Long story short, some developments in recent years of the implications of the Treaty of Waitangi for governance (aka "co-governance") of life hereabouts (e.g. of how health is organised, of how water usage is governed) have provoked one of our current coalition government parties, ACT, into proposing a sweeping change to our unerstanding of the Treaty (if not effectively-abolishing it). As a whole the coalition government has pushed back against use of Te Reo (Māori language) in government documents and departmental names.
In turn this has provoked angst among Māori (fearful of losing rights, access to that which improves social and personal life outcomes, diminishment of great progress of acceptability of Te Reo in everyday Kiwi life), deep concern among many Pākeha (concerned that progress for Māori will not only be stymied but set back in measurable degrees) and pleasure among those whose views are that Māori have too many rights, benefits and, these days, too much power.
There is always in such situations, where politicians tap into currents of resentment in society, the possibility of increasing division in society, something which may benefit some politicians in a democracy (cf. Trump in the USA) or, indeed, in a dictatorship, but which never benefits society. A divided society then becomes, tragically, fertile ground for new resentments to emerge, resentments which may becomes rebellions and rebellions may become civic unrest or even civil war.
In recent months, concern about where current approaches of the ACT Party, if not the coalition government itself may lead has risen high.
Theologically, referring back to my post last week, I am concerned that we recognise that a divided society is not compatible with a Christian vision for society - such vision flows out of passages such as Ephesians 4:25-5:2 - for society as a united body of people, committed to forgiving past sins and working in the present for loving, reconciled relationships.
Yesterday a large hui (gathering) was held at Turangawaewae - 10,000 Māori and supporters gathering to address the situation Māori find themselves in.
What would the tone of the event be? Would it be itself a furthering of division in these islands?
Thankfully this seems not to have been the case, as John Campbell reports here.
His report of the day, and its notes of welcome, hospitality, peace, friendship and joy cohere strongly with Ephesians 4:25-5:2.
Thanks be to God!
A good thing to reflect on at the moment, a Christian way of living and how to do it in the current climate. Not that it isn’t always a good thing but surely there are things coming at one left, right and centre at the moment re opinions and perspectives and worldviews as you rightly point out +Peter that contravene biblical principles. Discernment will be a well sort after gift going ahead.
ReplyDeleteI too was concerned with the response of the new government to Maori that it would fuel division and anger leading to unrest. John Campbell makes a good point in terms of the underlying ideology of equality squalling all people being treated equal. It reminds me of the bible verse of the early Christians who pooled all their resources and gave to everyone, “each according to their need.” A distinct recognition that we all have different needs, and at different times in our lives. Unfortunately the changes to benefits that Act and NZ first have also put as part of their coalition agreements also carry the same type of stance, even going so far in the case of Act that if someone on an unemployment benefit fails to meet an ‘obligation’ of which there will be plenty new ones, all their spending should be electronically monitored. Unemployed or criminals? I am sure their are people who work or abuse the ‘system’ as there not doubt always has been, I am also sure that there are people who neglect their employees and people who work and are culpable of fraud and people who take advantage of vulnerable consumers to make excessive profits. Taking advantage is unfortunately a human trait but it is not unique to those out of work.
So yes let’s resist being swayed by the many ideologies and worldviews around us and seek The Way and walk in it!
Peter, languages live or die according to their real-world usefulness. Nearly 100 years of compulsory Irish in Ireland's education and government had produced an essentially monoglot society - and Irish is actually an ancient literary language of an ancient people (Celts came to Ireland c. 500 BC) with an untold wealth of written works in it. What does that tell you about political attempts to mould a people? Speaking Irish is not the same as lacing your Hiberno-English with the occasional 'pogue mahone', as my Irish great-grandfather likely did.
ReplyDeleteCan you tell me the Maori for aeroplane, bicarbonate of soda, carburetor, download, email, fluoride, gymnasium, hydatids, insulation etc?
What real world use do you have in mind?
Much more to say on your post (which makes a great number of political assumptions and glides very easily over the past six years and more), but that's a linguist's start.
Pax* et bonum
William Greenhalgh
* Irish 'pogue' is actually from 'pax', the kiss of peace in the Mass.
William, a medieval saying which I can speak in Medieval English from University days but not write:
ReplyDelete“The falsehood that exalts we cherish more than meaner truths a thousand strong.”
