Constructing a simple sentence | Stuff.co.nz

David Kārena-Holmes is a Nelson-based author and academic

COLUMN: An English-speaking learner of te reo Māori is faced, certainly, with acquiring a vocabulary of words which may be unfamiliar – but a greater difficulty is acquiring a good understanding of the differences between the languages in the manner in which sentences are constructed.

The magnitude of these differences is indicated by the fact that early attempts in the 19th century to explain the grammar were quite confusing.

In both A Grammar and Vocabulary of Language of New Zealand (1820) by the linguist Samuel Lee of Cambridge University (with whom the missionary Thomas Kendall and Ngāpuhi Rangatira Hongi Hika collaborated) and in Robert Maunsell’s Grammar of the New Zealand Language (1842) the authors openly admit the inadequacy of their explanations.

It wasn’t until 150 years after the publication of Lee’s book that the real “break-through” to better understanding of Māori grammar came with the “entirely different grammatical theory” and “much simplified system of classification” presented in Bruce Biggs’ Let’s Learn Maori of 1969.

READ MORE:
* Te reo Māori’s place among the world’s languages
* Classifying words by colour
* Qualifying words in te reo
* To be in English or not to be in te reo Māori

In this work it’s clearly shown how the grammar of te reo Māori, far from being more complicated than that of English, is – when considered on its own terms – in many ways actually vastly simpler.

The principles established by Bruce Biggs, with minor modifications, inform the explanations provided in these columns – and it’s hoped that considering those principles again, at this point, will be found useful to readers.

Almost the entire vocabulary of te reo Māori may be considered in two main groups: base words and particles.

There are thousands of base words. They are used as nouns (to give a name to something or someone) or verbs (which denote actions or states of being). Many may be used as either. e.g. waiata may be used as a verb (“sing”) or noun (“song”); kōrero as a verb (“speak”) or noun (“speech”).

There are only just over 50 particles, which may be classified in various groups. These are “structural” words which support the base word or words in a phrase.

Thus, in the simple sentence I oma / a Hone. (“John ran.”) the base word oma (“to run”) is a verb, and the verb particle i marks it as past tense (i oma = “ran”).

In these columns the breaks between phrases in te reo are marked by a forward slash, and in the second phrase here the name Hone, as subject of the sentence, is preceded by a particle called the “personal article” for which there is no equivalent in English.

A thorough understanding of exactly how such simple, basic sentences as this are constructed may serve as a good foundation for progressing to more complex sentences.