than meanings

More to words than meanings

A Word-list of South Island Maori. By Ray Harlow. Pub lished by the Linguistic Society of Hew Zealand, Auckland,

1985. 116 Pp. Isbn O

9597603 6 9.

In May 1840 the Rev. James Watkin arrived with his fam ily at Waikouaiti to found a Wesleyan mission. Since 1831 he had been in Tonga and he is reported to have spoken Tongan fluently.

He did not much like Waikouaiti nor Maori which he immediately set to leam. In 1843 he wrote that “speaking Maori distresses me greatly” and he took his family to Sydney the following year.

Waikouaiti had been “a place rivalling in proportion to its population the Bay of Islands in wickedness than which the sun shines not on a worse in the whole world.”

Yet Watkin left us the nearest thing we have to a dictionary of South Island Maori which Ray Harlow has now reorganised and edited for the Linguistic Society.

Watkin had arrived expecting to preach in North Island Maori.

The Rev. J. Buller of Kaipara had given him some books printed in Maori and with his fluency in Tongan Watkin had not anticipated any language problems.

The people of the South Island could not understand them. He wrote to Buller, “1 read to some of them out of the New Testament published at Paihia, but ‘Kahore e matou was the reply when I asked the question ‘Do you understand?’ 1 found I must have another alphabet o express correctly the sounds of this language.”

He began to write down the vocabularly of South Island Maori in a notebook with the help of informants like Haerer oa. It is on that notebook, now in the Hocken Library, that this book is based.

Using this he arranged for liturgical material to be printed

in South Island Maori at Man gungu in the Hokianga of which one booklet survives, He Puka Ako i te Korero Maori. This booklet, had been republished as an appendix to the word-list.

It records the first appearance of a language in print and is dated 1841.

Some 140 years later the South Island Maori Keri Hulme published The Bone People, now arguably the best known New Zealand novel after the Booker Prize. The Maori we read in The Bone People is not of the North Island, is not of the well-known Williams Dictionary of the Maori Language but rather of the word-list Watkin and Harlow (and informants like Haereroa) have given us here.

There are not a lot of other sources for Hulme’s Maori. The Oxford University Press has published the journal of John Boultbee. Boultbee was a sea ler on the coast south of Waikouaiti in 1825-1828 and his journal includes a word-list of 216 items which the Maori poet Hone Tuwhare has been doing some work on. Mantell (27 items), Shortland (all Kaita hu dialect), Harwood (29 items), Wohlers and the note books of James Beattie are really our only other sources.

You will notice these are all European names. South Island Maori is still spoken but, as Keri Hulme herself has written, her “Ngai Tahu dialect is practically extinct today, because the mis sionaries (the first people to use Maori as a written language extensively) were based in the North Island and assigned sound values to letters accord ing to what was current speech there.

“South Island Maori has been under seige from both English and North Island Maori for at least 150 years. What is perhaps most significant about A Word-list of South Island Maori is it appeared in 1985 not 1845.

Something worse underlines all this to which we find a clue in Watkin’s notebook. On pages 94-95 there is a long section of words headed ka ikoa o ka mate: 35 items dealing with disease.

In 1827 John Boultbee found the southern chief Te Wera “in a most dreadful state owing to the ‘fafa’, a disease common to these people. I was told that the first symptoms of it was a wryness of the mouth, and a discharge from the eyes.

The ravages it makes on the face, eyes, nose, mouth and at last on the feet and hands, is terrible. The victim of this dis ease generally dies in a half putrid state.”

Boultbee found Te Wera’s face “scarcely human, and I turned away with mingled feel ings of pity and disgust from an object so forbidding.”

An account of the South Island Maori published in Paris in 1826 described, “Natives . . . who have lost their feet and hands; their bodies are frightful ly thin and their extremities rot away. ” Among the diseases for which South Island Maori appears to have coined new words after the coming of Euro pean ships seems to have been leprosy.

A Word-list of South Island Maori is divided into three sec tions. After a discussion of South Island Maori we are given the word-list itself (cross indexed to other sources of South Island Maori). This is followed by an English-Maori index to allow readers to quick ly find which Maori word to look up in the main list.

Harlow is convinced “the language reflected in the list (is) a dialect of Maori and not a separate, though closely re lated, language.” In an earlier study Harlow found this South Island dialect was “more similar to some North Island dialects than are some pairs of North Island dialects to each other.

My guess is that at the moment

all these dialect differences are gradually being smoothed out and we are witnessing the emergence of something like a ‘standard Maori’.”

But dialects can tell us as much as archaeology about the Pacific’s past. When Watkin reach the South Island in 1840 he found Kaitahu consolidating their conquest of that island which they had taken over from Kati Mamoe during the pre vious 200 years. Through inter marriage those two tribal dialects had combined. Harlow suggests we can leam at least two things by studying Watkin’s resultant word-list. (1) Watkin’s dialect shares word-forms with several North Island East Coast dialects of Maori. This is linguistic evi dence for the Kati Mamoe and Kaitahu traditions of an East Coast origin. (2) Marked differences with those East Coast dialects poss ibly point us to borrowings from even earlier South Island occu pants: the Waitaha who lived there prior to the “Little Ice Age” of 1600-1800.

What I would like to call “the Waitaha traces”, the differ ences, are principally to be found in some vocabulary differences and the replace ment of /ng/ by /k/. You will have noticed how Ngai Tahu became Kaitahu above.

With other differences we must be more cautious. Watkin spoke Tongan perhaps too well! His word-list “pulls” South Island Maori in the direction of that language. The North Island Maori word for male (tone) becomes taane in Watkins’s word-list. We are on our way to the Tongan word taane.

We forget how influential lex icographers can be. Dr Johnson pushed English pronunciation in the direction of his own Scottish dialect when he com piled the spellings in his diction ary. Webster pulled another branch of English into another direction with his spellings.

Watkin, perhaps through the influence of his Wesleyan pamphlets printed at Mangun gu, may have given South Island Maori a slightly Tongan flavour.

Clearly there is more to a word-list or a dictionary than merely the means to look up

the meaning of a word.

D. S.

Long