Personally the depth of meaning added by languages I have found both useful and profound in my own life. Although I do not have a grasp of Greek or Hebrew I am sure those who do also find such in their study of Scripture and I will often look up words to garner the true interpretation…. And how does one learn except by starting somewhere with a language? The Te Reo words I have discovered fill a space in my vocabulary and have no equal in modern English include, taonga, Arohanui, and manaakitanga and this without any extensive study. I delight in language and take equal delight when my nephew uses a new for him, but an old word in conversation such as lackadaisical. To reduce the value of a language to how many people at the present time are able to speak it fluently is I think a little like reducing the value of people to economic units, it overlooks worth that is inherent not ascribed.
As for political attempts to mould people, my Uncle’s experience of being hit for speaking Te Reo and forbidden to at home contributing to a loss of both identity and self worth, it tells me a lot.
Jean, much of my professional life has been spent in learning and teaching languages, ancient and modern, and there isn't a word in biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, classical Greek or Latin that cannot be adequately rendered into modern English. I would wager the same for Maori as well. The Gospel is built on the notion of translatability, as ex-Muslim Lamin Sanneh observed many years ago. Muslims claim the Quran cannot be "truly" translated but this is nonsense. We must stop mysticising language. But many people who weigh in on the question show little grasp of linguistics.
ReplyDeleteI love word studies more than most people and I think it is perfectly fine for people to learn Maori for cultural and personal reasons.
But it is absurd and alienating to fill weather forecasts with untranslated Maori. And the same with renaming government departments in a language unknown to the great majority. What is the point of doing that other than to exclude people? Why not do it in Chinese since more people speak Chinese in New Zealand a daily and professional basis? - and Chinese is an important world language. I don't imagine you would suport that. Neither do I.
And to suddenly inject streams of untranslated Maori nouns into passages of English doesn't aid communication - and it isn't speaking Maori either, just English that may not be understood.
It's sad if your uncle's parents forbade him from speaking Maori at home, but they no doubt wanted him to progress at school. The same thing happened in Ireland in the 19th century. Irish wasn't forbidden, it was just that Irish parents wanted their children to enter British and American culture and economic life.
People invest in languages to the extent that they are actually useful or significant to them. As the Irish experience showed, this is not a thing that can be imposed on people. It must be a personal choice, not a political bandwagon.
Pax et bonum
William 3
Just to say 'William 3' is a glitch from the predictive text on the software on my tablet. I am not and never will be William of Orange!
ReplyDeletePax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
Dear William
ReplyDeleteYour observations are missing the following points:
- Māori is a living language and an official language of NZ. Whether it has usefulness in the wider world is neither here nor there.
- All languages are critical to the lively preservation of the culture and customs of the people of each language: surely you are not arguing for the complete cessation of Māori culture and custom and thus for the final triumph of assimilation to British/Western culture in NZ?
- All languages change over time: Māori is quite capable of forming new words to cover new things; NZ English is absorbing of new words from elsewhere in the English-speaking world and from other languages - is there any specific reason why such adaptation should not include Māori? (One of the points I have heard made is that we English speakers are comfortable including French words to describe our wines (pinot noir etc!) but diffident about using Māori to describe an NZ govt department ... why is that?)
- Various countries in the world are bilingual (Wales sometimes held up here as a good example, close to England itself!): why not NZ embracing such a future ... especially when Māori is already an official language?
Hi William
ReplyDeleteMy apologies to start with, I mis communicated one point, yes my Uncle was forbidden from speaking Maori at home, however, he was beaten for speaking it at school. The latter was a political bandwagon and the way language was used at that time was to make it obsolete. So Te Reo language has been a political football for a long time. Notwithstanding the initial resurgence of Kohanga Reo schools/playgroups was a grassroots initiative lead by locals it only became regulated so to speak when it became too popular and the government of the time thought regulation was needed. So the re-surgence of Te Reo if you like was driven by ordinary people. You probably already know, however, the Maori seats in parliament that were so controversial in recent years were originally put in place to limit the number of Maori in government when the Maori population exceeded the general population as a whole.
You have some reasonable points. The feelings of exclusion and alienation I noticed regarding the use of Te Reo only for government department names in the media, especially as these are entities all of us need to know or understand who is being referred to. I personally think it would have been wise to use both Te Reo and English when using these names as the written logo’s employed. At the same time it does give rise to questions of how Maori must have felt when their language was to all intent and purposes put aside and they were compelled to navigate a word all in English - we have only been grappling with minor changes and look at the response it has elicited! As for other languages being more useful or pertinent, well people who immigrate to New Zealand already know and understand that English and Te Reo and Sign Language are our official languages. I do not say this makes life easy but it is as if I went to France I would except French as the language of that country.
