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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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C.K. said: >>While we are evolving/have evolved a distinctively New Zealand culture (better described using negative statements than positive)... Upon which, belMarduk asked: C K …what do you mean by this. It sounds awfully self-critical.I appreciate Max Quordlepleen's immediate leap to my defence (120-odd miles in a single bound ... how DOES he do it?) although I think his example may be a little off the mark. The comedian he refers to, John Clarke (or his alter ego, Fred Dagg), did indeed say or semi-sing "You don't know how lucky you are." The point that Max missed (or chose to ignore) is that New Zealand is surely but steadily bringing civilisation to the inhabitants of the Ocker Isle. The Land of Oz, sans Dorothy but avec Dame Edna Everidge. Go figure. Anyway sending some genuine comedians over there was part of a deliberate policy, best articulated by a now mercifully deceased Prime Minister, Sir Robert Muldoon, to raise the average IQ of both countries ... However, even as I was reading the two posts, a comedy debate was being shown on TV. The debaters were actors/TV personalities, all of them very good. I hope you were watching it, Max, because it reinforced our view of Kiwi Kulcha. The topic of "debate" was "New Zealand is the best little country in the world". I guess most people realise that these comedy debates actually allow the debaters to express real opinions in a non-threatening way. Some of the jokes were really funny. And some were definitely not. One of the debaters, a Samoan, as it happens, talked about the New Zealand "number eight wire" syndrome. This is a myth (mostly urban, wholly fallacious) that all New Zealanders are born able to do or fix anything that needs doing or fixing without professional help. Folklore has it that whenever nothing better is to hand, anything can be fixed with a piece of No. 8 wire (a gauge of wire generally used in fences designed to restrain as many of New Zealand's 40 million sheep as possible). Since everyone knows that the myth/folklore is not true, it's a negative view. While it's saying "Kiwis can do anything", it also evinces carelessness or sloppiness and a willingness to put up with second best. And this is generally true (isn't there a thread running on generalisations?) of all our cultural idioms. But don't get me wrong. Apart from our currency woes (our dollar is becoming known as the "South Pacific Peso") it's a damned good place to live. But we like to leave frequently to reassure ourselves about this by comparing our lifestyle with others ... I'm off to Singapore next week! Syncopically  , Capital Kiwi
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Another example:
Those who perform Handel's 'Messiah' leave off the definite article, while others call it "The Messiah." Never figured out why.
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old hand
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old hand
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I have had the advantage (?) of living in Bombay (Mumbai to the newbies there), and can talk at length about the difference between natives and outsiders. Unfortunately, the jests (such feebly ironic ones as there are in all this) will be lost on an English-speaking audience. Perhaps, therefore, it would be best merely to write down my favourite.
As background, India has been through various patriotic convulsions, during which periods it was deemed necessary to reject all signs of the Raj. The change of name from Bombay to Mumbai is one such manifestation. In any case, the 'natives' themselves, bewildered by (or not interested in) these changes, have often stuck to the old names, and their children use them too. Only newcomers to the city, and public transportation, use the 'new; names.
So...
One of the more important junctions in Bombay city, close to the diamond dealing district (and equally close to the notorious red light area, but you don't want to know about that) used to have an Opera House on one corner. Over time this large building evolved into a cinema house, and thence to the ramshackle home of rats that it currently seems to be. Through all that time the locals (all 12 million of them?) persisted in calling that junction 'Opera House'.
In a fit of PC, the authorities, sometime in the '70s, I think, decided to award the title of that junction to some cultural luminary. It was thenceforward officially titled Gnyanacharya Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar Chowk'.
So all the buses have it as a title (if that is their terminus or starting point). And in all official correspondence it is referred to as 'Paluskar Chowk'. But no native ever calls it anything but Opera House.
For those in the least bit interested, the full name translates out as:
Sage-of-knowledge Scholar Vishnu Digambar Paluskar (his actual name - pretty obviously Maharashtrian) Square.
cheer
the sunshine warrior
ps. Don't get me started on SV Road versus Ghodbunder Road, Vallabhbhai Patel Road versus Linking Road, and the like. At least Alexander Graham Bell Road is considered politically correct enough to remain!
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Pooh-Bah
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Somtime in the eighties I travelled through the former USSR on the Trans Siberian Express. It was back in the says when Leningrad had not yet reverted to St Petersburg.
An interesting thing about the cities was the level of standardisation that the regime had brought about. One day, we got off the train in a city we did not know well with one of the "real" railway buffs. He said that we didn't need any directions. The number one tram would always go in a straight line along Lenin Street, so all you would have to do would be to get off, cross the road and get back on again. The number two tram would go in a circle, so if you stayed on the tram you would get back to where you started. In any of the smaller cities, go down Lenin Street, turn left into Karl Marx Street, left into Pushkin Street and left into Gorky Street to get back to where you started. His directions were really quite accurate and we never did get lost.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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left into Gorky Street... ... thus confirming geographically what we all suspected for ages - that Lenin was further to the right than Gorky 
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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...and you couldn't get from Lenin to Gorky without going though Marx.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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ps. Don't get me started on SV Road versus Ghodbunder Road, Vallabhbhai Patel Road versus Linking Road, and the like. At least Alexander Graham Bell Road is considered politically correct enough to remain!When legislation was finally passed making Maori an official language of NZ, with the same legal standing as English, many place names were changed. In most cases the older, original, Maori names were simply appended to the front of the English names. Often the Maori names are much more mellifluous (thanks to my compatriot). So instead of Mt. Cook we have Aoraki/Mt. Cook, Mt. Egmont is now Taranaki/Mt. Egmont, and, though seldom seen, Aotearoa/New Zealand. While many people feel that these changes are more PC madness, I like the Maori names, especially Aoraki, meaning "cloud piercer." Every city and town in NZ also has its own official Maori name, which may be used in postal addresses, though I'm sure many postal sorters devoutly hope not to see them, as most are totally unknown, even to their residents.
