Maori Irish

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31007, 12 March 1966, Page 5

Maori Irish

JT HAPPENED that

before coming to New Zealand at the age of 30 I had never come across that peculiar Irish idiom which produces so odd an effect when it is adopted in English. The idiom apparently became very connnon here, while in England it was comparatively rare.

It concerns the use of the preposition “on” in the descriptive of some misadventure or minor mishap and has been compared to the Latin “dative of disadvantage.” I had been fishing near the mouth of the Opihi where there was a small pa and had hooked and lost a trout when a Maori behind me said: “So he got away on you!” That is a fair example of the idiom. The stock example usually was the lament of an Irish housemaid, “I’ve broken his stick on the master.” Partridge in his “Dictionary of Slang, etc.” describes it as meaning “to the detriment or the ruin or the circumventing of” as: “I hope he won’t go bankrupt on us.”

This is a literal translation of the Irish (Erse) idiom and could not have been developed from any usage of the English preposition “on.” I was often hearing it in my early days in New Zealand. A man’s horse had “jibbed on him,” or his cartwheel had “stuck on him;” All very comical when taken literally. It is not surprising that this idiom became familiar to the Maori.

The preposition in Irish is “air,” pronounced “er.”