Linguistically I am sure your education and knowledge of such is greater than mine. I suppose, given many translations that exist, language in that way can be conveyed. What I have observed with my limited knowledge in this area is that something is also lost. I remember when I first discovered the Hebrew play on words, the double meaning of words, in biblical passages and it opened a new world in terms of understanding as well as humour of certain Bible verses.
In respect to the merging of languages (e.g. using both Te Reo and English) in a sentence. I actually enjoy it and do it without thinking once a word becomes familiar. Kai, Morena, Kia Ora, Mahi, puka puka etc etc are words that come without bidding in my vocabulary. Personally I think this is a natural merging of languages, just like English has many roots in other languages such as Germanic and French - I mean we use Kindergarten (German) and Rendezvous without a second thought.
All the best
Hi Liz… the saying has long been a favourite and Alexandra Solzhenitsyn well he will provide you with some meaty material - I remember reading one of his books at school and what a life he lived! Go well..
ReplyDeleteJen, thanks for responding. No real disagreement with you, I was only observing that most languages in the world are dying (half are estimated to be gone by 2100). Language death is an age-long process, which has been accelerated in our days by the global village and the demands of education.
ReplyDeleteI am very happy to see Maori learned for cultural purposes (songs, poems, hakas, historical research etc), for the same reason that I learned and taught Latin: for cultural and educational enrichment, not for communication. Latin was indeed used a the lingua franca in university education and scholarship up to c. 1800 but was replaced by English globally. Maori will always have place on the marae.
Latin, you may know, didn't really 'die out' but rather evolved into the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian etc) until comprehensibility of Latin was lost. I don't think Maori will evolve because that would involve the deep structure of the language (phonemes and grammar) and the use of Maori across the whole range of social, scientific and commercial life, which isn't possible. With only 15 letters, the range of possible sounds in Maori is very limited and introducing new foreign words into Maori
That's why I think inflicting it on non-Maori speaking people in weather forecasts and government department names is just gimmicky and alienating. There is already Maori TV, just as there are Welsh and Gaelic TV channels in Britain and Irish in Ireland - although I don't think anybody watches Gaelic or Irish language TV.
However, introducing a lot of Maori words into English is not the same as speaking Maori! It may make the language a bit 'richer', but it can also introduce more confusion, especially when people refuse to translate a word. This is what I mean by mystifying language. More on this later, maybe!
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
Hi William. I am a bit confused about your third paragraph because I'm not sure how the number of "letters" relates to languages "evolving". Does the number of sounds people use really limit what they can say?
ReplyDeletePeace
Bruce Symons
Bruce, my third paragraph got a bit garbled before I posted, but to explain a bit further:
ReplyDeleteThere are about 40 letters in the International Phonetic Alphabet (which I can't reproduce here), which includes numerous sounds not found in Maori (but found in related Polynesian languages). These include: b, d, j, l, s, v, x, z, as well as many consonantal clusters (gr, cl, fl etc). Trying to bring any of these words containing these letters into Maori would mean significant reduction or distortion. It isn't worth the effort.
It's like trying to fit a very large crew into a small boat.
You're gonna need a bigger waka.
Pax et bonum
Wiremu Haruhara
But, William, it is the same in any language. In English, for example, "we" don't use the [x] and it could be claimed "we" don't use the [b] and [d].
ReplyDeleteAnd isn't the reduction and distortion only in the minds of the non-Maori speakers?
I am very unclear about the point you are tyring to make, William, and thus concur with Bruce.
ReplyDeleteMaori has ways of coming up with variations of words (Rihare for Richard; Harete for Charlotte; Ihu for Jesus) so not clear why limitations of sounds/their alphabet is an intrinsic problem.
In my limited knowledge of languages, the English alphabet does not have some of the sounds of (e.g.) Arabic/Hebrew/German/Fijian/Chinese, but that doesn't seem to mean that English is in any sense a language marked with deficiency.
OK, I'll "spell" it out. The issue is not the alphabet but the phonemic range. The phonemic range of English is much, much larger than Maori or any of its related East Polynesian languages.
ReplyDeleteThis is because English from the 8th or 9th century has been an expanding, packrat language: first Old Norse, then Norman French, then the vast expansion of Latin and Greek based vocabulary right up to our day when Maori words get adopted into English. And once a word is adopted into English, it becomes an English word and follows English grammar. What is the plural of pizza? Pizzas, not pizze. What is the plural of kiwi? Kiwis, not kiwi. I am perfectly aware that Maori doesn't pluralise nouns, but when I say "tuis" I am not speaking Maori.
