happy medium

You may have heard back home about the passing of the Maori Queen – Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu. She died on Tuesday last week, 75 years of age, just 2 weeks after her birthday. She was crowned in 1966, at just 34. The 40th anniversary of her coronation took place in May.

Today her eldest son, Te Arikinui Tuheitia Paki, was confirmed as her successor.

There have been now 7 Maori monarchs, the first being crowned in 1853. A head Maori was introduced as a way of combating the loss of land and unity due to the British settlers, who in turn tried to destory the monachy as it was deemed a threat to the British crown.

The Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand. They are not natives however, having settled here between 800AD and 1130AD, from as far as the Easter Islands. In fact New Zealand is one of the last places on Earth to have been settled by Man.

The island was “discovered” by a dutch man named Abel Tasman 1642 and named it “New Zeeland” after a province in the Netherlands. (The Tasman sea between NZ and OZ is named afer him), although settlements in large numbers only took place with the coming of the British in the late 1800s. This lead to the landwars around the time of the first Maori King.

Someone of White British descent in New Zealand is known as a “Pakeha”, although the term is now used for anyone of non-maori descent but it is deemed as derogative by some.

Before the Europeans settlers, they had been no written form of the Maori language. European Christian missionaries developed Maori as a written language, and the first printed material in the Maori language was published in 1815. It’s actually a pretty difficult language for a Brit to get his head around, especially pronunciations, as although the characters are recognisible, the way in which they are pronounced is not.

The language consists of five vowels:

A – pronounced “ah” as in lava
E – pronounced as in the word pet
I – pronounced “ee” as in the ie in families
O – pronounced “or”
U – pronounced “oo” as in boo!

There are just 8 single consonants – H,K,M,N,P,R,T,W, and two digraphs:

NG – pronounced as in the word song.
WH – generally pronounced roughly as `f’ or “ph”

You’ll notice there is no “S” in the Maori language, and is deemed offensive if you pluralise Maori words by adding an “s”. For example, never say “Maoris”, always “Maori”

This entry was posted on Monday, August 21st, 2006 at 2:12 pm and is filed under unhappy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.