Distinguishing between nouns in te reo Māori has been a long haerenga

David Kārena-Holmes is a published author living in Nelson

COLUMN: The first substantial, published attempt to explain how sentences are formed in te reo Māori was the Church Missionary Society’s A Grammar and Vocabulary of the people of New Zealand of 1820.

Both the editor of this book – Samuel Lee of Cambridge University – and Robert Maunsell, author of the subsequent (1842) Grammar of the New Zealand Language, admitted that their explanations were unsatisfactory.

It wasn’t, in fact, until 150 years after the 1820 book that real progress in explanation was made available in Bruce Biggs’ Let’s Learn Maori.

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In a brief passage (to which reference has been made several times in these columns) Professor Biggs explained: “In Let’s Learn Maori an entirely different grammatical theory is used and a much simplified system of classification results.

“All words are divided into two classes, bases and particles.

“The particles … are the grammatical words; they are few in number … All other words are bases.”

Bases (or base words) are words used either as nouns or verbs.

It’s now more than 50 years since Let’s Learn Maori appeared, yet it’s still not uncommon to encounter attempts to explain te reo using traditional English grammar – and often confusion results.

A recently noted example was the assertion that there are two classes of noun: “common” and “proper”. This may be true for English, but with te reo Māori there are three classes: “common”, “personal” and “location”.

English “proper” nouns include names of both people and places, but in te reo such nouns may be either “personal” or “location”. The distinction is made because of the different ways in which phrases are constructed with each type.

Personal nouns, when the subject of a sentence, and when not emphasised by the particle ko, are preceded by the personal (or proper) article – a: Kua haere / a Mere / ki te whare. (“Mary has gone to the house.”) and also when following any of the four location particles (ki, kei, i, hei): Hoatu / te pukapuka / ki a Mere. (“Give the book to Mary.”).

Location nouns, on the other hand, are the only base words which directly follow (that is, with no intervening word) any location particle: Kua haere / a Mere / ki Whakatane. (“Mary has gone to Whakatane.”) and Kua haere / a Mere / ki waho. (“Mary has gone outside.”)

Like personal nouns however, location nouns are also directly preceded by the personal/proper article when they are the subject of a sentence: He tāone / a Whakatane. (“Whakatane is a town.”) and He makariri / a waho.” (“The outside is cold.” = “It’s cold outside.”).