All the sounds of Arabic, Hebrew, German and Fijian can be found in the varieties of English spoken around the world. Scots can easily make the Germanic 'ch'sound. American English is more rhotic than English English etc. The language isn't tonal like Chinese and Vietnamese (where rising and falling tones give different meanings to the monosyllabic words) but of course we use tones in speaking.
What English doesn't have is the click sounds of Xhosa and other southern African (Xhoisan) languages. But maybe some South African English speakers incorporate these sounds into their speech.
Since all Maori speakers already speak English, why don't they simply adopt English sounds into Maori? Especially s/sh/z/b/g/v/l/d, which are utterly important sounds. Harete doesn't sound remotely like Charlotte, Ihu is nothing like 'Jesus'. I suspect what happened was that when missionaries reduced Maori to writing and wrote grammars they put the language into aspic and stopped it growing. And subsequent grammarians and lexicographers stuck with that antiquarian approach, treating it essentially as a dead language.
As a result the language became more like a museum piece; very important for anthropological and cultural studies of a pre-modern east Polynesian people, but of decreasing importance for real world use. You are not going to find any scholarship- or even simple textbooks- on maths, computing, chemistry, mechanics or medicine in Maori. (Which is true of most traditional languages in the world - Nahuatl, Quichua, Guarani, Omoro and thousands more.) So what is its actual use, given that we don't live in 18th century New Zealand? Ceremonial, not actual - and emotionally significant to people of Maori ancestry. Similar to the way I feel about Scottish Gaelic.
What you will find is folkloric and similar material - which fits the anthropological approach to language. What Peter could tell us is how many people attend Maori language church services. Are there many? Ten?
Languages live or die according to their usefulness, and if they don't adapt, they either die or have to be put in some protective reserve, like flightless birds. The Gaeltacht is a protective reserve in Ireland - and it is disappearing as nobody wants to live there.
The real issue is that the drive to push the language onto monoglot Kiwis is not a response to grassroots feeling but was really political and a powerplay by Jacinda Ardern intended to see off Te Pati Maori - and that has caused an understandable reaction and pushback. Strange to say, politics today is more racially and ethnically 'coloured' than it ever has been in my lifetime, and state subsidy for a language is one of the footballs.
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
Dear William
ReplyDeleteYou are lucky I published your comment - a further one with such pejorativeness against Maori and Te Reo won't get published.
No sounds in one language compared to another are "utterly" important. Languages adapt and change. People adapt and change.
Many Asians in NZ change the name they wish to be addressed by fellow Kiwis becuase we struggle to pronounce their names. Are they polite? Are we lazy? Is it racist for English-familiar Kiwis not to make more effort to adopt sounds of other languages? These are questions worth discussing but nothing and no one is served re social relations by the kind of put downs you make above.
No Maori using Te Reo expects Maori to become the lingua franca of scientific and tehnological discourse in global academia. English won that battle a while ago (further sidelining Latin and French) - but - of course! - it may not win the ware a hundred years from now ... Chinese? Hindi? whi know what will dominate the world in another era.
All Maori using Te Reo are deepening their identity as distinctive people within NZ, the South Pacific and the world. No one derides Samoan being used by Samoan congregations, Fijian ... Tongan ... why should not Maori proudly and appropiately continue to use their language in worship, on marae and in other spheres of life.
There are more than ten Maori using Te Reo in their worship!
Please take care with any response to this comment.
Dear William. I am wondering also if your linguistic arguments actually hold up.
ReplyDeleteHow many phonemes were added to the (Old) English phoneme inventory through the large scale borrowing you mention? One? Two? More than two? Doesn't this sort of contradict your claim about the number of phonemes being an issue?
Yes, in the languages of the world Maori has a smallish number of phonemes. But English has an 'average' number. The number of phonemes is not at all relevant to people being able to communicate.
Yes English speakers can use a variety of sounds -- as can any human being. But don't most English speakers treat 'loch' and 'lock' as homophones? So is [x] (as in German 'Ich' and Scottish 'loch') a phoneme in English? We also sometimes do use clicks -- 'tsk tsk' ('tut tut').
And to support Peter's comment about 'utterly important' sounds. Of a sample of 567 languages, only 220 contrast voiced and voiceless plosives (p/b t/d k/g). These languages are not lacking, just different.
Actually (and just slightly tongue-in-cheek) 'Ihu' might be closer phonetically to Jesus' name in Greek than 'Jesus', yes?
Peace
Bruce Symons