has been a series of reverts about the exact language in the second paragraph. I argue that "sailed over in canoes" is counter-intuitive. Initially I edited the article, I did not know that Polynesian peoples, especially, actually did sail canoes. I was informed that they did. However, as Ping said, my edit did not change the sense, and I would submit that it is an easier concept to grasp for someone not particularly knowledgeable about NZ/Maori/Polynesian history (i.e. me). Cheers, Smoddy (t) (e) 17:03, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

See how it looks now. I think it conveys the message of both edits - sails and canoes. Grutness|^hello? Missing image
Grutness.jpg

08:45, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Looks good to me. It does explain the concept better now. Smoddy (_t^g_e^c_{k (http://kohl.wikimedia.org/~kate/cgi-bin/count_edits.cgi?user=Smoddy&dbname=enwiki)</sub>)} 08:53, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Alphabet

I've added L to the listed alphabet, with the caveat that it is only used in Southern Maori. Grutness|^hello? Missing image
Grutness.jpg

05:40, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Um...you guys realize that the whole alphabet thing is inside an HTML comment tag, right? Tomer ^TALK 06:31, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)

Yup - if you look at the edit history you'll see that it was put there "for comment", before being put into the article formally. Grutness|^hello? Missing image
Grutness.jpg

08:22, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Kia ora na, greetings,

Matters of opinion follow: "Tahitian" and "Rarotongan" are common if incorrect descriptions for what is in fact te reo "Maohi" in Tahiti and te reo "Maori" in Rarotonga. Some may also recognise "Maoli" in Hawaii. Referring to Tahitian, Rarotongan and Hawaiian as languages or dialects makes no more sense than describing te reo Maori as "Aotearoan" or "Cook Islandish." Most academics refer to Cook Islands Maori as "Cook Islands Maori" in the same manner as New Zealand Maori in their corner of Polynesia. In other words, describing someone as New Zealand Maori distinguishes them not just from non-Maori New Zealanders, but also their relations in the Pacific, such as Cook Islands Maori. Not sure how exactly this should be submitted but, for future reference, will watch this part of the wiki to see how these suggestions are handled.

Suggestion: In the interests of clarity I would suggest retaining words like Tahitian and Rarotongan. Improve accuracy by referring to Tahitian Maohi and Rarotongan Maori. This may prove more linguistically versatile as it allows for reporting of variants of Maori, Maohi and Maoli as a language of many dialects. For example, Mangaian Maori. Eventually, European speakers will feel comfortable enough with the word Maori to leave off the 'n' - just as many have done already with a now historical 's'

I can be contacted at the address below:

jason brown editor at avaiki dot nu

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