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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Max,
Your posting about Maori place names interests me. It has some similarities with what is happening here in Australia, but also some key differences.
I gather that Maori is a uniform language NZ-wide. Was this the case historically, or have a number of distinct languages or dialects been unified in some (artificial?) way to produce an official indigenous language?
The native inhabitants of Australia had hundreds of 'tribes', each with its own language. In fact, anthropologists tend to use the term 'language groups' to distinguish them, apparently since 'tribes' didn't cater well for the extent of mixing and territorial sharing amongst the various nomadic groups. Whilst some Aboriginal people seem keen to rid themselves of the Western-imposed generic label Aboriginal and come up with their own word, there is no one word that does the job. In my region (SE Australia), they call themselves Koories; in other regions there are words such as Murris, Nunga and Anangu. Each of these names applies to many language groups in a large geographical region. Some people prefer to be referred to by their language group and reject the more widely applicable label. To complicate matters further, native inhabitants of the Torres Straits islands, which lie between Australia and Papua New Guinea, are referred to not as Aboriginals but as 'Torres Straits Islanders', leading to frequent references to 'Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders'. Unfortunately, the problem of nomenclature seems to have left indigenous and non-indigenous Australians confused as to the PC term to use for the original inhabitants of our country. I guess this is similar to the dilemma of the indigenous peoples of North America - Indians/American Indians/etc and various tribe names, as touched upon elsewhere on the board.
I was also surprised to hear that there is a Maori equivalent for every city or town in NZ. I understand that traditional places of significance would have an original Maori name. In Australia, when control of Ayers Rock was officially given back to the local Aboriginal people, it reverted to its original - and beautiful - aboriginal name Uluru. Is that well known outside Australia? (As an aside, the transfer has posed a dilemma for tourists, because Aboriginals disapprove of people climbing their sacred rock, but have not prohibited it outright). There are certainly a lot of Aboriginal words used in place names, although many of them are apparently a result of misunderstandings by explorers/settlers of the local Aboriginal language. There is a push to change some placenames to original Aboriginal ones, but it's not a widespread phenomenon.
Getting back to NZ, I am intrigued by the existence of a Maori word for cities and towns that have sprung up in the last 200 years. Are you now applying a traditional Maori word to refer to the region occupied by the "new" settlement, and is there really a one-to-one correspondence between them, or have Maori names been invented recently to cover the gaps?
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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I gather that Maori is a uniform language NZ-wide. Was this the case historically, or have a number of distinct languages or dialects been unified in some (artificial?) way to produce an official indigenous language?Yes, and no. Maori was basically one language, but with significant regional differences. Aoraki is an example of the most prominent of such. The Maori spoken in the South Island ( te Wai Pounamu) uses k where North Island Maori uses ng. Growing up in Rotorua, a North Island city heavily dependent on Maori culture for its economic well-being, I learned the Maori name for Mt. Cook as "Aorangi." I have friends who grew up in the Hokianga, a region in the Far North of NZ, one of three areas in NZ where it is still not uncommon to meet people whose first language is Maori. They tell me that they occasionally have difficulty with the Maori spoken by those from the East Cape region, while Tuhoe, spoken in a geographically isolated region is probably the most distinctive variety of Maori. You are absolutely right in assuming that there has been a synthesised hybrid version created in the interests of standardisation. My friends tell me that this "artificial hybrid" can be almost unintelligible to their ears. I was also surprised to hear that there is a Maori equivalent for every city or town in NZ. I understand that traditional places of significance would have an original Maori name.
Getting back to NZ, I am intrigued by the existence of a Maori word for cities and towns that have sprung up in the last 200 years. Are you now applying a traditional Maori word to refer to the region occupied by the "new" settlement, and is there really a one-to-one correspondence between them, or have Maori names been invented recently to cover the gaps?Generally, what has been done is to apply the ancient Maori name for a region to the prominent town of the region, if that settlement is of European origin. I live in Hastings, which is called Heretaunga, after the plains on which it stands. Nearby Napier is called Ahuriri, a name refering to a specific locale close to its port, that has been extended to include the entire city. As I understand it, this is the sort of system that has been used nationwide. I don't think that there were any regions of NZ which had not at least been visited by Maori, and henced named by them, before the arrival of Europeans. A lot of towns in NZ already have Maori place names, and these towns have not had English equivalents invented for them. One final note on your mention of the challenge of naming indigenous peoples. The following is a very thoughtful, concise, summary of the application of the term "Maori" for the indigenous peoples of Aotearoa. http://maorinews.com/writings/papers/other/pakeha.htm
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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Thanks for the response and interesting link, Max. It seems that the differences between the NZ Maori and Australian Aboriginal situations are not as great as I original assumed, at least on the issues of tribal languages, tribal names and the difficulties associated with finding a generic term to be applied to and accepted by the indigenous population. In light of a previous exchange about Whakapapa, I was alarmed to read in the article you linked that it apparently means 'genealogy'.
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