Far-flung Cousins: Māori and Tongan

GIF WARNING! Also if you're not a language nerd, you will probably fall asleep reading this post, so you might wanna wait for my next one about the Chinese Lantern Festival and/or the Polynesian market.

So...I survived my Māori final exam last Wednesday. Despite having studied for the past few weeks, I was worried it would go a little like this:

Upon first seeing the test

Attempting to remember all the grammar patterns we learned...
plus a few we never explicitly learned

Reflecting on the test afterward.

There was a little of the panda-regret on my part, due to dumb vocabulary mistakes (waewae = 'foot, leg') and more than a few translation mishaps. But otherwise I think all the studying paid off, and I'm happy to be done with direct treatment of Māori for a while. So, the aftermath ended up being more like this:

For now, though, our Field Methods class has started off with a bang: we're working with two recent college grads who are native speakers of Tongan, which is a thriving language spoken by upwards of 200,000 people. This is a stark difference from Māori, which is still struggling to rebuild its native speaker population after so many years of linguistic/cultural oppression. One more fun fact: for some reason the king of Tonga currently lives in Auckland, but we have yet to invite him to join our field work sessions. We would probably have to pay him extra for the hassle.

King Tupou VI, in all his glory. Maybe he can be the next Pope,
with the way he's rocking that hat.

Onto the class itself! Starting from basic word elicitation ('what's the word for man?'), we quickly discovered the similarities between the Māori and Tongan sound systems (they both use h, p, t, k, f, m, n, ng, and the same vowels), which include the following general patterns of correspondance (lots of exceptions to the rules; deal with it):

Māori r = Tongan l (toru = tolu = 'three')
Māori w = Tongan v or u (wai = vai = 'water', waea = uaea = 'wire')

As a sidenote, some of the exceptions are pretty cool (rima = nima = 'five/hand', since hands have five fingers). But I digress, as usual.

One thing we're still getting used to is the Tongan sound ', which represents a glottal stop...difficult for English speakers to pronounce word-initially. Try saying the word 'butter' a few times with the cheesiest Cockney accent you can muster, and feel what your throat muscles are doing in the middle of that word. Now try putting that glottal stop at the beginning of a word like ʻanga ('shark'). It's not easy!


So yeah, we're still struggling to pronounce things. But fortunately from the grammar perspective, a lot of the same building blocks we picked up in Māori 101 tend to fall right into place where we expect them in Tongan. This was a big help when we've had to struggle our way through a transcription of 'The Pear Story', which is basically a wordless video meant to encourage storytelling.
But then again...we still haven't fully figured out why the focus particle ko, rather easy to define and use in Māori, is more fluid and resistant to grammatical categorization in Tongan. Or why some sentences include multiple references to the subject pronoun. Or why some verbs mark transitivity with the suffix 'i (e.g. maumau'i = 'to break something', derived from maumau = 'to break) while others use the prefix faka (faka'osi = 'to finish something', 'osi = 'to be finished')...while others employ another strategy entirely. If we had another month or so, we might be able to pin down the details, but for now we're doing the best we can by cobbling together ideas from our knowledge of Māori grammar and our professor's often erroneous guesses (he didn't take Māori with us, leading to some amusing information gaps).

One more cool thing about Tongan before I sign off to be "productive": the definitive accent! In English and Māori, to distinguish between a noun that is definite and one that's indefinite, you just use different articles:

he wahine = 'a woman'
te wahine = 'the woman'

Simple, right? In Tongan, you still stick on an article...but you also change the pronunciation of the word itself! Check this out:

ha ika = 'a fish'
he iká = 'the fish'

In the first word ika, the stress (as it usually does) falls on the second-to-last syllable. In the second word iká, the stress ends up on the last syllable, thus lengthening the vowel and confusing us when we were still struggling to differentiate long vowels from short ones. Anyhow, this might seem pretty dull to you, but I think it's pretty crazy. Hence why I'm writing my final paper on the topic. Yet as I learn more about it, I can't help but think:

Oh well. One more (short) week of elicitation with our ever-patient consultants, then we'll be in the home stretch. Wish us luck!

Stuck in the Suburbs: The Homestay

Hi again! I hope Hallmark™ Valentine's Day was good to you all.

A can of L&P from my friend Cali, and a yellow
rose from a restaurant called Thai Me Up. Yay.

