Purer Pronunciation

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 428, 9 August 1928, Page 16

Purer Pronunciation

MAORI SCHOLAR’S PLEA

ADDRESS ON LANGUAGE A plea for the proper pronunciation of Maori words was made by Archdeacon H. W. Williams, a noted Maori scholar, in an address which he gave last evening. Archdeacon Williams, a descendant of the Williams family famous in early New Zealand history, gave his address to the anthropology and Maori race section of the New Zealand Institute. There was a large audience, which included boys from St. Stephen’s College. The speaker, in entering his protest against the mishandling and mispronunciation of Maori words, said it was criminal to speak of “Otahu” when it was easier and better to say “Otahuhu.” In the railway guide and some newspapers it was invariably found that words like mitimiti and hoho were printed as two words. The Maori prediliction for duplicating syllables was the cause of the construction of such words.

The speaker went on to say that Maori was one of a group of languages, and it seemed to him that one should speak rather of the Maori dialect than Maori language. The Polynesian language had, in common, a limited phonology. The speaker explained the sound values of the fine, long and short vowels in Maori, and showed that the language had only a possible of 55 syllables. Of these but 51 were used, so it was inevitable that there should be much repetition of sound in Maori words. The 55 Maori syllables compared with a possible total of 80,000 syllables in English. PURITY OF VOWELS

In speaking Maori the principal thing to remember was to keep the vowels pure, and give each vowel its full value in whatever part of the word it occurred. In the matter of accent Maori words tended to break up into groups of two syllables. Continuing, he said there had been a tendency among philologists to lean over-much on the similarity in words of the Maori and Indonesian languages, for there was a great difference in grammar. The study of the relationship between the Maori and Polynesian languages had still to be developed, and it was an ignominy for English scholarship that almost all the books of value on these languages had been produced either by the Germans or the Dutch.

“Maori grammar,” he said, “is the most straightforward and intelligible of all Island grammars. There are no declension of nouns, and speaking generally, no inflections. There is no verb ‘to be’ and no verb ‘to have,’ and many sentences have no verb at all.”

The speaker went on to say that a good deal of Maori had been committed to print. At the end of 1834 the Rev. William Colenso arrived at the Bay of Islands with a printing press, and that event marked the beginning of Maori literature. The early missionaries did wonderful work in translating the Bible, but there were still a number of blemishes. The Maoris, having only the Maori Bible as a model, were inclined to fix their style by that, and fell consequently into its errors. A number of Maori newspapers were published at different times, but the difficulty was that in writing the Maoris used worse Maori than they spoke.