New Zealand: Language (Māori)

[rsc]

We didn't have any need to actually be able to speak, read, or understand Māori; but it shows up in a lot of place names. I'm usually pretty good with foreign-language place names, but there are whole classes of Māori ones that I simply cannot keep straight. When I look at a map and see Whangarei. Whangaroa, Whangaparaoa, etc., or when I discover that among the many islands in the bay we're staying on (imaginatively named "Bay of Islands" by the British) are one named Moturua and one named Moturoa (I had to stare the map to convince myself that these islands really had different names), when we had stayed only a few days before in a town called Rotorua, I get a bit confused, and find myself having the very provincial thought that "all these names look alike". Of course, it would probably be easier if the components of the names meant anything to me. It also doesn't help that Māori (like Hawaiian, and I suspect many other Polynesian languages) seems to have a lot fewer phonemes than the European languages with which I'm more closely acquainted.

All this put me in mind of what I guess you could call a running gag in George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. In the play, Cleopatra's nurse and confidante is a rather formidable woman named Ftatateeta. Caesar and his friend Rufio simply cannot get their tongues around this name, and alternately call her "Totateeta" and "Teetatota", or sometimes simply "Tota". So when trying to talk about some place that we had been or been near or considered going, whose name I couldn't remember or distinguish from some other similar name, I would just say "Ftatateeta". (Of course, strictly speaking, this was inappropriate¹; I should have used one of the Romans' variants, particularly since f is among the phonemes that Māori lacks.)

¹Not as inappropriate as it would have been if I had used it somewhere other than the privacy of our hotel room or car.