PACIFIC NAMES

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 169, 20 July 1942, Page 2

PACIFIC NAMES

'TULAGF FOR 'TULANGF

PRONUNCIATION ERRORS

(By J.C.)

The radio announcements are a very common means of spreading errors in pronunciation of native names of islands and ports in the Pacific. One of the blunders of the tongue heard over the air almost daily is the radio pronunciation of the Solomon Islands name Tulangi, which is officially spelled "Tulagi." Here the initial mistake was made by the Europeans—missionaries, officials, and traders, who almost invariably followed the pioneer blunder of making "g" the arbitrary sign for "ng." So we have on the South Sea map hundreds of names not pronounced phonetically like Maori names. Our missionaries in New Zealand fortunately adopted phonetics and spelled native names as they are pronounced, a method which at once eliminated the early errors and fanciful experiments in orthography. The pity is that this system was not followed throughout the Pacific. It is next to impossible to teach the native pronunciation of such names as Pango-Pango, Tulangi, Makongai, when the guiding letters that denote the "nga" sound are omitted from the map. Even in Samoa, which isas purely Polynesian as New Zealand, Rarotonga and Tahiti, the mutilation of the language is common, and the result is often ghastly to the ear of a New Zealander. It was only the sound phonetic sense of such men among our missionaries as the Williams brothers, John Hobbs and one or two others that gave our Maori tongue its present form. Samoa's official and church spelling, with its omission of the "n" from "ng" creates such grotesque errors as "Magiagi" which a stranger would naturally pronounce "Maggyaggy." By the way, we have a reminder of that unshapely form in the far-back New Zealand pioneer with his "gaw-gaw" parrot. The radio announcer cannot be expected to be a Pacific Islands expert, but he can at least make himself familiar with the local spoken forms of muchused words of places. The result is worse when the radio man sends the spelling over the air, in order to make the mispronunciation more obvious to the listener. Fiji is the worst of all to the uninitiated. There, the dividing line between East and West Pacific, the letter "c" sometimes stands for "th," so that "Cicia" as written and printed is pronounced "Thithia." There are other vagaries. Sometimes "b" stands for "mb," and sometimes not. Usually "d" carries "n" before it not an easy sound for the unschooled to pronounce. Usually, however, the "n" is written with the "d" as in "Kandavu." Old King Thakombau's name was formerly spelled "Cakobau." This error at least has long been rectified. But Fijian language has a confusing, large admixture of Melanesian tongues.