So I've been really busy all this week, dealing with not only readings and essays for my Anthro class (plus applications for internships) but ALSO our first few sessions of our main Linguistics class, Field Methods. We're studying Tongan, a relative of Māori that is strange and awesome but not the subject of today's post. Instead, let's take a quick tour around my host family's house!

My lovely bedroom (don't worry, I'm fully unpacked by now).

The living room! Note the upright piano in the corner.

Kitchen/dining area, which my housemate Adam and I recently
used to make tacos and quesadillas for our family.

Mmm. Homemade guacamole is best guacamole.

View from the back porch.

The bay behind the house is great to look at; not so much for swimming.

The clouds make cool shadows on the water.

A not-really-secret trail from behind the house into the woods!

Oh hi, crane-like bird.

Plenty of cool houses in the suburban neighborhoods.
Apart from the older houses like this, the 'burbs remind
me of Florida.

A little nearby school, with cute multilingual greetings.

The sunset always catches me off-guard.

SO INTENSE

I'm not sure how acceptable it would be to post their names on a public blog, so I'll just use their first initials for now. D and M, the mother and father respectively, are a wisecracking Pākehā couple with four adult sons scattered all throughout the world. She does substitute teaching, he works on airplanes for Air New Zealand, and they both manage to keep busier than most adults their age. I'll frequently get up in the morning to greet D on her way out the door as she bustles off to go walking with a friend, and later come home to find one of them talking to a friend or family member via phone or Skype. 

Still, in the midst of all that, they've made time to get to know us and get us acquainted with various aspects of New Zealand life. For instance, spaghetti on toast! Sounds crazy, but it's easy to prepare and pretty tasty after a long day of chasing buses around the city. Don't knock it before you try it. I hope to expand my repertoire of Kiwi food over the next few weeks (pavlova, please?).

Without reading too deeply into anything, I'd like to think that D and M exemplify a lot of traits commonly ascribed to Kiwis. Hardworking and practical, they have a zeal for travel that's kept them going throughout the years and has given them a lot of great stories. On top of that, they have a penchant for dry wit that always keeps me and Adam on our toes, with such exchanges as the one below:

D: I hope you like your bed.

Me: Yeah, I really like the comforter. I used to have one at home, but we had to get rid of it once it started to smell weird.

D: Well, how long are you here for?

They've also offered a lot of neat insight into New Zealand politics and culture, especially as we've asked them more about Māori issues. It seems that they, like many Kiwis, want to find a middle ground between the ideas of Māori activists and those of the sometimes-sluggish government. Of course, that doesn't make solving problems like land claims any easier, but it does provide perspective on the Pākehā view of these issues. I learn something new from them every day, and I hope it stays that way.

By now, I bet you're wondering what my daily schedule is like. Well, I have a weird class schedule, but here's a rough approximation of a typical day in the life of me:

6:30 AM = Wake up due to sunlight, attempt to sleep in.

7:30-8:30 AM = Roll out of bed and head to the kitchen to make breakfast and lunch.

9:00 - 9:45 AM (on an early day) = Catch the 267 bus into the city to get to the university.

(early day) 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM = LING 54 lecture/discussion with a Māori professor (this week was Professor Mutu) on various aspects of Māori, like this one tricky particle ai

(later day) 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM = ANTH 51 discussion on postcolonial stuff; this week on indigenous issues and the benefits/problems of NGOs

at some point between 12:00 and 2:00 = lunch with the gang, either at an Asian food court or some other fun place

4:00 - 6:00 = studying/hanging out in the library to do readings and homework before heading back to the suburbs

7:00 - 8:30 = dinner and lots of chatting with the host family (usually includes ice cream or other desserts...they are too good to me)

8:30 - midnight = more homework and/or procrastination in the form of watching Downton Abbey (I am addicted...help)

So, yeah! There's a little bit about my life so far, and how I'm often busy but not (yet) overwhelmed. I'm really enjoying my homestay and I hope to keep learning from the family.

If you've gotten this far without falling asleep, here are some more blogs from my fellow FSP-ers! Plus, my sister Lily is road-tripping to Alaska for the Winter World Championships, because she's a boss. Read about her long, cold journey here!

And with all those links, I bid you adieu. Auckland's Pride Festival (the first in 11 years) is this weekend, so lots to look forward to and write about!

Kapa Haka

It's over. Kua oti te kapa haka.