What happened to the Maori langauge so that some kids now have to study it in school instead of just learning it at home? Same thing as happened to Huichol in Mexico or Lushootseed around Seattle. The Europeans systematically tried to eradicate it. Not too many decades ago, kids in NZ, the US, and Mexico were beaten at school, or had their mouths washed out with soap, or were taken out of their homes and put in residential schools where their elders weren't around to talk to them. It's a pretty sickening and oft-repeated story, but at least Maori wasn't killed off, just wounded. I hear people speaking it all over the place. And when I watch Maori tv, I hear people of all ages who sound darned fluent. Phew. Go, endangered languages! Too bad we can't haul the extinct flightless birds back from the abyss too.
So here's some more stuff I found out about Maori.
The order of words in a sentence puts the verb first. So to say "The kiwi is sleeping" (which they do alot -- on the order of 19 hours a day), you would say "Is sleeping the kiwi." Oh, and for you Spanish speakers -- by total coincidence, you have to put the little word 'a' before a person's name. If Sean is sleeping, you say "Is sleeping "a" Sean." Also like Spanish, the adjective comes after the noun. This explains why lots of place names here end in 'nui.' Nui means big, so we have Maunganui (great mountain) and Wainui (great water), and so on.
Remember how Maori is kind of poor in consonants? Well, they have a really good number of vowels. Not only a, e, i, o, and u, but also long vowels aa ee ii oo uu (you just prolong the vowel sound for around twice as long as for the short vowel). I think the first vowel in Maori is supposed to be looonngg -- so you say it Maa-o-ri.
E noho ra ('Goodbye' for now)
-your itinerant linguist
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