Learning phrases key to fluency in te reo

‘‘The phrase, not the word, is the unit of Maori speech which must be emphasised in learning.’’ Thus Bruce Biggs begins the first chapter of Let’s Learn Maori. In this opening paragraph he then explains that the phrase ‘‘is the natural grammatical unit of the language, and even more importantly, it is the natural pause unit of speech.’’

Those studying te reo in Te Ataarangi classes will almost certainly appreciate the value of fully understanding this principle in progressing towards fluency.

Some English phrases have exact parallels in te reo.

The phrase ‘‘to the house’’, for example, is paralleled word-for-word by ki te whare. More frequently, however, there is no such easy matching of phrases.

A phrase such as ‘‘on the table’’ might seem equally of equal simplicity as ‘‘to the house’’. But the translation of this into te reo is very different. Here two phrases are required: kei runga / i te te¯pu.

Prior to the publication of Bruce Biggs’ work a group of words such as kei runga / i had been described as forming, collectively, a ‘‘complex preposition’’.

This seems an unnecessarily convoluted way of trying to relate a whole phrase of te reo, along with the preposition from a following phrase, to the simple English preposition ‘‘on’’.

In clarifying this issue it should be noted that whilst English has two main classes of nouns – ‘‘common’’ and ‘‘proper’’ – in te reo there are three classes, each with distinctive conventions of use: ‘‘common’’ ‘‘personal’’ and ‘‘location’’.

The word runga is a location noun. Besides meaning ‘‘the south’’, it means ‘‘the upper part’’ or ‘‘the top side’’ of something. Thus, a word-for-word translation of kei runga / i te te¯pu might be ‘‘at top side / of the table’’.

There are only a small number of words similar to runga, but these are unlike any words in English in that they are nouns which are never preceded by either of the definite articles te or nga¯ (‘‘the’’) or the indefinite he (‘‘a’’ or ‘‘some’’).

Yet that is not quite the whole story. In addition to nouns such as runga, raro, mua and twenty or so others, the class of ‘‘location nouns’’ includes all place names – and place names, considered ‘‘proper nouns’’ in English, are not normally preceded by articles either: kei Rotorua = ‘‘at Rotorua’’ (not ‘‘at the Rotorua’’).

If the convention (adopted along with other features of English written form) that the initial letter of place names should be capitalised, were extended to words such as runga perhaps their grammatical status might be more readily recognised.