THE MAORI LANGUAGE.
NOW LITTLE USED. ‘•Korera” writes in the' “Aueklancl Star”:. “N&tliing is so disheartening Jto‘ anyone who admires th%Maori race as the utter disregard for their beautiful language by . IhetMaoris themselves. You hardly, ovei? hear its melodious vowels nowadays in the streets. Most significant of all is that when the Maori is angry, he is angry in English. As a rule a man drops back naturally to his mother tongue when very much annoyed. Down at the corner of Queen and Custom Sts. the other day I heard two slightly elevated sons of the soil having a difference and they were horribly English over the whole affair. Up at the recent bio- hui at Ngaruaw'alvia it was am using to hear the Maoris punctuate with perfect European ‘hear, hear,’ the spech of one of the heads who was speaking in the Native .language. Pakeha ways, however, fkrnand. pakeha phrases for which l 1 lie Maori has no equivalent and it is perhaps inevitable that these phrases should crop up even in con-,-Ycrs'atiion otherwise strictly Maori, rile aha te tadma o te second express nei? The change in sound and tone between the soft Italian-like Maori words in such a phrase and the, staccato English ‘second express’ had a very quaint effect.”
Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/MH19290416.2.3
Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka
Manawatu Herald, Volume L, Issue 3931, 16 April 1929, Page 1
Word count
Tapeke kupu
213THE MAORI LANGUAGE. Manawatu Herald, Volume L, Issue 3931, 16 April 1929, Page 1
Using this item
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
Stuff Ltd is the copyright owner for the Manawatu Herald. You can reproduce in-copyright material from this newspaper for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This newspaper is not available for commercial use without the consent of Stuff Ltd. For advice on reproduction of out-of-copyright material from this newspaper, please refer to the Copyright guide.