Book Description

Excerpt from South Island Maoris: A Sketch of Their History and Legendary Lore The Maoris of New Zealand are a portion of a race which shares with two other races - the Papuan and Malay - the countless islands of the Pacific. The chief centres of Maori population are found in the Hawaiian, Samoan, Rarotongan and New Zealand Islands. The language spoken by the New Zealanders is a dialect of the language common to all branches of the Maori race. The extreme simplicity of its structure is a proof of its great antiquity. The grammar is peculiar as compared with the ancient and modern languages of Europe. Nouns are not inflected nor the verbs conjugated in the same way. To form the cases or the plurals of nouns, or the mood, tense, or person, of a verb, all that is required is to put a participle before or after the word. There is no auxiliary verb "to be," but its place is supplied by a participle. The pronouns are very complete and possess double duals and double plurals. The vocabulary is wanting in words to express abstract ideas, but full of terms to describe outward objects. But there are here and there words which seem to indicate that abstract ideas were once more familiar to the minds of the race than they are now. But while the language is defective for the purpose of argumentative discourse, it is peculiarly well adapted for the purpose of narration and the peculiar style of oratory cultivated by the people. The art of writing was unknown till it was introduced by the English missionaries about the year 1820. It was by the advice of Professor Lee, of Cambridge, that Roman letters were employed to represent the sounds of the language, and a phonetic system of spelling adopted in forming the words. Only fourteen letters are used to express the sounds of the dialect spoken by the New Zealanders - five vowels and nine consonants, none of which are sibilants. This is a noticeable peculiarity as sibilants do exist in the Samoan, Rarotongan and Hawaiian dialects. Except in forming the sound Nga no two consonants ever come together, and every syllable and every word ends in a vowel, which renders the language when spoken soft and euphonious. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.