CORRESPONDENCE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 46, 24 February 1937, Page 18

CORRESPONDENCE.

POINTS FROM LETTERS

MAORI PLACE NAMES

'"Korero Maori"' has favoured us with four letters since lie promised, unless he intended it as a threat, that he would leave me to ii«;lit it out with "Koro j lleke. ' Iliis would Ik; all to the good i if his letters were not full of errors, j brazened out »vith the assurance which ; so often accompanies limited knowledge. It was not at all necessary for either j "Koto lleke"' or "A.H.M.8." to apolo- | o'ise to "K.M.," for he has made more serious mistakes than all the other correspondents combined. Finally, to cover j them all, he rushes in to hail .Mr. James ] Cowan as a Daniel come to judgment. ! So he is, but the only writer whone statements Mr. Cowan wholly condemns j is "K.M." himself. 'J'lie worst mistake that "Koro lleke" made was in suggest-| ing that il, us 1 claim, the vowels have the Latin value (which he should have known, especially if he had recalled that] the name of George Nepia, the renowned footballer, its the exact Maori for Napier), then a Maori would be correct in pronouncing Latin as "l.ah-tecn." This is absurd, for two distinct rea>oii>: there is no "1" in Maori, and a Maori word cannot end in a consonant. "K. 11."' is only going out of his way to display his want of knowledge, and Euclid.famotis Q.E.D. seems quite applicable to him, but not to ine. However, this is nothing to what "K.M." tells me, for he corrects Dr. Moure for saying that "e"' must be sounded like "a" in "nav,'" and says "it certainly is not; it is almost identical with tne 'e' in 'led,' and he writes of Mr. Cowan as an authority who "ought to know."' What does Mr. Cowan say? In the "Star" supplement of January Hi he pronounces Marire as "Mah-ree-ray," and a week later l'ukema ire as "l'oo -kay-tny-ray," while we also have it in the aforesaid Nepia. That justifies all that Dr. Moore and 1 have written, «so "K.M." can now try to wriggle out of that glaring error and not dodge it like he (lodged my challenge to make him disprove my statement that a Maori can only pronounce "ng" ix.'fore a vowel. Ix't him tind a Maori place name or any other word where "ng" or any other consonant is anywhere but liefore a vowel, or. as lie puts it, "wherever it occurs in bis language. To say otherwise is ridiculous." I do say otherwise, and recant nothing that I have written for it will stand the closest analysis. *but not the misquotations which "K.M. ' usually give* it. and I certainly have no intention of admitting that there is no "u" sound in "rude," as he says 1 do. It is one of the four values we give that value in English, and one of the two values that it has in Maori. My letters have l>een purely constructive, enabling local residents and overseas tourists to understand tlie good fortune we enjoy in "our written form of Maori, ti \ t'<l finally bv the pioneer missionaries.' which Mr. Cowan eulogises as "the excellent phonetic orthography of the Maori," so when "K.M." indulges in a destructive and confusing policv throughout, and "K.H." says I am "grievously wrong in saying that Maori is phonetic," and that "the compile's of a written Maori language did not meet with much success." 1 must refer him to Mr. Cowan's articles in the "Star" supplement and challenge him to disprove them. If he and other critics want a language with more successful phonetics they could start from Gray Lin in the city of Orklnml. and when thev come bark from lnjiland. aftei viewing tlie Coronation profession in Pell Mell. in Lundun on the Tents, and also visiting Eddinburra, they will probably agree with Mr. Cowan, and also with me. that Maori is the easiest lan"ua"e in the world to pronounce • om the spelling. LISTEN El*.